How to navigate e-commerce shopper behavior

Welcome to the dynamic world of e-commerce, where grabbing attention and winning over potential customers feels like finding a needle in a haystack. With a staggering 12 – 24 million e-commerce sites worldwide, the digital marketplace throbs with relentless competition, each vying for its moment in the spotlight. 

Now, picture this: typical e-commerce conversion rates hover around a modest 2.5% to 3%. That means out of every 1,000 visitors to your site, less than 50 ends up placing orders. Yet, here's the kicker—half of those potential sales slip through the cracks as visitors struggle to find what they're looking for. 

So, how can one navigate this complex landscape and invest wisely in e-commerce success and ROI? The answer lies in mastering the e-commerce category shopping experience. These insights are the secret weapons every marketer needs before making crucial decisions. 

Step 1: unraveling shopper behavior 

Understanding e-commerce shopping behavior involves diving deep into various KPIs, such as deciphering where shoppers start their journey on e-commerce websites: through search queries, menu clicks, or maybe promotions. 

Analyzing search bar usage and common keywords, along with observing menu and filter preferences, reveals invaluable insights into shopper navigation and preferences. By pinpointing key touchpoints and addressing bottlenecks, retailers can streamline the shopping journey and boost conversions. 

Step 2: elevating product visibility 

During this step, pay special attention to presence and visibility metrics, such as the average number of products viewed and clicked.   

Tracking the existence of a specific brand's items and then assessing their position and visibility in a highly competitive category list provides guidance on how to improve the brand's presence and overall performance on the e-commerce platform. 

Step 3: conquering conversion challenges  

Solving conversion challenges requires a nuanced grasp of various factors- especially the impact of product positioning on its visibility and consideration. Identifying key conversion drivers, such as pricing, imagery, discounts, and tags, offers valuable insights into boosting product consideration. 

Moreover, understanding the critical areas of the Product Detail Page that drive purchase decisions provides further clarity. By leveraging these insights, businesses can optimize presentations and user experiences, driving higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction. 

Step 4: Go deeper and beyond E-commerce Category Shopping Experience  

Gaining all the above insights to key questions about shopper e-commerce experience, such as identifying key touchpoints and addressing bottlenecks, investigating the impact of product positioning, and determining how to optimize presentations and user experiences, is all part of the testing framework we call E-commerce Category Shopping Experience. It is accomplished by observing behavior on live e-commerce retailer websites and utilizing an innovative mix-method approach, which includes free browsing, eye tracking, interaction tracking, and surveys.  

However, this is just one of four modules from a larger testing framework called Ecommerce Shopper Insights, which on the one hand goes deeper into portraying your category online shopper, resulting in a customer profile, and on the other hand, it can provide even more detailed and narrower insights about specific products through Hero Product Shopping Experience Testing and Online Pack Testing, allowing you to test your hypotheses in context.  

In conclusion  

Whether you are interested in a specific set of questions included in one module and only want to make tactile changes, or you want to have 360 degrees of clarity by running a full four module testing on your product's e-commerce presence and performance, one thing is certain: your product category knowledge, product presentation insights, and customer profiling must be as strong for e-commerce as they are in brick and mortar.   

It is time to say goodbye to trial-and-error investing and hello to data-driven decision-making. No more guesswork—just transparent, actionable insights to propel e-commerce success. 

Eager for more knowledge about e-commerce success? Find out: Is retail media CPG’s e-commerce future?