Grow Ecommerce Sales
Revenue has four terms. Find out which one is holding your store back.
Online revenue is traffic multiplied by conversion rate, average order value and repeat rate. Almost every store reaches for the first term first, and in most cases it is not the weakest one. This page is about working out which term is.
The spine of this page
Four numbers multiplied together
Online revenue over a period is sessions multiplied by conversion rate, multiplied by average order value, multiplied by how often the same customers come back. Four terms. Everything you could do to grow the business acts on one of them, and because they multiply rather than add, the weakest term drags the whole result down disproportionately.
That has a practical consequence that most growth plans ignore. A ten per cent improvement on your weakest term is worth more than a thirty per cent improvement on your strongest, and it is almost always cheaper to buy. Yet nearly every store we speak to has spent its last two years buying more of the first term, because traffic is the one you can purchase on a card this afternoon.
So before recommending anything, we work out where each of your four terms sits relative to what is achievable in your category, and where the practical ceiling is on each. Some terms genuinely cannot move much — a high-consideration, high-price product will not convert like a consumable, no matter what is done to the page. Knowing which ceiling you are already against is as valuable as knowing where the headroom is.
The shape of it
The four terms, and what each one is asking
Because they multiply rather than add, the weakest of the four sets a ceiling on the other three. Write your own figures against each one before reading further.
- Sessions
- How many people reach the store at all, and how many of those landed on a page that sells something.
- Conversion rate
- The share of those visits that end in an order, read separately for phones and for desktops.
- Average order value
- What one order is worth before discount, and before the cost of getting the goods to the door.
- Repeat rate
- How often the same customer comes back — the only term of the four with no media cost attached.
Diagnosis
How to tell which term is the weak one
Each term has a distinct signature in the data and a distinct place where the work happens. This is how we tell them apart before any budget is committed.
| Dimension | What it looks like in the data | Most likely cause | Where the work happens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traffic | Few sessions, and almost none of them from non-brand organic search | No category page architecture, or faceted URLs consuming crawl capacity | Site structure, category pages, technical SEO, paid reach |
| Conversion rate | Healthy sessions, high cart abandonment, poor mobile checkout completion | Slow pages, thin product information, unclear delivery and returns terms | Product and cart pages, checkout, page speed, trust content |
| Average order value | Orders arrive steadily and almost every one is a single item | No bundles, no threshold incentive, irrelevant cross-sells | Merchandising, bundling, shipping thresholds, cart design |
| Repeat rate | Strong first orders, very few second orders, rising acquisition cost | No post-purchase programme, or a delivery experience that disappointed | Email and lifecycle marketing, fulfilment, product quality |
The levers
What actually moves each term
Traffic: category pages, not blog posts
Most non-brand ecommerce demand lands on category and subcategory searches — a type of product with a qualifier attached — long before anyone knows a product name. Those pages need real content, sensible facet handling and internal links, which is a structural job rather than a publishing one.
Conversion: information, speed, and delivery clarity
Most abandoned carts are not design failures. They are unanswered questions — when will it arrive, what does shipping cost, can I send it back, will it fit. Answering those clearly, before the checkout, moves this term more reliably than any layout change.
Order value: thresholds and honest bundles
A free shipping threshold set just above your current average is the most reliable lever here, followed by bundles that genuinely belong together. Recommendation carousels of loosely related products add weight to the page and very little else.
Repeat rate: the cheapest term to move
It is the only one of the four with no media cost attached. A post-purchase sequence timed to when the product would realistically run out or wear through, plus a fulfilment experience worth repeating, is where most stores have the largest untouched headroom.
Common misdiagnoses
Three ways stores work on the wrong term for a year
- Buying traffic to cover a conversion problem.
- If the store converts below what is normal for the category, every additional visitor is bought at full price and wasted at the same rate as the last one. Acquisition costs then rise until the maths stops working, and the conclusion drawn is usually that the channel stopped performing rather than that the site was leaking all along.
- Publishing content that will never sell anything.
