If you have an ecommerce site, you might have wondered how to increase your sales.

By systematically analyzing each factor, you can more easily identify areas for improvement in your ecommerce sales. This article will cover everything you need to know to raise revenue on an online shop, from fundamental concepts to specific strategies and a successful Japanese example.

What’s in this article?

• The formula for an ecommerce site’s sales
  
• Five principles for increasing sales on ecommerce sites
  
• Specific measures to increase sales on ecommerce sites
  
• Key considerations for increasing ecommerce site sales
  
• A case study of successful increased ecommerce sales
  
• How Stripe Payments can help
  

The formula for an ecommerce site’s sales

Before we look at how to increase sales on an ecommerce site, let’s make sure we know all the elements that contribute to revenue. To start, we’ll use the following formula to analyze the current sales situation:

Monthly Sales = Monthly Visits x Conversion Rate x Average Order Value

Let’s look at a scenario where the online shop has 10,000 monthly visits, a 2% conversion rate, and an average order value of ¥5,000.

By using the formula above, we’d get:

10,000 x 0.02 x 5,000 = ¥1,000,000

In this example, monthly sales are ¥1 million.

Revenue is the product of those three elements, and the steps to expand sales will vary depending on which area(s) you choose to improve.

Number of visits

This metric measures how many users visit the ecommerce site. No matter how appealing what you offer is, if people don’t see it, revenue won’t grow. If an online shop has low traffic, the first priority must be on increasing visitor volume.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate represents the percentage of users who access the webpage and convert from visitors to customers, for instance, by buying a product or service or completing a contract. Calculate the percentage using the formula below:

Conversion Rate = Number of Conversions ÷ Number of Visits x 100

The target rate for ecommerce sites is between 1% and 3%.

Average order value

The average order value reflects the typical amount spent per purchase. Using the equation above shows that a slight uplift in average customer spend has a significant impact on total revenue.

Five principles for increasing sales on ecommerce sites

To increase sales sustainably on an ecommerce site, it is necessary to objectively understand the overall situation rather than focusing solely on individual actions. The following five principles are highly valued as methods for raising revenue on many online shops and mail-order businesses.

Acquire new customers

Ecommerce is a practical way to expand sales channels, but the starting point is figuring out ways to get people to discover your digital storefront. Expand touchpoints with new customers through search, advertising, social media, and other channels.

Retain existing customers

While acquiring new customers is central to business expansion, retaining existing ones is equally valuable because they are highly cost-effective. Efforts to enhance buyer satisfaction, such as improving website usability and providing reliable support, are key.

Improve the rate of repeat purchase by existing customers

Drive stable revenue by encouraging repeat purchases from current customers through member-exclusive benefits and targeted email newsletter coupons.

Increase the average order value

Increasing the average order amount per transaction is one way to lift revenue efficiently. One approach would be recommending a higher-grade or special-edition vehicle to someone considering buying a car. Grow sales by boosting the average shopper spend.

Review prices of products and services

Fine-tune your product pricing by conducting a comprehensive review that encompasses more than competitors’ prices and includes opportunities for added benefits, such as after-sales service.

Specific measures to increase sales on ecommerce sites

Let’s take a closer look at some specific strategies that can increase sales.

Measures to increase site traffic

Methods for growing visitor volume to your site include those that deliver results in the short term and those that require long-term commitment.

SEO measures

These are the basic actions to improve the number of search engine visits you get. While they might not yield immediate results, consistent and ongoing efforts can help secure stable traffic over time.

Online advertising

Online advertising offers a straightforward way to attract customers quickly and allows flexible adjustments based on budgets and objectives.

Use social media

Use social media consistently to build awareness of products and brands and maintain a steady flow of visits to your online shop.

Influencer marketing

By having influencers with broad appeal introduce your products, you can expect to expand awareness among audiences previously out of reach for the brand.

Measures to improve conversion rate

Once traffic begins to grow steadily, the next pivotal step is implementing measures that lead to purchases.

Comprehensive payment methods

We know that users could abandon an order when they discover their preferred payment method is unavailable at the final stage of checkout. It is important to diversify the available ways to pay to prevent this kind of lost opportunity.

Measures to prevent cart abandonment

Let’s take a look at some countermeasures for customers who leave their cart after adding items (cart abandonment).

If you suspect a user is hesitating to make a purchase, actions such as the following can be impactful:

• Automatically sending reminder emails
  
• Delivering ads to encourage repeat visits
  
• Sending discount coupons
  

Refine the purchase flow

If the checkout process feels too complex, shoppers might give up. Build a simple, easy-to-understand purchase flow, for example, by reducing the number of required input fields.

Use online customer service tools

Deploy a chatbot or similar tools to quickly resolve customer questions and concerns, and ensure the chat interface appears at the right moment to maximize performance.

Measures to increase average order value

To grow sales on an ecommerce site, a small uplift in average order value per transaction can greatly boost overall revenue, not just increase purchase frequency.

Upselling and cross-selling

Strategies that encourage shoppers to buy closely related products or higher-tier items based on their order history and objectives are considerable for strengthening customer loyalty and raising the average transaction amount.

Tiered membership plans

This system provides tiered benefits based on a user’s previous order totals and purchase frequency. This retention marketing approach also effectively increases average shopper spend, as members are motivated to buy more to achieve higher ranks.

Free shipping

Raise the average purchase amount by offering free shipping on orders above a certain threshold. However, it is important to carefully assess cost-effectiveness when offering free shipping to ensure profits aren’t unduly affected.

Key considerations for increasing ecommerce site sales

So far, we’ve introduced various ways to boost sales on an ecommerce site, but we also need to consider several meaningful factors:

Don’t try to implement all measures at once

While there are many approaches to increase revenue, it isn’t necessary to implement all of them at once. In fact, spreading yourself too thin can sometimes lead to efforts ending without a proper evaluation of their adequacy. First, it is valuable to prioritize tackling the measures most closely aligned with your company’s challenges.

Continuous improvement while monitoring results

After implementing one of these actions, regularly check data such as the visit count, conversion rate, and average purchase amount, and continue making refinements. Making small adjustments and tweaks will ultimately improve sales.

Don’t forget the user’s perspective

If a site becomes difficult to use because revenue goals are over-prioritized, it will have the opposite effect to what you’re aiming for. Remember to always consider whether the steps being rolled out enhance the user experience.

Don’t focus exclusively on short-term results

When working to increase ecommerce sales, it is beneficial to strike a balance between immediate actions, such as advertising, and strategies focused on long-term change. SEO and initiatives to nurture repeat customers take time to yield results, but they offer the benefit of gradually accumulating outcomes over time. Overall success hinges on properly combining both short-term and medium- to long-term measures.

A case study of successful increased ecommerce sales

SourceNext, a company that provides software and digital content, is one successful case study. For SourceNext, the aging systems of their long-running ecommerce site had become a challenge, resulting in increased running costs and maintenance, combined with the growing complexity of payment processing and fraud prevention measures.

The company adopted Stripe, an online payment platform, in 2023 to simultaneously enhance the checkout experience, strengthen security, and simplify operations as part of a major overhaul of its online shop.

Improvements to the payment form and the centralization of fraud controls, combined with the ability to analyze transaction data across the entire ecommerce page, have enabled them to identify causes of cart abandonment and review risk prevention safeguards that were not functioning correctly. As a result, sales of specific products rose by 15% compared with the previous year.

This case study demonstrates that when looking for sales-boosting strategies for online shops and mail-order businesses, it matters to comprehensively evaluate factors such as payment processing, fraud prevention, operational efficiency, and data utilization.

How Stripe Payments can help

Stripe Payments provides a unified, global payments solution that helps any business—from scaling startups to global enterprises—accept payments online, in person, and around the world.

Stripe Payments can help you:

• Optimize your checkout experience: Create a frictionless customer experience and save thousands of engineering hours with prebuilt payment UIs, access to 125+ payment methods, and Link, a wallet built by Stripe.
  
• Expand to new markets faster: Reach customers worldwide and reduce the complexity and cost of multicurrency management with cross-border payment options, available in 195 countries across 135+ currencies.
  
• Unify payments in person and online: Build a unified commerce experience across online and in-person channels to personalize interactions, reward loyalty, and grow revenue.
  
• Improve payments performance: Increase revenue with a range of customizable, easy-to-configure payment tools, including no-code fraud protection and advanced capabilities to improve authorization rates.
  
• Move faster with a flexible, reliable platform for growth: Build on a platform designed to scale with you, with 99.999% historical uptime and industry-leading reliability.
  

Learn more about how Stripe Payments can power your online and in-person payments, or get started today.