Running a business is a challenge on its own — throw in constantly changing search engine optimization (SEO) tactics and it can be difficult to keep your head above water.

Let’s be clear: SEO is a big project. But when done right, it boosts your site’s visibility, traffic, and bottom line. And even if you don’t have a full-time webmaster on staff, there are a few quick-win opportunities you can do to boost SEO on your site and main product page.

First, we’ll give you a clear definition of what SEO means for Shopify stores and why it’s beneficial. Next, we’ll give you tips to optimize your store. We tackle technical SEO first because it impacts your entire site — and other efforts won’t yield results with poor technical SEO. Then, we’ll zoom in and offer some on-page and off-page SEO strategies that'll get more eyeballs on your product pages.

What is Shopify SEO (search engine optimization)?

Shopify SEO is the process of setting up your Shopify website so search engines (like Google) promote it to people searching for the kinds of products you sell. 

If you want potential customers to find your Shopify store, you need strong SEO efforts that'll boost your website's search rankings and visibility. Specifically, you need to think about technical SEO and on-page SEO, both of which we cover below.

Technical SEO vs. on-page SEO

Technical SEO refers to the optimization of your website's overall performance rather than the content of your website. Before focusing on on-page SEO strategies, you need to cover site-wide technical aspects:

• Make sure your website’s code is clean so search engines can find, crawl, and index your pages
• Ensure your website’s pages load quickly, so Google can confidently promote your website
• Optimize your website for mobile, so Google knows your website is worth promoting for all devices

(Don’t worry — we have a whole section on technical SEO where we walk through each of these to-dos in detail.)

On-page SEO involves optimizing the content of your website’s individual pages to rank higher on search engines. This requires optimizing HTML tags, making sure each website has a relevant and finable URL, and publishing content that is high-quality and relevant.  On-page SEO is all about your content.

Technical SEO appeals directly to search engines. While on-page SEO does that as well, it also appeals to human users and how they experience your website. 

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📚 Related reading: On another ecommerce platform like WordPress, Magento, or BigCommerce? No problem. Check out our more general guide to ecommerce SEO.

Why is search engine optimization (SEO) important for Shopify stores?

“If you build it, they will come” unfortunately it doesn’t apply to the ecommerce industry. You need to do more than just set up shop — you need to make it easy for consumers to find you. That’s where SEO comes in.

Improves your store’s visibility

According to a Wolfgang Digital report, 43% of ecommerce traffic comes from organic Google searches. If you want to make sales, you need to optimize your website to maximize your chances of it showing up at the top of relevant search engine results pages (SERPS).

Great SEO improves your chances of popping up when people Google the types of products you sell — even if they don’t know the specific product name. For example, Nordstrom, Famous Footwear, and Adidas nail SEO and show up as top search results for broad terms like “sneakers for men”:

 SEO (and the tips we share below) determine your store’s visibility within Google’s search results and help more customers find your store. 

Improves your store’s user experience (UX)

SEO isn't just about keywords — it's about making your site user-friendly, accessible, and well-organized. Optimizing your site for search involves reducing page load times, properly linking pages across your site, and eliminating dead links and pages. All of these changes will improve customers' shopping experience on your website, even if you never rank on Google.

Offers higher return on investment (ROI) than other marketing strategies

Optimizing your site for search might be a big project, but it has much higher ROI potential than other growth tactics. Ads and other paid marketing strategies have extremely high upfront costs, and they quickly fade to the bottom of peoples' feeds (until you dump more money in). 

Organic traffic is the opposite: SEO has no upfront monetary investment (though it can take a while for SEO efforts to start yielding results). But organic website traffic from your SEO efforts doesn't fade away — it compounds. Once your website starts climbing search results, Google typically rewards you more, boosting your ranking for other search terms and providing additional traffic month over month for no additional cost.

📚 Recommended reading: Our VP of Success’ guide to customer service ROI.

Technical SEO checklist to improve your ecommerce site

Your site needs to be functional before Google will start promoting your website in search results. Technical SEO is all about improving your website’s performance and foundation, and it’s the first step to being discovered.

Make sure you’re following these tips to optimize your ecommerce website.

Make your website crawlable

If you want search engines to find your site, help them out by making it crawlable. Crawling refers to the automated process where search engines send bots to read the page. 

Google crawls a webpage when any of three things happen: 

• A new link points to the page
• A webpage sees a significant boost in traffic
• An XML sitemap — essentially, the blueprint of important links on your website — is submitted to Google

Google will eventually crawl your page without a sitemap.xml file, but newer sites lacking traffic and external links should submit a sitemap so Google can crawl and then index your site ASAP.

Something called a robots.txt file goes hand in hand with your sitemap.xml file. The robots.txt file instructs crawlers on which pages to avoid and which pages to crawl. It can even block crawlers from visiting your site altogether. 

This is part of a larger strategy called faceted navigation, where you instruct Google on which pages to notice and avoid.

Shopify already has robot.txt files that prevent crawling from happening on specific pages such as the shopping cart or checkout page. You’re free to change that and edit your robot.txt files — by creating a robots.txt.liquid file — to disallow other pages from being crawled, or add extra sitemap URLs. 

Search engines will only index your content if it’s crawled and then categorized as “worthy.” Here are some tips we suggest to make your site crawlable:

• Edit your Shopify robots.txt file by creating a robots.txt.liquid file
• Block any page paths with robots.txt files to prevent crawlers from indexing pages that don’t have search value

Resolve any 4xx errors

If you own any pages that have dead or broken links, your site will instantly be off-putting to crawlers and consumers. All old URLs require redirects to avoid any “Not Found,” “Unauthorized,” or “Forbidden” errors.  — usually 404 or other 4XX errors. 

For ecommerce websites, these errors often stem from discontinued products or sitemap issues.

Ensure 4xx errors don’t impact your SEO by doing the following:

• Use 301 redirects to fix any old or permanently broken links
• Make sure these pages are excluded from your site map by editing the robots.txt file
• Find broken internal links with a tool like Sitechecker

Have a flat site architecture

The structure and organization of your web pages will affect how search engines decide to rank you, as well as the customer’s experience when navigating your site. You need a smart, sensible site structure if you want to scale your business and optimize your website.

Implement good linking and arranging techniques like these so that Google understands your Shopify website’s layout and where to find the essential information:

• Pages should be no more than 3 clicks from any other page: A permanent navigation bar that links to all your main pages is a must
• Pages should be as few clicks from the homepage as possible: Avoid burying pages under multiple layers, like /product/categories/shoes/women/heels/kitten-heels
• Pages should be grouped by relevant keywords/topics
• The homepage should link to your most important pages

Remember, less is more. There’s no need to overly complicate your site architecture, as it'll just confuse customers and search engines.

The same applies to your URLs. Consider a “flat” URL structure over a “hierarchical” URL structure. Optimizing your URLs this way results in a simple site architecture that requires fewer clicks to get from page to page.

A flat URL might look like “example.com/collections/blue-shoes” while a hierarchical structure might look like “example.com/collections/shoes/blue.” See how the hierarchical URL makes each page further from the domain.

📚 Recommended reading: Our guide to product categorization and organization for ecommerce websites. 

Add Shopify tags and product schema

Shopify tags and product schema can both help optimize your website by helping search engines understand your products. This understanding makes it easier for engines to rank you appropriately.

Shopify tags

Shopify tags are a tool Shopify introduced to categorize items. They don’t appear in front of customers but help Shopify and yourself understand your website’s organization. Shopify tags don’t affect SEO on their own, but they naturally go hand in hand with other efforts (like product schemas) that have a great impact on SEO. 

Here’s how we recommend using Shopify tags:

• Identify important keywords (like “summer” and “winter”)
• Create Shopify tags for these keywords
• Add tags to relevant products without overdoing it

Don’t rely on these keywords to be your page’s content, or use them as your product description. Continue to utilize them as organization tags, but now you can have your cake and eat it by gaining a boost in technical SEO in the meantime.

Product schema

A product schema is great for making your ecommerce search results stand out. It displays rich snippets such as price, reviews, ratings, and more in product search results.

Check out how Nike’s shoe shows reviews and shopping links in a Google Image search result:

Install an app like Schema App Total Schema Markup to integrate product schema into your site. Or, you can edit the code of your store’s theme, which is a bit trickier, but it doesn’t require you to pay for an app.

Consumers can view this valuable product information before even visiting your site. If you showcase these properties, your products are more visible and you’re more likely to get clicks and conversions if people like what they see.

Product page SEO tips that impact your product discoverability

Now that we’ve covered technical, sitewide SEO, we can zoom in on product pages and start making them SEO-friendly. 

Focus on these tips once your technical SEO is up to par, and make sure you have everything checked off before launching your ecommerce website.

Relevant title tags

One of the most important pieces of an SEO-optimized page is the title. The title tag is the first thing a search engine sees about your page. 

Think of the title tag as the headline you submit your page to Google with. If a store is selling shoes for men, they’re going to put that in the title along with the name of the store and perhaps a catchy adjective. This is helpful for search engines indexing the content to understand the main point of a page.

Below, the title tag is “Casual Shoes for Men - Steve Madden”:

Title tags are short — 50-60 characters is the recommended max — but hold a lot of power. Search engine algorithms heavily value the title tag when determining the page’s content.

Every page on your website should have its own title tag that is both relevant and unique. It should describe what is on that individual page — otherwise, Google will be confused about which page of your site to show for which search term.

Enticing meta descriptions

Your meta descriptions are 155-character “snippets” of your web page summarizing the page’s content. Some search engines use meta descriptions to display a preview in search results.

Your product meta descriptions should include your target keywords, but they also need to speak to the reader in a way that entices them to click through to learn more and ultimately make a purchase.

Unique product descriptions

When writing product descriptions, you want to be unique. 

All content you create should be original, as to avoid duplicate content in the eyes of search engines. So, don’t just copy and paste content from manufacturer websites or use the same descriptions for multiple products.

Google won’t remove your website from search results if you have accidental duplicate content, but it will affect your organic traffic when Google is unsure which page to prioritize in search rankings.

So, if you want a fully-optimized web store —trust us, you do! — you can’t just copy and paste sales text from your own pages either.

If duplicate content exists at multiple URLs, search engines struggle to decide which page to rank and you can miss out on valuable organic traffic. Beyond making pages unique, canonical links can help Google prioritize your best content.

You don’t want a product page description for your women’s red Converse sneakers that has the same text as your women’s blue Converse sneakers with the color descriptions swapped out.

Instead, when the products you’re selling are similar, combine them in a single product page with multiple variations and focus your energy on describing the common features in a way that gets visitors to convert.

Descriptive images

Ecommerce store owners put a lot of emphasis on using great product images on their websites. They hire commercial photographers, photo editors, and even graphic artists. But, many of them forget or are ignorant of the fact that your images also need to be described to search engines.

So, let’s take a look at how Google understands your pictures through alt text (or alternative text), image title tags, and image descriptions.

The following photo isn't a scientific example of what a search engine actually sees when they crawl an image on your store. But, it provides an idea of how much Google knows when looking at a picture alone.

Think of this picture as an illustration to showcase why you need to add image alt text and title tags to your photos — without the following, Google can’t fully understand what’s in your image.

• Alt text is what site visitors will see when an image doesn’t load on your site.
• Image title tags are the file name of your images.
• Image descriptions are the optional text you can include on your product pages to describe your image.

Search engines will read the above text fields for each image to bring things back into focus.

Try to use your main target keyword phrase at least once in the alt text of your image to fully optimize your pages for search engines.

