Self-Initiated Project · E-commerce / Digital Marketing
Project Overview
Most e-commerce growth conversations jump straight to “run more ads.” This project starts earlier: a digital growth strategy covering the full path from first visit to repeat purchase, built on the assumption that fixing leaks in the existing funnel is almost always cheaper than buying more top-of-funnel traffic.
The Problem
Two numbers define most e-commerce businesses’ biggest opportunity, and neither is traffic volume. Industry benchmark data from the Baymard Institute, one of the most widely cited sources on this topic, puts the average cart abandonment rate at roughly 70%. Separately, average e-commerce conversion rates across industries typically sit in the 2–3% range. Together, that means most stores are already paying to bring in visitors who are willing to buy, and then losing the majority of them to friction, not disinterest.
Research
- Reviewed published cart-abandonment and checkout-friction research to identify the most common, fixable causes: unexpected costs at checkout, forced account creation, and a checkout flow that’s too long.
- Looked at benchmark recovery rates for abandoned-cart email flows. Platforms like Klaviyo and Omnisend regularly publish benchmark data showing well-built abandoned-cart sequences recover roughly 10–15% of triggered carts, a meaningful reclaim of revenue that’s already “in the funnel.”
- Mapped the full customer journey, not just the ad-click-to-purchase path, including email capture, post-purchase flow and win-back sequencing.
Strategy
The growth plan was sequenced deliberately: fix conversion leaks before scaling acquisition spend, because every percentage point of conversion improvement compounds against all future traffic, paid or organic. That meant prioritizing checkout simplification and cart-recovery email flows ahead of any new campaign launches.
Execution
- Designed a three-email abandoned-cart sequence (reminder, incentive-free urgency, final nudge) based on published benchmark structures.
- Outlined checkout simplification priorities: reducing form fields, surfacing shipping costs earlier, and adding a guest-checkout path.
- Planned a post-purchase flow to increase repeat purchase rate, since acquiring a repeat customer is consistently cheaper than acquiring a new one.
- Structured a basic acquisition plan (paid social and search) to only scale once conversion fixes were in place.
Tools Used
Klaviyo-style email flow structure, Google Analytics event-mapping concepts, and published Baymard Institute / e-commerce benchmark research.
Key Decisions
Fix the leaks before scaling the pump. A 1-point conversion rate improvement is worth more than a 20% traffic increase, and it’s usually cheaper to achieve.
Outcome / Learnings
Result: Growth strategy, email flow structure and checkout audit framework completed.
Expected impact: Applying a standard abandoned-cart recovery flow to a store with no existing automation typically recovers an additional 10–15% of abandoned carts, based on widely published platform benchmarks, essentially free revenue from traffic the store already paid to acquire. Checkout simplification aimed at known friction points (hidden costs, forced accounts, long forms) is one of the most consistently cited levers for moving a store’s conversion rate from the low end toward the high end of that 2–3% industry range.
What I Would Improve
With a live store, I’d prioritize checkout analytics to identify the exact drop-off step rather than optimizing generically, and run the recovery flow as an A/B test against a control group to measure real incremental recovery.
Final Takeaways
E-commerce growth is often treated as an acquisition problem when it’s actually a retention-and-friction problem first. The highest-leverage early moves are usually invisible to visitors, checkout steps removed, emails that trigger automatically, not new campaigns.