Turning site visitors into customers

People are visiting. They're just not buying.

Picture a shop where people wander in, have a good look round, and wander out again. Somewhere between "hello" and the till, something's put them off (or to put it another way, nothing's really grabbed them) — and the frustrating thing is that you can't ask them what it was.

That's the puzzle here, and it's a good one, because it's solvable and the analytics help us pinpoint the "why". We look at your store the way a customer does (phone first, because that's where most of them are), dig deep into the analytics and user data, find the step where the reaction stops, and change one thing at a time until we know what moves it.

Sound familiar?

• Plenty of people visit; far fewer buy.
• Baskets get filled and then abandoned, and you've no idea why.
• Your product pages say everything about the product but just don't quite grab the imagination of customers.
• You suspect the site is awkward on a phone, but you only ever check on a laptop.
• You've heard "conversion rate" thrown about and have no idea whether yours is any good.

What's usually going on

It almost always comes down to one of these, and an owner experiences all of them as the same complaint — "I'm not getting sales" — which is exactly why it takes a proper look to tell them apart.

• No clear next step. The site informs beautifully but never actually asks anyone to buy, book or get in touch.
• A bumpy path. Slow pages, fiddly menus, a mobile layout nobody's tested, a checkout that wants too much, incessant popups, forced account creation, shipping costs that only appear at the last moment. We call this the "Customer Journey" and getting it right is the difference between a browser and a buyer.
• Trust gaps. Delivery and returns tucked away, no reviews, no sign there's a real person behind it.
• Thin product pages. Photos that don't show the thing properly, descriptions that don't answer the obvious question, sizing nobody can work out.
• Nobody following up. Someone gets to the basket, gets distracted by the kettle, and never hears from you again. And you never reach out to give them that little polite nudge to come back.

How we'd tackle it

1. Walk the journey as a customer. Phone first, from the first click to the confirmation page, writing down every bump.
2. Check what the data says. Where do people actually drop away? A hunch about the problem is useful; a number is better. A before and after-change number is the best.
3. Test one change at a time. A hypothesis, a small experiment, a result. Then the next. It's slower than redesigning everything at once and a great deal more reliable. Data and iterative testing win the day.

Where we'd start

A store teardown: we record ourselves going through your store as a customer would, narrating what we see, and send you the recording plus a short list of what to try first. If you'd like it looked at more deeply, there's a full UX and journey audit.

The honest bit

We can't tell you in advance that a change will lift your sales — nobody honestly can. What we can tell you is how we'll find out, and we'll show you the evidence either way. Sometimes the best result is learning that the thing you were worried about wasn't the problem at all.

Send us your store's address and tell us where you think people are dropping off. Get in touch

Related challenges: Optimising a site · Winning repeat business