Check out this guide to adding alt text to your Shopify site’s images.

Desirable user experience (UX)

Your website’s ecommerce UX is in a category all on its own. Many web designers focus solely on UX, which determines the way a shopper experiences your online store.  

So, what exactly does UX have to do with SEO? In addition to reading the indicators on your pages, search engines also measure how long visitors stay on your pages. If your bounce rate is high — meaning users move away quickly — modern search algorithms will rank your pages lower.

On the flip side, when search engines measure the traffic that stays on your site for more time, they'll rank your site and pages higher. They’re essentially assuming there’s something good to see because people want to stay and read, watch, or shop.

Consider adding an informative FAQ section or help center to decrease your bounce rate. If it’s well-written and addresses any potential pain points, chances are customers will stay on this page longer, and search engines will take note of this.

One of the greatest determining subfactors in the quality of your store’s UX — what really gets qualified shoppers to stay on your site — is your navigation menu and search features.

Usable navigation features

Shoppers are only going to purchase products when they find what they’re looking for, so you need to make it easy for them.

The following navigation features will optimize your navigation and search.

Autocomplete

Adding an autocomplete feature to your search bar is another way to get shoppers to stay on your site longer. It gives consumers new ideas about items that they may be interested in and encourages them to try new products.

Filtered and faceted search

You might hear the terms “filter” and “faceted navigation” used interchangeably — both refer to the act of sorting search results for relevance. Filters allow customers to narrow results based on categories. Faceted navigation is the process of using multiple filters at once to help customers find the exact product they’re looking for. 

Help users browse your site with ease by offering a faceted search experience.

📚 Recommended reading: Our guide to the best Shopify theme (after analyzing over 13,000 themes). 

Subcategories in the display menu 

Make sure your navigation menu displays categories, subcategories, and individual collection pages. This way, it’s easy for shoppers to find what they need, rather than taking multiple steps to navigate to a specific category page.

Promotional banners 

Another great feature to improve customer UX and keep people shopping in your ecommerce store is to include a promotional banner (or pop-up) above the fold. Let people know what items are on sale and about any other discount offers, contests, and more.

That said, too many banners can drag down your page’s load speed and disrupt your shopping experience. Chat campaigns are a subtler alternative to sharing announcements and promotions, with an easy path to a human agent to continue the conversation. 

Easily accessible customer support

Chat boxes and self-service support tools can help your customers find what they seek. Ideally, your customer will be able to find products on their own, but you need to give shoppers an easy way to find new products or seek recommendations if need be.

Take a look at Jaxxon’s chat widget, which automatically lets shoppers request a list of new products or connects shoppers with live agents if they have follow-up questions.

🧰 Tool: Learn more about how to offer this kind of self-service support in your chat widget with Gorgias’ Automation Add-on. 

Ecommerce marketing SEO tips that impact your brand’s reputation and recognition

Once your on-page and technical SEO is fueled with best practices, it’s time to look at your off-page SEO. Remember, a well-working website and thorough product pages are key before you begin embarking on any marketing efforts.

As you scale, you'll need to start monitoring and taking action on off-site reviews, websites linking back to you, and brand mentions on social media.

Backlink building

It’s crucial to create and implement an informed link-building strategy. Unfortunately, it’s also a harder strategy since it relies on links coming from other websites that you don’t control. 

Google rewards websites with many diverse backlinks because they say a lot about your website’s reputation and authority. If high-quality sites are linking to your Shopify store, then Google will trust you and rank your page higher.

Again, it’s about other people taking action — which is a little bit out of your control. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things you can do to invest in a good linking strategy and start gaining backlinks.

Here are some of the best places to start:

• Get listed in niche directories
• Ask blogs to review your product
• Appear as a guest on someone’s podcast
• Reach out to journalists
• Join relevant communities
• Create and share free tools
• Run contests
• Partner with influencers
• Offer sponsorships

Most existing backlink building services are cheap, which usually means they’re not exactly trustworthy. Linking is one area of your SEO strategy that you’ll need to invest time and effort into learning and implementing if you want to see off-page SEO results.

Content marketing

In ecommerce, content marketing refers to your blog, off-site guest posts, social media posts, stories, videos, and other content that helps move traffic to your product pages. Unfortunately, most brands get it wrong.

Many online stores launch a blog only to share news about their store and product features. While customers might need to know about updates and promotions, this kind of info is better left to press release submission sites and targeted subscriptions (to your qualified leads and existing customers segment).

Instead, what online stores should be doing with their content is solving their customers’ pain points. Articles, infographics, and videos should build trust, establish authority, nurture customer loyalty, and eventually lead consumers to make a purchase.

When it comes to SEO for content marketing, you should focus on keyword phrases that are relevant to the problems that your products solve (and have a high search volume, which you can check in tools like Ahrefs) — not the products themselves.

For example, if you’re selling women’s blue shoes, here are some topics you might want to write about:

• What should I wear to an interview?
• 10 best accessories to wear with your brown pants suit
• This is what Ariana Grande wore to the Oscars

By providing your shoppers with expert fashion advice, these topics (if written well) will eventually lead people to your email list and later your product pages. It’ll also increase your reputation as an authority in the space and gain you more trust with your audience.

So, while content is an amazing tool to help you scale your ecommerce operations, just remember that it isn't all about you, but rather helping your target audience.

When embarking on a content marketing journey, remember to do keyword research so you can make sure your content is getting in front of your target audience.

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How to use keywords to rank your Shopify store higher

Just as linking is an important indicator for search engine rankings, so are keywords. Keywords tell search engines what the content of your site looks like, and it’s used to match up against what consumers are looking for in search engine results. Proper keyword implementation is an effective SEO strategy that’ll rank your Shopify store even higher.

1) Figure out which search terms you want to rank for

You already know you want to rank higher for the target keywords your potential customers are searching for. But, how do you know what they are?

Here are some general Shopify SEO rules of thumb:

• Choose 1–3 target keyword phrases for each product page, landing page, and piece of content
• Make sure your content is easily-readable, descriptive, and relevant to the page topic — never over-optimize
• Solve the problems your customers regularly face
• Include your keywords in your page titles and sprinkle them throughout your content
• Monitor your competitors

2) Create a list of potential search phrases

One of the easiest ways to define your list of target search phrases is to use an SEO tool or seek inspiration from your potential buyers. Feel free to get creative, but use real data to make informed decisions when doing keyword research.

Leverage advanced SEO tools

Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush are the most popular tools among modern SEO professionals. Each offers a suite of tools to help you make informed decisions to optimize your content. If you feel like you have an intermediate or advanced understanding of SEO, check out these tools. SEMRush and Moz offer free trials and you can try Ahrefs for $7 for the first week.

Use beginner SEO tools

Alternatively, beginners might want to use a tool like Long Tail Pro or even Google Keyword Planner. Use these to measure your potential keyword competitiveness and make informed decisions about your search marketing efforts.

Do a Google search

Are you selling blue sneakers? Find related keywords with a simple Google search. Check out the related searches list at the bottom of the page.

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Between SEO tools and search engines, you should be able to generate a preliminary list of search phrases to optimize your Shopify or Shopify Plus store. From there, you’ll still need to narrow it down a bit.

3) Focus on long-tail keywords

Long tail keywords are three to five-word search queries that are specific to your page content (in this case, your products). Usually, they're much easier to rank for than general search phrases.

If you’re selling blue shoes, it’s going to be much more competitive to rank for “blue shoes” because it’s a general term. So, instead of general terms, keyword phrases like “women baby blue sneakers” and “toddler royal blue sneakers” are likely to generate more traffic and ensure that traffic is targeted and qualified.

In most cases, you'll want to remove general search phrases from your preliminary target keywords list. Instead, stick to long-tail search phrases.

4) Pay attention to other ranking factors

Even when your keywords are perfectly targeted to your products, more factors increase the likelihood of improving your pages’ search engine rankings. So, learn what else you need to watch for.

Here are the top competitive ranking factors to consider:

• Quality of existing competitor pages
• Number of high-quality backlinks to competitor pages
• Competitor pages domain ranking or domain authority

In a nutshell, you need to make sure that you can create content and build links better than your competition. Keep in mind that your competitors will have the freedom to update their content should you outrank them later, so make sure to monitor your pages and those that rank on page one for the same keywords.

The best SEO apps to improve your ecommerce site’s SEO

SEO strategies don’t mean much if you have no way to see if they’re working. If you want to achieve your goals and continue growing each year, you need to use some of the tools at your disposal that’ll allow you to track your site’s performance. 

1) Google Analytics

All ecommerce store owners should invest some time into learning Google Analytics. A free tool — which can easily be connected to your Shopify store — it's one of the easiest and most insightful ways to see if your SEO efforts are working.

Google Analytics lets you monitor organic search traffic and user engagement with your site. Look at how your rankings change when you adjust certain on-site components, and pay attention to how people find your site and what they’re doing when they get there.

Use this information to better understand your customers and try out new SEO strategies.

2) Google Search Console

Shopify allows you to submit your sitemap to Google Search Console. Your sitemap file is generated automatically by Shopify, and you can submit it so that your site is found and properly indexed by Google.

Once your sitemap is added, use Google Search Console to identify high-traffic pages, measure click-through rates, analyze your site’s performance, and much more. It’s an invaluable tool that takes some time to understand, but the benefits are worth any learning curve.

3) Yoast

You’ll be happy to hear that Yoast is available on Shopify. It comes in handy as a keyword research tool that optimizes your site with keywords and assesses the SEO strength of your pages with the help of structured data. Get real-time feedback on how your titles and descriptions perform on social media or Google search.

Your technical SEO is also taken care of with Yoast. It’s constantly updated to automate any code errors that affect your site’s performance or speed and be up-to-date on the latest SEO practices.

4) SEO Manager

Cost: $20.00 per month

Free Trial Available: 7-day

Star Rating: 4.7 (1,728 reviews)

Function: This app helps store admins understand and implement Shopify SEO tactics to get ranked by search engines. It has over 20 features — only 5 of them are available with other existing apps.

📚 Recommended reading: Our list of the 40+ best Shopify apps to grow your store.

5) Image Optimizer

‍Cost: $4.99 per month +

Free Trial Available: No, but there is a free plan

Star Rating: 4.8 (759 reviews)

Function: This app automatically adds image ALT tags and image file names to your product photos based on templates customized by you. You can compress images to minimize file size and increase site speed and page speed. It also converts png images to jpeg format.

6) SEOMetriks Marketing Tools

‍Cost: $7.99 per month

Free Trial Available: 7-day

Star Rating: 4.8 (22 reviews)

Function: This app empowers you with a step-by-step Shopify SEO roadmap. It delivers crucial SEO data and simplifies your search marketing processes.

7) Plug in SEO

‍Cost: $29.99 per month +

Free Trial Available: 14-day and free plan

Star Rating: 4.7 (2,567 reviews)

Function: This app automates Shopify SEO audits while delivering worthwhile search marketing recommendations. It integrates with Google, Bing, other search engines, Langify, and Locksmith.

8) Benchmark Hero

Cost: Free

Free Trial Available: N/A

Star Rating: 4.9 (317 reviews)

Function: This app automates the SEO audit process while you work on building pages. It delivers benchmarks and analytics while also suggesting action items for you to take.

9) AMP

Cost: $9.00 per month +

Free Trial Available: No, but there is a free plan

Star Rating: 5.0 (529 reviews)

Function: This app optimizes Google-accelerated mobile pages, increasing your store’s mobile traffic. It integrates easily with review apps.

Note: In addition to the available marketplace apps, you can also leverage helpful Shopify SEO tutorials to read current best practices straight from the horse’s mouth.

Remember: SEO is meaningless without great conversion

SEO is how you get people to visit your site, but if people aren’t placing orders, that traffic — and all the effort and dollars you spent on marketing — goes to waste. 

Once traffic arrives on your site, your new mission is converting customers or turning browsers into buyers. A great shopping experience — complete with informative product pages, proactive customer support, and a streamlined shopping cart and checkout process — is your best bet to grow your store and maximize profits.

Take a look at our guide to ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO), written in partnership with ecommerce CRO agency Swanky, to learn how to turn your website traffic into paying customers.

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Gone are the days when a customer places an order online without considering order fulfillment. They want free shipping, two-day shipping, and live order tracking — and that’s just table stakes.

Big ecommerce brands and marketplaces, especially Amazon Prime, have trained customers to expect their orders will arrive as soon as the next day and with absolutely no hassle. That creates challenges for small and medium businesses now tasked with achieving similar results.

Your ecommerce business may not have the resources for next-day delivery, but having online orders arrive quickly and smoothly is non-negotiable. Slow or frustrating order fulfillment can easily trigger a product return or a negative review, and will likely prevent a customer from turning into a repeat customer.

Even small brands can optimize their order fulfillment process, from taking in and storing inventory to taking return requests, and deliver great results every time.

What is order fulfillment?

Order fulfillment is the sequence of steps that starts after a customer places an online order, and ends when your customer receives their order. It includes order intake, order picking, assembling, packing, shipping, and order tracking. 

Some companies include post-delivery communications in this category, while others put that communication into another category, like customer support or onboarding.

All organizations rely on some third-party assistance within the order fulfillment process — even if you’re a solo business owner who handles most of the order fulfillment process in house (like inventory storage and order processing), you use a delivery carrier like FedEx or USPS to drop off packages. 

Other businesses lean on more outsourced fulfillment solutions to manage warehousing and ship orders, such as a dropshipping partner or third-party logistics (3PL) operation. Self-fulfillment is quite time-consuming for stores with high volumes of orders, so you’ll likely outsource more of the order fulfillment process as you grow. 

Common challenges of order fulfillment

Companies frequently run into several common hurdles when building an ecommerce fulfillment strategy, especially as they grow and scale. Processing more customer orders is a good thing, but only when businesses can keep up with customer expectations around their fulfillment needs. 

Do any of these order fulfillment challenges sound familiar to your business?

• Poor inventory management: Frequently being out of stock (or, worse, selling items you don’t have in stock) hampers your sales potential and harms the customer experience.
• Low shipping quality: When you hand packages off to a shipping carrier, much of the shipping process is out of your hands. Yet, customers still blame you when items don’t arrive or show up damaged.
• Too much stock: Keeping too much stock on hand affects storage and carrying costs, and you can end up stuck with unsellable items that have gone out of style, out of season, or otherwise become unpopular.
• Supply chain breakdown: When one or more links in your supply chain are unable to keep up with demand for inventory.

These issues are common, but they add up over time, diminishing your customer experience (CX) and growth potential. Building loyal customers is key to repeat business and a poor fulfillment strategy put that at risk. Every time a customer has to reach out about an issue in the process, you’re a step closer to losing them. 

Even if you have the fastest, friendliest customer service team around, a fulfillment operation that doesn’t require customers to reach out is always preferred.

📚Related reading: Our list of revenue-driving ecommerce shipping best practices.

Why is order fulfillment important for ecommerce businesses?

Why pay close attention to your order fulfillment strategy? Because it’s what ensures your customers get what they ordered, when they expect it. 

As many as 90% of online shoppers see 2-day and 3-day delivery as the standard, with 30% of shoppers saying that they expect same-day delivery. In fact, the same-day delivery market in the US is expected to grow by more than $9 billion from 2020 to 2025.

What’s more, Arvato finds that 54% percent of U.S. shoppers have walked away from a purchase because of the cost of delivery, and 27% percent have done the same because the ecommerce business didn’t have fulfillment options that arrive in time.

Providing a delivery estimate is also key. A 2020 report from Navnar found 68% of customers said estimated delivery time during the checkout process influenced their decision to complete a purchase.

The bottom line is that customers expect fast, cost-effective, and transparent shipping if you want to win their business and loyalty.

How does the order fulfillment process generally work?

Let’s take a step back to the basics and look at how the order fulfillment process works for the typical ecommerce business selling on an ecommerce platform.

Each of these steps has its own set of intricacies and details, and it’s easy to overlook something in one or more of these areas. Looking at each step before getting any deeper in will help you better assess what your business needs to handle — and how to go about doing so.

1) Receiving inventory

Receiving inventory is the process of taking stock into a warehouse or fulfillment center. Before you (or your order fulfillment company) can ship products to customers, you (or they) must first have products to ship. 

Depending on how your business is structured, inventory can come from your own production facilities, from other companies directly, or from third-party or intermediary services.

Part of the receiving process is counting and inspecting incoming stock for damage. Categorizing or labeling starts here and continues in the next step.

2) Storing inventory

Any products you don’t immediately process and ship need to be categorized, logged, and stored, usually using a stock-keeping unit (SKU). Some larger businesses may also use some other kind of barcode or radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking system to help with inventory management.

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Items are placed into inventory storage, either in your warehouse (whether that’s a large facility or just your garage) or in your fulfillment service center or third-party logistics partner’s warehouse.

This step encompasses a lot, as your strategy here dictates how much time and labor goes into finding and packing items later on. For example, digital inventory management systems are crucial for tracking and locating items stored in inventory.

3) Processing the order

Processing an order involves developing a system to find items, pull them from the inventory, and then pack them once a customer places an order. 

This could look like you going to your at-home inventory and packaging the items, or your fulfillment partners taking your items from a warehouse. It all depends on the size of your business.

You can streamline and track order processing Gorgias and with apps that integrate into Gorgias such as ShipMonk and Bigblue. ShipMonk, for example, pulls order fulfillment data and tracking information right into Gorgias helpdesk.

There’s also ShipBob, a 3PL that takes care of order fulfillment for ecommerce businesses. ShipBob integrates with Gorgias to pull all your customer orders fulfilled by ShipBob into a single account.

4) Shipping the order

This step is when your team (or your 3PL) hands off the order to a transportation channel (for example, shipping carriers like FedEx, UPS, and USPS).

This is the step where your strategy most directly influences the costs your business incurs. The packing materials, weight, and sizes you choose get calculated into a measurement called dimensional weight (DIM weight), which generally determines how much you pay in shipping costs.

This is an opportunity to communicate shipping notices to the customer. AfterShip provides tracking for you and transparency for customers and integrates with Gorgias so you can quickly access shipping information when communicating with customers.

Providing detailed shipping information is a crucial step of your fulfillment process. According to Optimroute, 24.6% of customers said they were “extremely likely” to buy again from a brand that provides real-time order tracking.

Shipping is deep into the process, but your shipping options greatly impact your incoming sales. Shipping costs are the most common reason behind abandoned carts: According to the Baynard Institute, 48% of customers will abandon a cart if shipping costs are too high, and 22% will do the same if the delivery time was too slow.

📚Recommended reading:

• 12 Best Shipping Software Tools for Ecommerce Stores
• 9 Revenue-Driving Ecommerce Shipping Best Practices
• How To Provide Order Tracking for Your Ecommerce Customers

5) Handling returns

Any ecommerce business must have a process for handling returns in place, and this crucial function usually falls under order fulfillment. Your returns procedures must establish when returns are and are not accepted, along with how to determine which returns can be restocked and which cannot (e.g., soiled or defective items).

You need to be prepared for returns as they’re guaranteed to happen. In 2021, shoppers returned over 20.8% of products ordered, according to the National Retail Foundation. Items returned in 2021 alone were worth a total of $761 billion.

Again, apps can make this all easier. Loop Returns, for example, automates returns for Shopify merchants. Loop and Gorgias work together to place all your returns data inside the Gorgias helpdesk. 

📚Recommended reading: 

• 9 Best Returns Management Tools for Easier Returns
• Ecommerce Returns: 10 Best Practices for Taking Your Online Store to the Next Level

The 4 types of order fulfillment

While the broad strokes we just outlined are fairly consistent, the details of order fulfillment are different from company to company, as are fulfillment costs.

Most businesses fall into one of four categories or types of order fulfillment. Below, we’ll detail each of these four categories: in-house order fulfillment, third-party order fulfillment, dropshipping order fulfillment, and hybrid order fulfillment.

In-house order fulfillment

In-house order fulfillment is what it sounds like — the business handles all the steps listed above internally (aside from the actual shipping). Employees or contractors for the ecommerce business receive and store inventory, pick and pack orders with a shipping label and packing slip, and handle the customer relationships that accompany each order.

In-house is common on two extreme ends of the spectrum: smaller, low-volume businesses and startups (where packing boxes doesn’t consume too much of any one person’s time), and major enterprises (think Amazon).

📚Recommended reading: How to Offer Free Shipping and Lift Revenue

Third-party order fulfillment

In a third-party model, everything about the order fulfillment process is outsourced to a third-party logistics company. Outsourcing to a third-party fulfillment provider like the Shopify Fulfillment Network, Amazon FBA, Amazon MCF, or Deliverr is a highly strategic choice for ecommerce businesses that have grown to a certain order volume but lack order fulfillment infrastructure.

Using an order fulfillment service also makes sense for firms with volatile or seasonal sales patterns, where maintaining as much storage space as possible is unsustainable during slower seasons.

📚Recommended reading: Shopify Fulfillment Network Review From an Ecommerce Merchant

Dropshipping order fulfillment

Dropshipping is when an ecommerce store doesn’t keep items in stock and, instead, sources products from a third-party manufacturer or wholesaler who holds the items and ships them as needed. The store owner pays the wholesale price as items are shipped, removing the burden of keeping their own inventory.

This is different from the 3PL model, where the store provides its own inventory to the third-party provider, and different from when a store stores its own inventory.

It makes sense for D2C businesses that own their own manufacturing and want to keep order fulfillment in house. It also makes sense for ecommerce businesses that want minimal involvement in the fulfillment process. Essentially, the business forwards shipping details to the manufacturer, who takes over the transaction.

The downside to dropshipping is that it means giving up control of the order process. Additionally, costs (and shipping times) can shoot up quickly when customers are far away from your manufacturing partner’s shipping locations.

Hybrid order fulfillment

Hybrid order fulfillment is any scenario that combines multiple strategies. For example, a company with heavy seasonal sales might keep most order fulfillment in house, but outsource some to a third-party firm during Q4. Alternatively, the company may select high-value or specialty items for dropshipping, while everything else is handled another way.

10 Best practices and tips for an optimized order fulfillment process

Once you’ve determined a broad direction for your order fulfillment strategy (or identified some top-tier issues with your current process), it’s time to reevaluate and optimize. Use these best practices and tips to tighten up your order fulfillment strategy and further wow your customer base.

1) Streamline receiving processes so damaged goods are handled promptly

Returns handling is something no business wants to focus on, but it’s an important area nonetheless. 

Assess all incoming products before they’re sent to your inventory and set a process to separate and catalog those damaged goods. All damaged items should be documented so you can provide proof to the wholesaler or manufacturer of defective items.

Return damaged goods as soon as possible so you can get replacements and not slow down your order fulfillment. The last thing you want is to find a product that is damaged just as you’re packing it for shipment and be left scrambling.

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2) Organize your inventory and warehouse with efficiency in mind

If you’re handling your own inventory management and doing in-house fulfillment, keeping your inventory and warehouse organized can have a meaningful impact on your bottom line. When used in combination with an order fulfillment system, better organization can generate real results.

Searching for lost pallets is a resource drain that generates zero revenue. The right organizational strategy makes it easier for human or automated pickers to find the items, and can even reduce travel time between items. This is especially true as you scale organizational strategies across entire or multiple distribution centers — clear organization helps improve pick and pack times.

Even for small businesses, which may involve keeping inventory in a garage or office, it’s still important to have an organizational system in place. Simple tools like labels and a spreadsheet can go a long way.

Using a 3PL like ShipBob makes this all easier by taking inventory out of your hands, leaving you to focus on branding and customer service.

📚Recommended reading: An Essential Guide to Ecommerce Inventory Management

3) Automate processes wherever possible

Automation in warehousing settings requires substantial upfront investment and may even require rethinking your entire warehouse footprint. But wherever you’re able to implement it, automation can help save you money and time in the long run by optimizing labor, improving working conditions, and making operations safer.

Automation can happen in small ways, too. Using Gorgias and the apps that integrate into the helpdesk puts all your data into one place and makes it easier and faster to make decisions.

Adding an app like Alloy Automation makes your Gorgias admin even more efficient by pulling in tickets, daily shipments, survey data, and review information.

📚Recommended reading: Automate and Streamline Ecommerce Tasks While Keeping a Human Touch

4) Use order fulfillment software that integrates with customer service software

As your company grows, you’ll eventually turn to some kind of order fulfillment software. When you do, choose one that integrates well with your chosen customer service software — you don’t want siloed information systems that can’t talk to each other.

When your fulfillment software integrates with your helpdesk, you can see fulfillment data while answering customer questions. So, if a customer asks about the status of their order, you don’t have to pull open a new tab and copy/paste things like tracking numbers and estimated delivery dates. All of that is already in your helpdesk, making it much faster to provide helpful, personalized answers. 

Source: NetSuite and Gorgias integration

NetSuite and ShipBob are two leaders in this category. The latter also offers some third-party logistics support.

Learn more about Gorgias’ multiple integration options.

5) Prioritize your inventory’s accuracy

From a customer’s perspective, which is worse? Seeing that an item is sold out before you order it, or ordering (and paying for) an item that’s listed as in stock, only to find out later that the item was not actually in stock?

Most customers would prefer the bad news upfront. Inventory inaccuracies create a host of customer frustrations that your business would surely prefer to avoid.

The math here is simple, even if the execution is complex: The more accurate your inventory, the more success you’ll have in delivering the right products on time.

Whether you’re using an in-house order fulfillment model or you’re relying on a 3PL partner’s distribution centers, using a warehouse management system is generally better than relying on manual data entry. This is certainly true as you grow or scale your ecommerce venture.

You also want to be sure to watch the right set of inventory management metrics, which can show you how well you’re doing at keeping an accurate inventory. These metrics will vary depending on your goals, but could include:

• Backorder rate (rate of unfulfilled orders due to items on backorder)
• Accuracy of forecast demand (compares on-hand quantity to the forecasted demand)
• Lost sales ratio (number of days a product is out of stock compared to projected sales over that time)
• Inventory shrinkage (inventory that you cannot find or cannot sell due to damage)
• Fill rate (measures how many items were shipped compared to ordered)
• Customer satisfaction score (number of positive responses against all responses)

If you’d like to learn more about these and other metrics, NetSuite has put together a solid explainer on 33 of the most important inventory management KPIs and metrics. Their guide explains all six of the metrics we’ve listed, plus several others.

6) Minimize package touching and handling

In general, it’s a good idea to limit the number of touches that each package gets (There are packing strategies that disregard this, such as wave picking, but we still consider it to be a best practice unless you have an overriding reason to choose a different strategy).

Why is it a good strategy to minimize touching and handling? Because of all the things that could potentially go wrong at every touch:

• Product damage
• Shrinkage
• Employee injury
• Packing mistakes (too many, not enough, or missing items)

Additionally, every touch is added time and energy expended on an item. You want to get items out the door with as little friction as possible, so engineer your processes in a way that minimizes touches and handoffs.

7) Keep enough inventory to keep up with demand

This best practice circles back to demand forecasting, which is always a complex element for ecommerce retailers. You want to keep enough inventory on hand to keep up with customer demand, because delivering on time and reducing stockouts are two primary ways to increase customer satisfaction.

Of course, you don’t want to overdo it and end up with excess or even dead inventory. Keep your inventory levels modest, yet sufficient — always have enough to deliver on time, but remain agile enough that you don’t end up with pallets upon pallets of product sitting around that cannot be sold.

Regularly assess your orders for what items are most popular and keep an eye on key calendar dates — like Black Friday and the holiday season — to predict how much inventory you’ll need.

8) Use an RFID system to enhance analytics

If you’re not relying on a third-party order fulfillment system and you’ve reached a certain size and complexity, consider implementing a radio-frequency identification (RFID) system for tracking inventory. 

RFID is a technology that uses tags and a reader device to track inventory in an automated way. It’s a way of providing real-time tracking for your inventory. Learn more about RFID with this Luluemon case study:

https://youtu.be/cZfx2naKYXo

Such a system far outpaces traditional systems for tracking and managing inventory, and it unlocks additional levels of analytics that can give you a better understanding of your inventory.

When doing inventory at scale, better data means better decision-making, which can filter through all levels of your supply chain.

9) Be clear with your shipping options

Unless you offer pick-up or can deliver orders yourself, such as in a local delivery area, you’ll be relying on a shipping carrier such as USPS, FedEx, or Purolator.

Customers want clear shipping times and flexibility. Do your research to understand which shipping partner will best suit your needs and communicate their various options to your customers, who may be willing to pay more for shipping if it means a faster delivery time.

The same is true if you’re using a third-party fulfillment partner. Ensure they can meet your shipping expectations, keeping in mind the average customer expectation for online delivery is three days. 

Another way to achieve this is with good coverage. Ideally, a fulfillment provider has enough warehouse locations to cover at least 95% of the US, for example.

Native Union, a tech accessory brand, lets customers input their shipping zip code to estimate the cost of each delivery option before they place an order:

10) Make returns and edits a simple process

Your customers want a simple returns process, as do your in-house order fulfillment teams.

There’s strategic value in instituting a transparent returns process that’s easy for your customers to understand and use when they need it. Don’t forget about the back end, either. Your internal teams are just as important to your continued order fulfillment success, so make sure the process for handling returns is simple to execute.

Start by setting expectations for returns and exchanges ahead of time with a FAQ or Help Center page that clearly outlines your return and refund policies.

Then, streamline the returns process with the following recommendations:

Use self-service order management to let customers cancel orders and request returns

Make it as easy as possible for customers to initiate cancellations or request returns, saving time for both them and your customer service team.

Use Gorgias’ Automate to create a self-service portal that customers can use for these processes. Instead of waiting for an agent to help, customers can use the chat widget on your ecommerce website to:

• Track the status of their order
• Return an order
• Report issues
• Cancel an order

For any ecommerce business, these are the top reasons customers reach out or file tickets, cluttering your dashboard. Letting customers take care of these processes themselves streamlines your workflow and builds customer satisfaction.

Use a tool like Loop to fully automate the returns and exchanges

Loop is a returns app that allows a customer to initiate a return or exchange all on their own without having to wait for your customer support team. With Loop, customers can see which of their items are available for return or exchange or select a new item or size for replacement.

Loop helps with customer retention by offering an exchange or bonus credit rather than an outright return, giving customers a chance to stay a customer. Loop then provides you with data so you can get insights into where customers may be running into issues with your products.

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And best of all, Loop fully integrates with Gorgias so you can see all those return and exchange details in one place. Read how Kulani Kinis saved $400,000 in refunds using Gorgias and Loop together.

📚Recommended reading: 10 Ways To Reduce Ecommerce Product Returns With Great CX

Enhance your ecommerce order fulfillment process and customer service with Gorgias

Ecommerce businesses benefit when they get intentional about their order fulfillment strategy. By leapfrogging past common hurdles like poor inventory management or poor shipping experiences, businesses can strengthen customer relationships and continue to grow.

The best practices and tips we’ve provided here can get you well on your way to improving your order fulfillment strategy. But in the end, you also need the right tools and apps to round out your inventory and customer service abilities.

Gorgias can transform how you empower your customer service team with better helpdesk and customer service tools tailored to the needs of ecommerce businesses. 

Plus, Gorgias integrates with all the top ecommerce platforms, shipping and fulfillment software, and other ecommerce apps used by businesses like yours to simplify essential services like order management.

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Ready to find out how Gorgias can help improve your order fulfillment strategy? Sign up for free today!

Running a successful online store requires a lot of strategy and decision making. But if you don't use the right data and insights to guide those decisions, then it becomes a lot harder to optimize your ecommerce business based on intuition alone.

This is where ecommerce KPIs come into play. By providing a broad range of insights regarding how your ecommerce store is performing, these KPIs can serve as a roadmap to guide your ecommerce strategy and help you meet your business goals.

To help you get started tracking the health and performance of your ecommerce business, let's take a look at the 20 most important KPIs that every ecommerce store should track.

What is a key performance indicator?

A standard performance indicator is a measurement used to calculate a business operation relative to a certain goal.

Sounds too complicated? Here’s a practical example: In ecommerce, most people aim to boost their website traffic by 50% to 100% yearly. Therefore, web traffic growth would be a metric relative to this goal and serve as one of the business's standard performance indicators.

There are many performance indicators, but many of them are irrelevant to your business's success. This is why most serious business managers tend to narrow the selection down to 10 to 20 indicators that significantly impact their business's success. These are known as key performance indicators (or KPIs).

Defining and tracking KPIs for your ecommerce business provides enlightening insights into your business's performance. You can use them to evaluate your business's health and spot issues that need correcting. You can even use them to evaluate the results of changes you make to your ecommerce store and strategy for data-based optimization.

Your business can’t possibly survive on your gut instinct alone. That’s why you need to measure the effectiveness of your business strategy, and the best way to do this is by defining and tracking your business's KPIs.

Different types of KPIs in ecommerce

While there are a few so-called "universal" KPIs, most industries measure success differently. 

In the ecommerce industry, several different KPIs are generally considered important to track. More often than not, store owners use the following KPIs to measure their success:

• Monetary KPIs: If you want to get some return on your investment, you need to keep track of your money. In the beginning, you should pick whether to track gross profit, revenue, or both. Other KPIs, such as average order value (AOV), customer acquisition cost (CAC), and customer lifetime value (CLV), can also fall under this category.
• Customer KPIs: The number of new customers, repeat customers, and former customers are a few ecommerce metrics that fall into this category, but any metrics about customer behavior, customer experience, and customer support can be customer KPIs.
• Purchase KPIs: The number of people that have made, tried to make, and abandoned a purchase are all vital KPIs for ecommerce stores to track.
• Conversion KPIs: How many of your visitors actually purchase something? Conversion KPIs provide insights into the performance of your ecommerce sales funnel and are also key to gauging the performance of marketing campaigns.

These different types of KPIs are measured during business operation assessments. You should perform these assessments once a month (if possible) during your store's first six months of operation. Past the six-month mark, you should perform business operation assessments once every three to six months.

Here are two different types of businesses assessment:

• SWOTT Analysis: Assessing your businesses’ Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, and Trends, should be performed twice a year
• GPCT Analysis: Looking at your Goals, Plans, Challenges, and Timeline, should be performed at least once a year

Along with assessing your overall business goals and strategy, these business operation assessments serve as an opportunity to measure and analyze your store's KPIs. 

KPIs to track revenue, profitability & conversions

If you would like to grow the sales on your ecommerce site (and what store owner doesn't?), then here are the top five KPIs that you will need to track and improve:

1) Overall sales

The first step to growing your store's sales is tracking how many sales you're already making. You can monitor your sales on a monthly, weekly, daily, and even hourly basis if needed. It all depends on the type of product you're selling and your sales volume. Businesses can easily monitor overall sales in Magento or Shopify. Another option is to set up sales trackers in your Gorgias dashboard and track them directly.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Create an optimized customer experience to drive sales via customer loyalty and word-of-mouth advertising.
• Utilize cross-selling and upselling to increase average order value.
• Use A/B testing to improve your online store's conversion rate.

‎2) Conversion rates

Conversion rate is the percentage of your website visitors that actually purchase something. Optimizing your conversion rate will enable you to turn a larger number of visitors into paying customers. While conversion rates vary from niche to niche, ecommerce stores usually have a conversion rate slightly above 3%. Unsurprisingly, you should try to get the number as high as possible.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Optimize product pages and other elements of your sales funnel with A/B testing.
• Provide proactive, pre-sale support via Gorgias live chat.
• Improve your cart abandonment rate.

3) Cart abandonment rates

Shopping cart abandonment rate is the percentage of orders abandoned at checkout. In the ecommerce industry, benchmarks for the average cart abandonment rate are incredibly high, with 70% of all online orders being abandoned at checkout. While an alarming figure, this also provides plenty of room for your business to grow its sales simply by reducing its cart abandonment rate.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Make your checkout process quick and simple, and offer a guest checkout option.
• Offer free shipping to encourage checkout completion.
• Target customers who have left items in their cart with abandoned cart recovery email campaigns.

4) Customer lifetime value (CLV)

CLV shows the average amount of money a single consumer will spend on your products throughout your relationship. It's a measure of how much value your store can gain by attracting a single customer, and improving CLV means that each new customer you acquire will lead to more sales for your company. The best way to grow CLV is to encourage customer loyalty and repeat purchases, which will benefit any ecommerce business hoping to grow its sales.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Use a tool such as LoyaltyLion to promote customer loyalty via loyalty programs.
• Increase your average order value (AOV) with cross-sells and upsells.
• Reduce ecommerce churn rate with exceptional customer support.

5) Customer acquisition costs (CAC)

While sometimes overlooked, the amount of money spent on acquiring new customers has to be tracked. If you can reduce your CAC without harming your brand's reach, then your marketing budget will go further, and you will be able to attract even more customers to your store.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Target your marketing efforts to the demographic of customers most likely to purchase your products, defined as your brand's "ideal customer."
• Utilize high ROI marketing tactics such as email marketing.
• Attract more organic traffic to your store via content marketing and SEO.
• Shift your emphasis from marketing to conversion so that the potential customers you target are more likely to convert.

6) Average order value (AOV)

AOV measures how much customers purchase, on average, with each transaction. By improving your store's AOV, you can generate more profit for each customer you attract and transaction that you process, improving your store's profitability.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Present customers with cross-sell and upsell opportunities at checkout.
• Focus your marketing and merchandising efforts on promoting high-value products.
• Offers discounts or promotions to encourage larger orders (i.e., free shipping on orders over $100).

7) Customer retention rate

Customer retention rate is a KPI that tells you how many customers remain loyal to your brand versus the number of customers who leave your brand. When creating consistent revenue for your store, nothing is more important than customer retention.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Utilize Gorgias' intent and sentiment detection features to identify customers who are upset or at risk of leaving your brand.
• Promote customer loyalty with rewards and loyalty programs.
• Prioritize creating an exceptional customer experience.

8) Average profit margin

Average profit margin measures how much you profit, on average, for each item that you sell. While raising the pricing of your products is one way to improve this metric, it comes with the risk of decreased sales. The good news is that this isn't the only way that ecommerce stores can raise their average profit margin.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Use your marketing and ecommerce merchandising efforts to promote products with high profit margins.
• Reduce your costs of goods sold (see the next section for more on this).
• Consider eliminating low-margin products from your inventory.

9) Cost of goods sold (COGS)

COGS is the direct cost of producing or acquiring the goods that your ecommerce store sells. Lowering your COGS can improve the profit margins of the products you sell and ultimately improve your store's profitability.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Eliminate products from your inventory that are not selling well.
• Negotiate with suppliers.
• Reduce waste and inefficiency in your supply chain.

10) CAC/CLV ratio

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are metrics we've discussed already. Combined, though, these metrics can provide a ratio that is arguably one of the most vital for ecommerce stores to track. If your CAC/CLV ratio is greater than one, your customers are spending more than it costs to acquire them, and your store will be profitable. If it's lower than one, you're spending more to acquire new customers than those new customers spend — meaning you're losing money.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Grow CLV by promoting customer loyalty, growing AOV, and utilizing the other tips we've covered for boosting CLV.

Reduce CAC by targeting your marketing efforts, emphasizing conversions, and utilizing the other tips we've covered for reducing CAC.

KPIs to track web and social media performance

Forty-six percent of U.S. customers state that they are willing to pay more for a brand name that they recognize and trust. If you want to boost your store's brand awareness, focus on improving these KPIs.

11) Website traffic

This is the total number of people that visit your ecommerce website during a given time period. Around 53% of your traffic will come from organic search, while the remainder comes from social media, blogs, and referral sources. Your website is the cornerstone of your brand's online presence, so increasing the traffic that it receives is one of the best ways to improve your brand awareness and reach.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Leverage search engine optimization (SEO) to grow organic traffic.
• Direct followers from social media, your blog, or other online profiles to your ecommerce store.
• Invest in paid advertising.

12) Bounce rates

When someone does manage to find your website, you want to keep them there for as long as possible - ideally long enough to learn about your products and make a purchasing decision. However, many of your website visitors will leave or "bounce" after viewing a single page. The rate at which this happens is your website's bounce rate, and you should strive to keep your bounce rate as low as possible.

Home page bounce rate

The home page is the page of your website that most visitors will discover first, making it vital to create a homepage that will capture their attention and encourage them to explore your website further.

Product page bounce rate

If you have a high bounce rate on your product pages, it could indicate that your product descriptions or product images are lacking.

Category page bounce rate

A high bounce rate here could indicate that your category pages are not well-organized and that your ecommerce merchandising strategy (defined as how products are organized and displayed within your store) might need improvements.

Search results page bounce rate

If your ecommerce store includes a search bar that enables customers to search for products, then a high bounce rate on your search results page could indicate that your store's search functionality is not up to par.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Ensure that your web pages are fast-loading and function properly.
• Populate your web pages with eye-catching images and compelling content.
• Engage website visitors with proactive customer service.

13) Mobile traffic

In addition to overall traffic, you need to monitor your mobile traffic closely. That’s because a large chunk of your traffic will come from mobile devices and perhaps a majority of conversions on your website; nearly 60.28% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Ensure that your ecommerce website is optimized for mobile devices.
• Consider offering an app version of your online store where customers can shop in-app.

14) Social followers

One of the best ways to improve brand awareness is to grow your brand's social media reach. Today, more customers than ever are using social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram to discover new products and brands. By developing a large audience of social followers, you can make your brand and products more discoverable.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Publish engaging social media posts that your audience will actually enjoy.
• Expand your brand's social media reach with influencer marketing
• Use photos and videos in your posts to make them more eye-catching.
• Invest in social media ads that are designed to grow your social following.

15) Click-through-rate (CTR)

Mainly used to measure the effectiveness of paid advertisements, CTR shows you the ratio of clicks to impressions in your ad campaign. For Google Ads, the average CTR is roughly 4-6%. Anything above that is considered great. By improving the CTR of your advertising campaigns, you can direct more traffic to your site and improve brand awareness.

Email marketing CTR

CTR in email marketing is the number of customers who click the links in your marketing emails. This is often one of the most valuable CTRs for stores to improve since email clicks won't typically cost you anything (unlike PPC ad clicks).

Social media CTR

Social media CTR is the rate at which customers click on the links in your social media posts. These are likewise "free clicks" and should be promoted as much as possible with high-quality social posts and compelling CTAs.

Paid advertising CTR

Paid advertising CTR is the rate at which people click on the paid ads that you publish. In most cases, you will be charged for each one of these clicks, making it especially important to target paid ads only to the demographic of customers most likely to convert.

Landing page CTR

Landing page CTR is the rate at which visitors who have been directed to one of your landing pages click on the links it contains. These could be links to your product pages or links to some other page or piece of content in your sales funnel.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Target your ads and marketing efforts to potential customers who fit your ideal customer profile.
• Create well-polished ads that feature compelling CTAs.
• Use high-quality images and or other visuals to capture attention.

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KPIs to track customer satisfaction & support performance

For as much value as positive reviews offer to ecommerce brands, negative reviews can do even more harm. If you would like to boost customer satisfaction and start generating more positive reviews, here are the top KPIs to track and improve:

16) Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

Poor reviews and low customer satisfaction go hand in hand. CSAT is a vital metric to track and improve if your store is receiving a lot of negative reviews. CSAT is most often measured using targeted CSAT surveys that ask customers to rate their satisfaction following a customer support interaction.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Gather customer feedback to identify the issues that are harming customer satisfaction.
• Make sure that your support team is equipped with the right tools and training to offer exceptional customer support.

‎‎17) Net promoter score (NPS)

NPS showcases how likely customers are to recommend your brand to their friends, family, and colleagues. Like CSAT, NPS is most commonly measured via customer feedback surveys that ask customers to rate their willingness to recommend your brand on a scale of 1-10.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Prioritize improvements to the customer experience.
• Utilize customer feedback to identify issues that are harming NPS.

18) First response time (FRT)

When customers have a question for your customer support team, they expect it to be answered as quickly as possible. FRT is a measure of how long it takes your support team to initially respond to customer support tickets and is one of the most important customer support metrics to track. While what constitutes an acceptable FRT varies from channel to channel (for example, customers will have much more patience waiting for an email response than waiting on hold on the phone), having an average FRT higher than industry benchmarks creates the risk of dissatisfied customers.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Use a helpdesk such as Gorgias to ensure support reps can efficiently respond to tickets.
• Create automated responses to common customer questions for instant responses and resolutions.
• Offer live chat support.

‎19) Resolution time

While FRT is a measure of how long it takes you to first respond to customer queries, resolution time is a measure of how long it takes, on average, to actually resolve a customer's issue. Swift responses and resolutions are equally important when boosting customer satisfaction. This means you'll want to optimize your customer support services to resolve customer issues as quickly as possible.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Use automation features such as Gorgias Quick Answer Flows to immediately resolve common customer questions like "where is my order?"
• Offer customers self-service options.
• Prioritize customer support tickets so that more complex/important tickets receive your team's attention first.

20) Active problems (shipping delays, faulty products, etc.)

Last but not least, you need to know how many problems have been solved during a particular period of time. Whenever there are many unsolved problems, satisfaction rates take a dive. Any active customer issues that have not been addressed should be resolved as swiftly as possible to ensure customer satisfaction.

How Gorgias can help

If your support team is struggling to keep up with your store's active issues, there are numerous ways that Gorgias' industry-leading helpdesk can assist. By both deflecting support tickets via automation and self-service options as well as improving the efficiency of your support team via a broad range of helpful tools, Gorgias empowers improved FRT and resolution times and helps your team stay on top of active problems.

KPIs for ecommerce businesses whose profitability ebbs and flows

Every ecommerce store experiences some degree of ebbs and flows in profitability. However, your goal should be to create a business that brings in a consistent and reliable revenue stream. When it comes to keeping a store profitable on a consistent basis, these are the most important metrics to track and improve:

21) Average order value (AOV)

AOV measures how much customers purchase, on average, with each transaction. By improving your store's AOV, you can generate more profit for each customer you attract and transaction that you process, improving your store's profitability.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Present customers with cross-sell and upsell opportunities at checkout.
• Focus your marketing and merchandising efforts on promoting high-value products.
• Offers discounts or promotions to encourage larger orders (i.e., free shipping on orders over $100).

22) Customer retention rate

Customer retention rate is a KPI that tells you how many customers remain loyal to your brand versus the number of customers who leave your brand. When creating consistent revenue for your store, nothing is more important than customer retention.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Utilize Gorgias' intent and sentiment detection features to identify customers who are upset or at risk of leaving your brand.
• Promote customer loyalty with rewards and loyalty programs.
• Prioritize creating an exceptional customer experience.

23) Average profit margin

Average profit margin measures how much you profit, on average, for each item that you sell. While raising the pricing of your products is one way to improve this metric, it comes with the risk of decreased sales. The good news is that this isn't the only way that ecommerce stores can raise their average profit margin.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Use your marketing and ecommerce merchandising efforts to promote products with high profit margins.
• Reduce your costs of goods sold (see the next section for more on this).
• Consider eliminating low-margin products from your inventory.

24) Cost of goods sold (COGS)

COGS is the direct cost of producing or acquiring the goods that your ecommerce store sells. Lowering your COGS can improve the profit margins of the products you sell and ultimately improve your store's profitability.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Eliminate products from your inventory that are not selling well.
• Negotiate with suppliers.
• Reduce waste and inefficiency in your supply chain.

25) CAC/CLV ratio

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV) are metrics we've discussed already. Combined, though, these metrics can provide a ratio that is arguably one of the most vital for ecommerce stores to track. If your CAC/CLV ratio is greater than one, your customers are spending more than it costs to acquire them, and your store will be profitable. If it's lower than one, you're spending more to acquire new customers than those new customers spend — meaning you're losing money.

Tips to improve this KPI:

• Grow CLV by promoting customer loyalty, growing AOV, and utilizing the other tips we've covered for boosting CLV.

Reduce CAC by targeting your marketing efforts, emphasizing conversions, and utilizing the other tips we've covered for reducing CAC.

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Creating a unique and satisfying customer experience is a crucial objective for brands across all industries. You’re probably already aware that most customers (95%, according to a Microsoft study) rank customer experience as important when it comes to brand choice and brand loyalty.

Most brands rely on customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) as the go-to metric for evaluating the customer experience. However, the problem with CSAT is that it's a lagging indicator of customer sentiment. Customers give you a CSAT score after an interaction. So, if your CSAT is low, you've likely already frustrated a new or loyal customer by the time you realize there is a problem.

Thankfully, tracking additional customer satisfaction metrics can go a long way toward filling the gap and ensuring that you can keep a finger on the pulse of your customer base. Below, we'll explore the best customer satisfaction metrics to track so that you can optimize your customer support services and overall customer journey — before your customer loyalty takes a hit.

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12 customer satisfaction metrics to better understand sentiment

Along with CSAT and NPS, you can use numerous other metrics to gauge customer satisfaction. If you want to create a holistic picture of how happy customers are with your brand to inform your customer service management efforts, here are the 12 metrics that you should track and analyze.

1) Customer effort score (CES)

CES tells you how much effort your customers have to put in to get answers to their questions or resolve their support issues. 

By tracking this metric, you can identify high-effort customer experiences like long wait times when customers contact your call center or confusing responses from your support team. This gives you a great starting point so that you can address these obstacles that are inevitably harming customer satisfaction.

Customer effort is an extremely important indicator for the quality brand’s customer experience. Plus, it’s directly connected to your bottom line. 96% of high-effort experience drive customer disloyalty, according to The Effortless Experience. 

Formula for calculating CES

To measure CES, you will need to send customers CES surveys. These surveys ask customers to rate on a scale of one to ten how much effort they had to exert to get an answer to their question. To calculate your overall CES score, you will need to divide the total sum of all responses by the total number of all responses. 

CES = Total sum of responses / Total number of responses

2) Customer health score (CHS)

CHS is a metric largely employed by customer success teams to determine whether a customer is "healthy" or "at risk." 

This enables customer success teams to identify customers who are at risk of leaving the company so that you can make efforts to retain them. 

Unlike other customer satisfaction metrics, this metric is measured on a customer-by-customer basis rather than the average score of your entire customer base. This enables brands to utilize CHS to boost customer retention one customer at a time.

Formula for calculating CHS

There is no set formula for calculating CHS, and brands utilize a broad range of criteria to evaluate the health of individual customers. These criteria can also vary dramatically from industry to industry and even company to company. 

But for ecommerce stores, here are a few important factors to consider when determining whether a customer is healthy or at risk: 

• Customer survey results
• Contact rate with your support team
• Number of closed and open support tickets
• Social media involvement
• Email engagement rate

Especially for larger brands, we recommend creating a standard formula to measure customer health, and periodically measuring each customer (especially VIP customers) to proactively prevent customer churn. 

3) Customer lifetime value (CLTV)

The primary point of reducing churn and improving customer loyalty is to increase your average customer lifetime value. 

Attracting new customers is difficult and expensive, and when you succeed at bringing a new customer into the fold, you want them to spend as much money with your brand as possible. 

Lifetime value can indicate customer satisfaction because satisfied customers tend to spend more with companies they’re satisfied with. Continued spending and repeat purchases are a surer sign on satisfaction than any star rating could provide. 

Formula for calculating CLTV

CLTV =  Average purchase value x Average purchase frequency x Average customer lifespan

4) Customer churn rate (CCR)

Customer churn rate is the rate at which customers leave your company. For subscription-based online businesses, ecommerce churn rate is the rate at which people cancel subscriptions. For non-subscription-based companies, you can define churn as shoppers who fail to place a repeat order within some time frame (likely between one and six months, depending on your products and industry).

If your churn rate exceeds industry benchmarks, it almost certainly spells issues with your customer experience. 

Reducing churn goes hand in hand with improving customer loyalty (and thus boosting revenue via higher customer lifetime values). If you can keep a handle on churn rate, you’ll have concrete evidence about how customer satisfaction is impacting your repeat business.

Formula for calculating CCR

CCR is calculated over a specific period. To calculate your churn rate for a given period of time, you can use this formula: 

CCR  = (Number of customers at the beginning of the time period - Number of customers at the end of the time period) / Number of customers at the beginning of the time period

5) Internal quality score (IQS)

IQS measures the quality of each of your support team's tickets, according to your own internal standards. For instance, you may define a good ticket as a ticket that resolves the customer's issues, reflects your brand voice and values, and is responded to promptly. A bad ticket might be any ticket that falls short of these standards.

If you’re like most brand, your IQS will revolve around four main elements:

• Speed: Did the agent respond within the terms of your service-level agreement (SLA)?
• Correctness: Did the agent’s response adhere to your company’s relevant policies?
• Helpfulness: Did the agent full address the customer’s question (and practice forward resolution)?
• Friendliness: Did the agent maintain a positive tone and use the powerful phrases that adhere to your company’s style guide?

With an IQS, you can proactively identify where your customer support agents are currently improving satisfaction (or degrading it). 

Formula for calculating IQS

We don’t have a clear calculation for IQS because each brand’s is different. However, we recommend using a simple rubric, where a ticket gets a point for meeting each item on the rubric. 

This way, you can simply compare the quality of each ticket (or the average quality of each agent’s tickets). You’ll also get valuable information about the missing elements of each ticket, which can inform your customer service training.

6) First response time (FRT)

One thing that is sure to generate a lot of unhappy customers is making them wait a long time for answers to their questions. 90% of customers rate an immediate response as "important" or "very important" when they have a customer service question. 

Therefore, attempting to reduce your FRT is one of the first steps to take on the road to optimizing customer satisfaction. This starts with tracking your average FRT and comparing it against industry benchmarks.

Formula for calculating FRT

Depending on your helpdesk, you may never need to manually calculate first-reply time. For example, with Gorgias, you get first-response time broken down by agent, time period, ticket type, and more:

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To calculate your support team's average FRT, you can use this formula: 

FRT = Total first response times during the time period / Total number of resolved tickets during the time period 

📚Recommended reading: 7 tips to improve your customer service response times. 

7) Resolution time

It's important to respond to customer support tickets as fast as possible, but not all tickets can be resolved in a single response. 

While customers who have received an initial response to their ticket tend to have a little more patience when waiting for a resolution, that patience will only stretch so far. This makes it important to calculate and improve your average resolution time and FRT.

Formula for calculating resolution time

Just like first-response time, average resolution time isn’t normally something brands should spend time calculating. That’s why Gorgias users can see resolution time broken down by agent, time period, ticket type, and more:

Average resolution time = Total resolution times during the time period / Total number of resolved tickets during the time period 

8) First-contact resolution

While it's true that you can't resolve every ticket with a single response, it's still a great objective for support teams to strive for. Resolving a customer's issue in a single response typically means that the customer received swift and satisfactory assistance that required minimal effort on their part. Therefore, working to boost your first-contact resolution rate is sure to improve customer satisfaction.

Formula for calculating first-contact resolution

To get an accurate evaluation of your first-contact resolution rate, you should only consider tickets that are possible to resolve in a single response. Once you've identified the criteria for tickets that are FCR-eligible, you can use this formula to calculate your FCR rate: 

FCR = Number of support issues resolved on first contact / Total number of FCR-eligible support tickets

9) Self-service resolution rate

Enabling customers to resolve issues on their own without needing to contact your support team offers numerous benefits — like reducing agent workload and freeing them up to focus on more complex tickets. 

Additionally, it provides customers with helpful self-service options, which improves customer satisfaction by ensuring that customers can quickly find the answers they need. 

But to evaluate how effective your self-service options actually are, you'll need to track your self-service resolution rate. This metric tells you the rate at which customers can resolve issues on their own and can be used to gauge and improve the quality of your self-service resources, like your FAQ pages and Help Center.

Formula for calculating self-service resolution rate

Depending on your helpdesk, you may never need to manually calculate self-service resolution rate. With Gorgias, for example, you get detailed information about the usage of self-service resources on your site:

That said, you can calculate your self-service resolution rate using this formula: 

Self-service resolution rate = Number of sessions that customers initiate with your brand's knowledge base or other self-help resources / Number of support tickets your support team handles over the same period of time

📚Interested in helping your customers help themselves for a low-effort experience? Check out our VP of Success's guide to customer self-service.

10) Support performance score

Support performance score (created by Gorgias) is a metric that encapsulates the three most important elements of great customer service: speed, helpfulness, and customer satisfaction. 

To achieve this, the support performance score combines average first response time, average resolution time, and CSAT into a score that is on a scale of 1-5. 

Tracking this metric provides support teams with a comprehensive overview of their performance quality.

Formula for calculating support performance score

Support performance score is calculated using a series of FRT, CSAT, and resolution time thresholds. To reach the next rating level, you must meet each category's threshold. Here is an example of what these thresholds look like for FRT:

• Level 1 (poor): 13+ hours
• Level 2 (lagging): 12 hours
• Level 3 (fair): 6 hours
• Level 4 (strong): 1 hour
• Level 5 (exceptional) 10 minutes

11) Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is the go-to customer support metric to understand customer sentiment around your brand and customer experience. Don’t get us wrong: We believe CSAT is one of the most important metrics. However, CSAT only gets measured after customers have a good or bad experience, making it a lagging indicator of customer sentiment.  

You can determine your CSAT score using customer satisfaction surveys. The survey questions should ask customers to rate their satisfaction with your company by choosing from one of four responses: very unsatisfied, unsatisfied, neutral, satisfied, and very satisfied. 

The ratio of customers who were either satisfied or very satisfied compared to the total number of customers who were unsatisfied or very unsatisfied is your brand's CSAT score.

While CSAT is certainly an important metric for ecommerce brands to measure and utilize, it isn't the end-all, be-all of tracking customer satisfaction. Brands that only track CSAT can encounter several limitations that can make it difficult to turn customer satisfaction results into business growth.

12) Net promoter score (NPS)

Net promoter score (NPS) is a metric that tells you how likely customers are to recommend your brand to friends, family members, and colleagues. If you want to improve your word-of-mouth advertising and start generating more referrals, NPS is the metric you will need to optimize.

Your NPS score can also provide insight into the overall satisfaction of your customer base. 

For one, NPS isn't quite as subjective and one-dimensional as CSAT, since it asks customers to rate their willingness to recommend your company on a scale of 0-10 rather than asking them a single question about their satisfaction. 

NPS is also more a measure of a customer's long-term satisfaction with your company, while CSAT surveys typically gauge a customer's short-term satisfaction with your product or service.

How to calculate NPS

NPS surveys gather feedback on how likely customers are to recommend your brand on a scale of 0-10. Customers who rate you at 0-6 are considered detractors; customers who rate 7-8 are passives, and customers who rate 9-10 are your promoters. 

To calculate NPS, you will need to calculate your promoters and detractors as percentages of your total number of survey responses. Then, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. 

So, if you got 100 responses with 40 promoters and 30 detractors (the rest being passives), here's what your calculation would look like:

NPS = 40% promoters - 30% detractors

NPS = 10

Why CSAT isn't the only metric you need to measure customer satisfaction

‍CSAT is a vital benchmark for analyzing your brand's number of satisfied customers. However, here are the three most important reasons why CSAT alone is not enough:

CSAT is a lagging indicator

We've already mentioned that the CSAT score doesn't indicate an issue with the overall experience at your company until it's already too late, when you've already provided a poor experience to customers. 

This is an especially pressing issue when you consider that nearly a quarter of customers will switch to a competitor after a bad experience. Their CSAT results can help you improve the experience for future customers — but ideally, you don’t have to lose customers to get this information. 

Ideally, your set of metrics to understand customer satisfaction include ones that don't require angry customers to tell you that your customer experience could be improved.

CSAT is one-dimensional

CSAT tells you the ratio of customers who are satisfied with your brand compared to the number of unhappy customers, but it doesn't tell you anything about why your customer satisfaction levels are what they are.

Most CSAT surveys have a comment box, but customers rarely take the time to fill these out — especially with any meaningful level of detail. 

A more well-rounded collection of metrics will help you better pinpoint the reason for high or low satisfaction, without solely depending on an optional comment box. 

CSAT is subjective

Asking customers a single question about whether they are satisfied with their experience will yield highly subjective responses. 

For instance, a specific issue might cause one customer to state they are "very unsatisfied," while the same issue might prompt another customer to respond with "neutral." 

Plus, customers may complete the survey while annoyed, emotional, or tired — all of which could inflate (or minimze) the importance of an issue, skewing the insights. 

For these reasons, CSAT offers the most value when used in tandem with other important customer satisfaction metrics — and the first of these important metrics is net promoter score (NPS).

How to improve customer satisfaction by collecting (and using) customer feedback

Metrics such as CSAT, NPS, and CES are all forms of customer feedback that ecommerce merchants can use to improve customer satisfaction. But along with tracking these metrics, gathering more in-depth customer feedback can be highly helpful for informing your customer satisfaction efforts.

A few of the ways that ecommerce brands can go about collecting and utilizing valuable customer feedback include:

• Audit low-scoring tickets to look for themes.
• Reach out to low-scoring customers for in-depth feedback.
• Reduce ticket volume with automation and self-service to free agents to solve complex tickets.
• Activate instant messaging channels like SMS and live chat.

📚Recommended reading: Our Director of Support’s guide to implementing customer feedback into your product and customer experience. 

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Analyze customer satisfaction from all angles with Gorgias' dashboards

There are numerous metrics that support teams need to track to evaluate and improve customer satisfaction. Thankfully, Gorgias' best-in-class customer support platform makes tracking these metrics easier than ever before. With Gorgias' dashboards, you can:

• Automatically track key support performance metrics such as FTR and resolution rate
• Access revenue statistics to see how customer support is impacting your company's bottom line
• Live statistics that allow you to monitor agent performance in real-time
• Send customers automated customer satisfaction surveys

To get started utilizing these powerful tools to track and improve customer satisfaction, sign up for Gorgias today!

We reviewed 300 Shopify store owners and discovered that 50% used website pop-ups as their preferred customer engagement tool. This isn’t surprising since pop-ups can yield a conversion rate of between 3% and 11%, compared to the standard rate of around 2%.

But using pop-ups to get more conversions for your website requires more than just slapping a newsletter email signup pop-up window on your website. In fact, poor use of pop-ups can drive customers away.

High-converting pop-ups are built on some of the best apps and tick all the boxes on our pop-up checklist. Below, we’ll dive deeper into this checklist and provide you with our top picks for pop-up app software.

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11 ecommerce pop-up types and examples

If you spend any time on the internet, you’ve likely encountered a pop-up campaign at some point. You may have even seen one on your journey to this page! 

Pop-ups have come a long way over the last decade. Whereas they used to be aggressive annoyances, they are now significantly subtler and operate as invaluable sales and marketing tools. 

Here are some of the most popular types of pop-ups to consider using for your store with ecommerce pop-up examples for each.

📚 Read more: 13 Ecommerce Growth Tactics to Boost Revenue

1) Sign-up form pop-ups

Depending on your current digital marketing strategy, sign-ups can be useful for a number of goals. You can invite visitors to sign up for a newsletter, register for an event, or receive an exclusive discount. 

This lets you collect valuable customer information like email addresses and phone numbers that can be used for marketing efforts.

Offering something like a discount in exchange for an email subscription sign up is known as a “lead magnet.”

Example of a sign-up form pop-up

When customers visit swimwear brand Kulani Kinis ecommerce store, the first pop-up they see is a sign-up form. It also includes an enticing offer of a discount on a customer’s first order. And it’s all done with cute graphics that match Kulani Kinis’ branding.

Also note that the pop-up includes a line that says “By signing up you agree to receive email marketing.” This is required to comply with email marketing laws.

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2) Special offers and discounts

Those glossy pop-ups that appear and, for example, offer free shipping for orders over $xx or highlight a sale. 

These can be tailored to just about any offering your ecommerce brand wants to promote, and can even be turned into a game to attract more interest. 

Spin-the-wheel pop-ups that allow customers to “spin” to unlock their discount percentage is a fun way to interact with customers, and many enjoy the gamified experience.

You could also offer a post-purchase discount by offering one in exchange for a customer review on social media.

Example of an offer or discount pop-up

When shoppers visit Bagallery, they’re greeted by a large pop-up promoting an up to 60% discount and a link to “shop now.”

3) Exit pop-ups

If you’ve ever visited an ecommerce store and moved your mouse to navigate to another tab, you may have seen one of these pop-ups. 

Exit pop-ups trigger when customers try to leave your website or have left the tab idling and are a great way to grab a customer’s attention and convince them to go to checkout.

It’s smart to offer an incentive to stay, like a discount code if they follow through on the purchase. The goal here is to reduce cart abandonment.

Example of an exit pop-up

This is the pop-up that appears on Princess Polly, a women’s apparel ecommerce store.

It’s triggered when a potential customer has added items to their shopping cart but left them sitting. The pop-up entices those customers with 10% off if they follow through with the purchase.

4) Seasonal pop-ups

Around seasonal shopping holidays, you may have targeted products or categories you’re looking to highlight to customers.

A pop-up can be a great way to draw attention to those products. A great example would be gift sets or stocking stuffer ideas during the Christmas season, or spooky items around Halloween. This pop-up type helps customers find what they need faster.

These can also create a sense of urgency by promoting a limited-time deal that coincides with a holiday.

Example of a seasonal pop-up

Here’s an example from skincare brand Absolute Collagen. It appears once the customer has scrolled down the main landing page a bit and reminds them that the “countdown to Christmas is on.”

Clicking through brings customers to Absolute Collagen’s curated gift sets, which is exactly what a customer might be looking for just before Christmas.

5) Upsell pop-ups

Upsell pop-ups suggest additional products a customer may want to add to their cart based on what they’ve already added. It typically pop ups right after an item has been added to the cart.

It’s important that these pop-ups are related to what customers have already been shopping for. It just doesn’t make sense, for example, to suggest purchasing a piece of cookware to someone who just bought a beauty product.

Product value also plays a role. If someone has just added a $25 product to their cart, it’s unlikely you can upsell them on a $100 product. The upsell product should be a cheaper product related to their original product choice.

Example of an upsell pop-up

Uqora is an ecommerce store that sells over-the-counter products for urinary health, targeted at women.

After adding their “Flush” product, shoppers get a pop-up suggesting their pH-balanced vulva cleanser for $10. This is a great example because the upsell product is inexpensive and targets site visitors already showing interest in health products.

📚 Read more: 11 Best Practices for Ecommerce Upselling

6) Chat campaigns

An unobtrusive chat pop-up tells shoppers that customer service is ready and waiting for their questions or concerns.

We’ll dig more into chat pop-ups later on, but they can be used for more than just offering help. They can be a spot to offer discounts, promote sales or products, or act as a personal stylist.

Example of a chat pop-up

Jewelry brand Jaxxon uses a chat pop-up to offer customer service as well as styling advice.

Powered by Gorgias, Jaxxon’s chat pop-up appears subtly in the bottom right corner of premium product pages, offering unique styling services. This is just one example of how you can use chat campaigns to spark conversation and increase conversions:

7) New arrivals pop-ups

When you launch a new product, a pop-up is a great way to get some eyeballs on it. 

These pop-ups are especially important for your loyal, returning visitors to show them something new and exciting.

Example of a new product pop-up

This is a pop-up that appears on the homepage of Lillie Q, a BBQ sauce brand. It highlights their new tender sauces and also includes a button to see other new releases.

8) Local currency redirect pop-ups

Customers will always prefer to shop in their local currency, if available. According to Shopify, 17% of shoppers will abandon a cart if they can’t determine the total cost up front. Having to convert currencies makes it more difficult to determine that cost.

If your ecommerce store is equipped to offer local currency prices, or has multiple sites to offer a localized experience, a pop-up can redirect international customers. 

Example of a local currency redirect pop-up

Crossnet is a sports equipment ecommerce store based in the US. However, when a customer visits from Canada they get a pop-up directing them to shop from the Canadian store in Canadian dollars.

