Growth & Conversion
Getting traffic used to be treated as the hard part. It isn't anymore — the hard part is why visitors leave without buying, and the honest answer is usually several small leaks, not one big one.
The numbers, so you know what you're actually working against
Cart abandonment is the clearest single measure of the problem, and it's larger than most owners assume. Baymard Institute's ongoing research, aggregating 50 separate studies, puts the average cart abandonment rate at just over 70% — meaning seven in ten shoppers who add something to cart never complete the purchase. That's not a reason to despair; it's a reason to know the leak isn't unusual, and that most of it is fixable.
70% average cart abandonment rate · 60% blame extra costs revealed late · 35% average conversion gain from better checkout design
Why this happens — the honest, unglamorous reasons
Baymard's research names the causes in order of how often shoppers cite them. Unexpected extra costs — almost always shipping, revealed only at the final step — is the single most common reason, cited by 60% of US shoppers who abandoned an order in the last quarter. Checkout friction — too many steps, limited payment options, a forced account requirement — accounts for close to one in five abandonments on its own. Slow page load, especially on mobile, quietly costs conversions before a visitor even sees what you're selling. Weak product photography or missing information leaves genuine, answerable doubt unresolved. Some share of abandonment — Baymard estimates around 43% — is shoppers who were just browsing and were never going to buy on that visit; that portion isn't really a leak, it's just how browsing works, and it's not the one worth chasing.
The leak isn't one big hole — it's several smaller ones stacked on top of each other. Treating "low conversion" as a single problem misses where the actual fixes need to go.
For a South African store this compounds in specific ways. A checkout that reloads the full page on every step burns through mobile data on a prepaid bundle, and a shopper who's watching their data run out is a shopper who abandons rather than finishes typing a card number. Load-shedding adds a second layer — a checkout that can't recover a half-completed order when a connection drops mid-payment loses that sale outright, not just delays it. Neither of these shows up in a generic conversion audit built for a market where fibre and card payments are assumed.
A practical spec: what to test first, in order
Baymard's decade of large-scale checkout testing found the average large ecommerce site can gain a 35% increase in conversion through better checkout design alone — which is why checkout, not traffic quality, is where this list starts:
Checkout itself first. The closest-to-the-finish-line leak, and often the cheapest to fix — remove one unnecessary field, show total cost earlier, add a guest-checkout option if there isn't one.
Then the cart-to-checkout gap. Usually the single biggest drop-off in the whole funnel — if shipping cost is the surprise, showing an estimate on the product page removes the shock before it happens at the worst moment.
Then page speed, especially on mobile, where the gap between a store that feels instant and one that feels sluggish is often the whole difference in whether someone finishes.
Then trust and information gaps — reviews, a visible returns policy, complete product details that answer the question a buyer is actually asking.
Only after these, look at traffic quality. Better traffic just leaks at the same rate, at a higher cost per visitor, if the funnel underneath it hasn't been fixed.
How we approach this
Produsell is a South African product studio, and our post-launch growth and conversion work starts by watching real user behaviour on your actual store, not by guessing from a generic checklist — every store's specific leak is different, even though the categories above are common to nearly all of them. Every engagement is fixed scope and fixed price agreed upfront: no hourly billing, no surprise invoices. A fixed-price Sprint is often enough to find the actual leak and produce a fixed quote for fixing it.
If the honest answer turns out to be that people aren't finding the store at all, that's a different problem — start with which SEO tools actually matter before assuming it's a conversion issue. And if the store doesn't exist yet, the cheapest fix for a leaky funnel is validating demand before building it.
FAQ
What's a good ecommerce conversion rate to aim for?
There's no single agreed figure — estimates vary by source and industry, which is exactly why chasing a benchmark number is less useful than finding your own funnel's weakest stage first and fixing that specific leak.
Why do people abandon their cart without buying?
Most commonly, unexpected costs revealed late in checkout (60% of US shoppers cite this), followed by checkout friction and using the cart as a wishlist rather than genuine purchase intent.
Should I redesign my whole website to improve conversion?
Not as a first move. A redesign without knowing exactly where the funnel leaks risks fixing the wrong thing at real cost — test the specific leak first, redesign only what testing points to.
Does mobile page speed really affect conversion that much?
Yes — mobile conversion typically trails desktop, and slow load times are one of the most consistently cited factors in cart abandonment research.
How much can better checkout design actually improve conversion?
Baymard's checkout-testing research found large ecommerce sites gain an average 35% increase in conversion from checkout improvements alone — a substantial number for what's often a smaller, cheaper fix than a full redesign.
Sources: Baymard Institute, cart abandonment rate statistics (50-study aggregate)
The short version: seven in ten carts get abandoned, most of it for fixable reasons, and checkout is the cheapest place to start looking.
Tell us what is holding your business back.
A short, fixed-price scoping session with our marketing lead or a backend engineer — whichever your business needs. No pitch, just a straight answer.
Growth & conversion work →Website builds →
produsell.io · Build · Grow · Launch