- A blog of buying guides and top-ten lists, written because someone said ecommerce needs content, while the category pages that could rank on commercial searches sit as unedited grids of thumbnails. The traffic that arrives is real and is not shopping. Two years of this produces a chart that rises and revenue that does not.
- Treating retention as a loyalty scheme.
- Points and tiers are added before anyone has checked whether the first purchase experience was good enough to warrant a second. If delivery was slow, the packaging poor or the returns process irritating, a discount on the next order is not the missing ingredient. Fix the experience, then ask for the reorder at the moment it would naturally be needed.
How we would run it
Diagnose, then fix in order of cheapness
The order is deliberate. The terms that cost nothing in media are worked before the ones that cost money every month.
Establish the four numbers properly
Sessions by channel, conversion rate by device and by traffic type, average order value by category, and the share of revenue from returning customers. Repeat rate is the one most stores cannot produce, and it is frequently the weakest term.
You get: A twelve-month baseline for all four terms
Find the ceilings, not just the gaps
Compare each term against what is realistic in your category and price band. This is where we tell you if a term you were planning to invest in is already close to its practical limit, which saves a quarter of expensive disappointment.
You get: A headroom estimate per term
Fix the free levers first
Delivery and returns clarity, product information gaps, checkout friction, a shipping threshold, and a post-purchase sequence. These move conversion, order value and repeat rate without adding a recurring media cost to the business.
You get: On-site and lifecycle changes shipped
Rebuild the organic surface
Category architecture, faceted navigation handling, internal linking and product data. This is slow and structural, so it starts early even though it reports late. It is also the only term that compounds without ongoing spend.
You get: Category and facet architecture, and a technical plan
Scale paid against a fixed site
Once the site converts properly and the repeat rate is doing some work, paid acquisition can be pushed with a much higher tolerable cost per first order, because the second order is now reasonably likely.
You get: A paid plan built on real customer value, not first-order value
Questions
What ecommerce teams ask us most
Which of the four terms should we work on first?
The weakest one relative to what is normal in your category, because the terms multiply. A store converting at half the rate of its peers will get more revenue from a modest conversion improvement than from a large traffic increase, and the conversion work costs less to sustain.
The exception is when a term is already at the practical ceiling for your category. High-consideration and high-price products convert lower by nature, and pushing against that limit is expensive. Knowing where the ceiling is matters as much as knowing where you sit.
Why do our product pages get no organic traffic?
Usually because product pages are not where the searching happens. People search for a category and a qualifier long before they know a product name, so category and subcategory pages capture most of that demand. Product pages tend to rank only for brand and model queries.
The other common cause is that faceted navigation has generated thousands of near-identical URLs, consuming crawl capacity and burying the pages that could rank. On a large catalogue this alone can suppress organic performance for years.
Is SEO worth it for ecommerce when we already run ads?
It depends on whether your paid acquisition is profitable on the first order. If it is, and it scales, then organic is a margin improvement rather than a rescue. If the first order loses money and you are relying on repeat purchases to recover it, then you have a structural dependency on retention working.
Organic and paid also do different jobs in retail. Paid captures people who already know what they want; organic captures the earlier research stage where the shortlist gets formed, which paid usually cannot reach economically.
How do we raise average order value without discounting?
Bundles, tiered quantity pricing, genuinely relevant cross-sells at the cart, and a free shipping threshold set just above your current average. The threshold is the most reliable of these and the easiest to test, because it changes behaviour without changing the price of anything.
What tends not to work is a recommendation carousel showing loosely related products. If the suggestion is not obviously useful with the item already in the basket, it adds page weight and nothing else.
Our repeat rate is low. Is that a marketing problem?
Partly, but check the product and the delivery experience first. Low repeat purchase in a category people buy repeatedly usually means something in the experience disappointed — delivery time, packaging, condition on arrival, or a returns process that annoyed people.
Where the experience is sound, the fix is usually that nobody has asked for the second order. A well-timed post-purchase sequence, built around when the product would realistically be running out or wearing through, is the least expensive growth available to most stores.
Find out which of your four numbers is the weak one
Bring twelve months of data and we will decompose it into the four terms, show you where each sits against what is realistic in your category, and tell you which one is worth your next pound.
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Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal