Most growth plans in e-commerce start with the same question: How do I get more visitors? More Google Ads, more SEO, more social media. This is a legitimate lever, but the most expensive of several. It obscures the fact that a shop’s revenue depends on four factors, not just one. Traffic is merely the first of these.
So before you increase your advertising budget, it’s worth taking a look at the other three. An online shop that loses visitors ready to buy during the checkout process is like a bucket with holes: topping it up with more water at the top becomes expensive as long as it’s leaking at the bottom. This article shows where the holes are and how to plug them without buying a single new click.
The equation: Turnover is more than traffic
An online shop’s turnover can be described as the product of four factors: Turnover = Visitors × Conversion rate × Average order value × Purchase frequency. Each factor is a separate control lever. Reach only affects the first one.
The word ‘product’ is key here. Because the factors are multiplied, improvements reinforce one another. A calculation example illustrates this clearly. If you improve the conversion rate, the average order value and the purchase frequency by 10 per cent each, you increase turnover not by 30 per cent, but by around 33 per cent (1.10 × 1.10 × 1.10 ≈ 1.33). And that’s with exactly the same traffic.
This is precisely what makes the latter three factors so appealing. They do not cost anything from the media budget, and their effects continue to benefit every future visitor. One euro invested in a better checkout process pays off in the long term. One euro spent on an advertising account is used up as soon as the click is made.
Why more traffic is the expensive reflex
Buying reach is attractive because it appears predictable: put in the budget, get clicks out. The catch is the cost per new customer. Traditional marketing literature puts the probability of selling to an existing customer at 60 to 70 per cent, compared with 5 to 20 per cent for a new prospect (Farris et al., Marketing Metrics). Every purchased click starts at the lower end of this range.
Added to this is the ‘leaky bucket’ problem mentioned at the start. As long as seven out of ten visitors ready to buy drop out during the ordering process, part of every new budget goes to waste at the same leaky point. Topping up the water at the top doesn’t plug the leak; it just makes it more visibly expensive.
That doesn’t mean that traffic generation is wrong. Proper SEO and performance marketing remain important. But the order is often got the wrong way round. Those who plug the leak first and then top up the water are the ones who scale their turnover. Those who do it the other way round are scaling a loss rate.
Lever 1: Turning visitors into buyers (conversion rate)
The conversion rate is the proportion of visitors who actually make a purchase. Depending on the sector, it usually lies between one and three per cent (Statsig, 2025: retail around 1.9 per cent, personal care up to 6.8 per cent). The rest just browse and leave. Some of this is unavoidable, but a large proportion is not.
This is most clearly evident in the shopping basket. The abandonment rate, averaged from 50 studies, stands at 70.22 per cent according to the Baymard Institute, stands at 70.22 per cent (as of September 2025). These people were already convinced enough to add a product to their basket, yet they still abandon the process before placing an order. The reasons are well documented and, for the most part, can be addressed. Among those who abandon their purchase for a specific reason, 40 per cent cite unexpected additional costs such as delivery charges or fees, followed by excessively long delivery times (20 per cent), security concerns (19 per cent), being forced to create an account (18 per cent) and a checkout process that takes too long (17 per cent).
This results in a concrete action list:
- Display delivery costs and delivery times early on, right on the product page.
- Allow guest checkout and make creating a customer account optional.
- Provide the expected payment methods (PayPal, purchase on account).
- Design the checkout specifically for smartphones.
You can find out exactly how these strategies work in our guide to shopping basket abandonment in Shopware shops. Two technical factors also affect every page: loading time and mobile usability. A shop that takes ages to load on a mobile phone loses revenue before the customer even clicks on the first product. This is the technical aspect of any checkout optimisation and needs to be addressed during development.
Lever 2: Increasing the average order value
The average order value (AOV) is the revenue per order. It can be increased without attracting a single additional visitor or requiring a single additional conversion. The same number of orders simply generates more revenue.
The most effective approaches have been known for a long time. Cross-selling suggests complementary products that go well with the items in the shopping basket, such as cleaning tablets for a fully automatic coffee machine. Up-selling highlights the better, more expensive version of the product being viewed. Both work best where the purchase decision is made anyway: on the product page and in the shopping basket. A much-cited McKinsey estimate from 2013 attributes around 35 per cent of Amazon’s turnover to such recommendations; whilst the figure is out of date, the basic mechanics of cross-selling and up-selling remain unchanged.
A second, often underestimated lever is the free delivery threshold. “Free delivery on orders over 50 euros” gives customers a clear target and encourages many to fill their basket right up to that limit. Set the threshold slightly above the current average order value; otherwise, you’ll be giving away margin rather than gaining it. Bundles and volume discounts have a similar effect without lowering the unit price.
In B2B commerce, there is an additional mechanism at play. Tiered pricing (for example, in stages from 10, 50 and 100 units), minimum order quantities and customer-specific price lists structurally increase the order value. Shopware accommodates this through its commercial editions and B2B features. However, aggressive up-selling that overwhelms the customer ultimately reduces the conversion rate. Lever 2 must not undermine Lever 1.
Lever 3: Turning first-time buyers into regular customers (repeat purchase rate)
The third factor is purchase frequency – in other words, how often a customer returns. Over the lifetime of the customer relationship, this adds up to customer value (Customer Lifetime Value). This is the lever with the greatest long-term impact, because retaining a loyal customer does not cost a single euro in acquisition costs.
The economics behind this are well documented. A classic study by Bain & Company (Fred Reichheld) concludes that a five-percentage-point increase in customer loyalty can boost profits by 25 to 95 per cent. This figure dates from the 1990s and the range is deliberately broad. What is particularly well established is the general trend: existing customers are more profitable because acquisition costs are eliminated and the likelihood of a purchase is significantly higher.
In practical terms, you can leverage this through lifecycle communication: a well-timed series of emails following a purchase, a reminder when a consumable product is running low, and a simple way to reorder. For suitable product ranges, the subscription model is the most effective way to drive repeat purchase rates, as the next purchase does not need to be triggered from scratch every time. We cover how this can be implemented with Shopware separately in our article on subscription commerce.
The prerequisite for all of this is a clean customer database with order history. In practice, lifecycle communication fails less often because of the tool than because of the data: duplicates, guest orders without assignment and inconsistent segments make any communication unclear.
Measure first, then tweak: which lever first?
Viewed objectively, there is no single ‘best’ lever; rather, there is only the one that is currently causing the most loss in your shop. That is why measurement comes before optimisation. Map out your funnel in a web analytics tool as stages (product page, basket, checkout, purchase) and identify the stage with the highest bounce rate. That is your first lever, regardless of which of the three underlying factors is responsible.
As a rough guide: if you have a lot of traffic but low turnover, you usually have a conversion problem (lever 1). If you’re selling well but struggling with margins, you should check the average order value (lever 2). If you see lots of first-time purchases but hardly any repeat purchases, you’re losing customer value (lever 3). This is no substitute for proper data analysis, but it tells you where to look first.
Two rules make the process robust. Always change just one thing at a time and measure it properly; otherwise, you won’t know in the end what actually worked. And calculate in terms of turnover, not clicks. A measure that boosts the conversion rate but reduces the average order value may be neutral on balance.
Conclusion: the revenue you already have
More traffic is a lever with a factor of four – and the most expensive one. Conversion rate, average order value and repeat purchase rate, on the other hand, focus on the visitors who are already there. First plug the holes in the bucket, then top up with more water: if you stick to this order, every click acquired later automatically becomes more valuable.
It’s worth being honest about this. These levers are easy to understand but time-consuming to implement properly. Measurement, checkout technology and the data infrastructure are all down to craftsmanship. If you need a partner for this, our team can support you with e-commerce development and conversion optimisation from analysis right through to implementation. But you can get started today, with a single question for your analytics: At which stage am I currently losing the most?