This pop-up appears as soon as a Canadian customer visits, so their entire shopping experience can be in local currency.

📚 Read more: Reduce and Recover Shopify Cart Abandonment: 17 Tips & Tools

9) Loyalty program pop-ups

If you have an active loyalty program for your ecommerce store that earns customers points or other perks, a pop-up can prompt them to sign up.

Having a loyalty pop-up come up early tells customers before they even make a purchase that they’ll earn something when they do convert. This is another opportunity to capture email subscribers for email marketing campaigns.

Example of a loyalty program pop-up

Campus Protein is a supplement ecommerce store targeted at college students. When first visiting the site, a pop-up appears in the bottom left corner prompting new visitors to join their loyalty program and “unlock rewards.”

Clicking through takes customers to a page to create an account on the site and start earning Campus Protein points.

10) Giveaway pop-ups

A giveaway or other offer can pull double duty. First, they entice customers to stay on the site, similar to an exit pop-up. They’re also another way to collect information such as emails.

These are best employed after a potential customer has already been on the site for some time, as a way to keep them browsing.

Example of a giveaway pop-up

This is an example from Darn Good Yarn, an ecommerce store that specializes in ethically-sourced fiber.

It triggers when the site senses a potential customer is going to leave and offers a chance to win a $250 gift card. Not only is the offer enticing, but it’s an opportunity to collect emails for marketing.

11) Bundle pop-ups

This is a type of upsell that recommends bundling an item added to a customer’s cart with other products to create a discounted bundle. This is useful if you have products that can be worn or used together.

It’s an opportunity to add another product to a customer’s cart but also give a styling or utilization recommendation. It’s also a more customized type of pop-up because the product recommendation is directly related to something the customer already wants to purchase.

Example of a bundle pop-up

On the Jaxxon website, there are products in similar styles that look great when worn together.

In this case, when a customer adds the Cuban Link Bracelet to their cart, the pop-up recommends upgrading to the Cuban Essentials Set, which includes a matching necklace, at a discounted price.

Risks of pop-ups in ecommerce

Pop-ups have a ton of uses and are a proven conversion tool, so the temptation is there to use them as much as possible. However, that would be a huge mistake.

Pop-ups are only useful if they’re used smartly, sparingly, and with purpose.

The short-term conversion win will be harmed if they’re overused, hurting:

• Brand image
• Repeat business and loyalty
• Site performance

It’s vital that your pop-up choices do more harm than good so here are some of the risks of employing a pop-up strategy.

Pop-ups annoy customers

This might seem obvious but it can’t be understated: Customers simply aren’t fans of pop-ups. There’s a reason ad and pop-up blockers are popular browser add-ons.

Even with your best intentions, pop-ups interrupt the shopping experience. If a customer came to your ecommerce website looking for a particular product or just to browse, their first choice is not to have that experience intruded upon by a pop-up.

G2 conducted a poll and found that an overwhelming 82% of customers said they “hate” pop-ups asking with an email capture. In particular, 45.6% said they dislike how pop-ups seem to be “everywhere” and 28.6% disliked how they appear right away.

While 72% said there was nothing that makes pop-ups better, 11.9% said a discount offer helps reduce their displeasure.

Pop-ups can harm load speed

Adding pop-ups to your ecommerce site usually means adding additional apps or other tech, which can impact how quickly your site loads. Each additional pop-up can mean a slower load speed and higher bounce rate.

Load speed is a vital part of your ecommerce website. Data from Portent shows that conversion rates are highest at a 1-second load time and drop from there. Ecommerce retailers should aim for a load time of between 1 and 4 seconds, more than that seriously hurts conversion. 

Plus, according to Unbounce, 45.4% of shoppers are less likely to make a purchase if the site loads slowly, and 36.8% are less likely to return to that ecommerce store. 

Pop-ups can hurt your SEO strategy

Customers aren’t too fond of pop-ups, and neither is Google.

Since at least 2016, Google has been penalizing the most intrusive types of pop-ups, especially for users on mobile. In particular, Google doesn’t like pop-ups that appear right away and fill the whole screen and need to be closed before the website can be accessed.

That doesn’t mean pop-ups are a complete no-go. You can appease Google by:

• Disabling pop-ups on mobile
• Having a delay before pop-ups appear
• Keep pop-ups small an unobtrusive
• Disable pop-ups for customers coming in through Google search results

📚 Recommended reading: Our guide to Shopify search engine optimization (SEO).

Pop-ups can overlap

If a single pop-up can turn off a potential customer, several overlapping pop-ups is much worse.

In addition to the load time issues, competing pop-ups is just a bad user experience. There are more pop-ups than ever now when you consider prompts to accept cookies or other privacy provisions and browser pop-ups like requests to allow notifications.

This is compounded when a customer is on mobile, because there’s even less space and a higher likelihood of overlap.

Be mindful of what pop-ups are showing up by default and time pop-ups so only one is appearing at any one time.

Ecommerce pop-up best practices checklist

At the most basic level, a pop-up provides a call-to-action that entices potential customers. The right type of pop-up can increase your ecommerce store’s conversion rate, but this is only possible if you check off all six items on the checklist below.

1) Entice buyers with a value add

The offer you present in your pop-up should be useful to your target buyers. But the only way for you to create the right offer is to truly get to know who your buyers are and what interests them.

Say you create a pop-up to collect email addresses from web visitors. If the pop-up doesn’t have an incentive, there’s no “what’s in it for me?” for the target buyer.

We’d recommend modifying pop-up to present the buyer with a chance to win something. Providing a clearer incentive for customers is a much better way to improve the conversion rate of your pop-up.

📚 Read more: Ecommerce CRO: Increase Conversion Rate with A/B Testing and Optimization

2) Keep pop-ups short and sweet (like these pop-up examples)

The wording of your pop-up copy depends on both your offer and the type of pop-up you‘re using (exit pop-up, sales pop-up, discount pop-up, etc.). Regardless of the type of pop-up you use, it should follow what we call the SIP rule: short, impactful, and precise.

Here’s a fun example from United By Blue, a Shopify store that sells clothing and accessories. The pop-up is a wheel you can spin to get a special offer.

We received a 15% off offer after spinning the wheel, but take a closer look at the wording on this pop-up.

The headline makes the offer clear:

• The website visitor can then choose men’s clothing, women’s clothing, or both. Giving website visitors this choice helps with audience segmentation so that future offers are relevant to the user.

• There’s a prompt to input an email address which is followed by a clear CTA that once again reminds the website visitor of the precise offer.

Here’s another example from BLK & Bold, a Shopify store that sells specialty coffee.

• The headline clearly states the value of the offer — a 15% discount on the buyer’s first order.
• The short text that follows further explains the value of signing up for their email list — the buyer will receive exclusive offers via email.

Short. Impactful. Precise.

Note: Your pop-ups should always provide a clear option for people to opt in to receive newsletters and promotional emails from your brand. Otherwise, you run the risk of breaching data protection laws such as the GDPR.

3) Create a compelling image

The team at Drip analyzed over 1 billion pop-ups and discovered that pop-ups with images convert better than pop-ups without images by 83.57%. Images used for online store pop-ups should either showcase the brand’s products in an interesting way or paint a picture of what the website visitor wants to achieve after using the product.

Let’s look at an example from Fresh Heritage, a Shopify store that sells grooming products and supplements.

The image used here features a man with a well-groomed beard — something Fresh Heritage's customers would want to achieve for themselves.

Here’s another example of creative use of imagery:

Here, Mavi uses a pop-up bar with a visual that stands out and provides depth.

The bottom line is that relevant images make your pop-ups stand out more and entice potential buyers to sign up for your offer.

4) Time your pop-up so that it isn’t intrusive

The same Drip study referenced above finds that pop-ups that display after eight seconds convert better than those that display before or after. However, remember that the timing of the pop-up itself won’t necessarily boost conversions for your ecommerce store — that largely depends on how well you can check off the boxes on this list.

There are also pop-ups that appear based on scroll triggers. The Drip study reveals that using 35% of a page as a scroll trigger works best for increasing conversion rates.

You can use the suggestions that the Drip study provides as your baseline, but conversion rates depend heavily on the nuances of your brand and the customers you serve. It’s best to do A/B testing so that you can optimize your pop-ups based on what works for your business.

5) Make sure your pop-up works well on mobile

Pop-ups convert better on mobile devices than they do on desktop devices. In a study conducted by OptiMonk, the average conversion rate for desktop pop-ups was 9.69% while the average conversion rate for mobile pop-ups was 11.07%. But there’s a catch: Mobile pop-ups only convert well when they’re optimized for use on those devices.

Here are some tips to optimize your pop-ups for mobile devices:

• Ensure the pop-up doesn’t cover more than 30% of the page.
• Use only one or two pop-up form fields.
• Use the best types of pop-ups for mobile devices. Three of the best options are the floating pop-up, slidebox pop-up, and featured pop-up.
• Make it easy for the website visitor to close the pop-up.
• Ensure the CTA button and exit button are easy to click.
• Limit image sizes to less than 100KB (or don’t use images at all).

Here’s an example of a mobile-friendly pop-up from Romwe that incorporates these principles:

6) Create different pop-ups for different actions and events

Don’t limit yourself to one type of pop-up. It’s best to strategically use pop-ups throughout your website so that you can better capture your website visitors’ data. A typical shopping experience includes multiple opportunities to display pop-ups. Here are a few examples:

• Display a simple email bar on the homepage.
• Create a specific exit-intent pop-up for visitors exiting a product page that offers a discount.
• Create a pop-up that appears only on out-of-stock items to encourage your visitors to subscribe to your restock alerts.
• Create a cart abandonment pop-up on the cart page.

Here’s an example of this strategy in action on the Christy Dawn website. Notice that the website displays an email bar on the first page a visitor views.

original And if this visitor doesn’t subscribe, the store displays this complementary pop-up (you’ll notice the different wording) on out-of-stock product pages.

Note: Be sure not to display pop-ups on every page of your website. This creates an intrusive experience for website visitors — and that‘s something that search engines will penalize you for.

Related: Learn how to climb search results with our Shopify SEO guide

The 7 best Shopify pop-up apps

The pop-up checklist described above is only as good as the app used to create the pop-ups. Here are our picks for some of the best pop-up builder apps on the market to add to your ecommerce tech stack — all available in the Shopify app store.

1) SmartPopup: Promotion Popup

SmartPopup is a user-friendly pop-up builder designed to help ecommerce store owners connect with website visitors, contribute to lead generation, and increase sales. The tool has a great collection of prebuilt pop-up templates that make the setup process easy: newsletters, videos, coupon codes, product-specific, countdown timers, and automatic discounts.

Pros

• Offers a truly free plan with basic features
• Fast setup
• Customizable for those familiar with code

Cons

• Some reports of problems with the tool’s mobile version
• Free plan features are limited
• Reported issues with late or unhelpful responses from support

2) Pixelpop Popups & Banners

Pixelpop is a tool built by Orbit. Like other email pop-up tools, Pixelpop helps brands collect email addresses from leads so they can be nurtured through your brand’s email marketing campaigns.

Pros

• Pixel Union offers premium customer support
• Easy-to-use promotional bar
• Intuitive and customizable

Cons

• Some reports of slow responses from customer support
• Overly complicated for some users; support needed to use custom themes
• Klaviyo integration doesn’t work for some users

Related: Our list of 150+ of the best tools for ecommerce.

3) Quick Announcement Bar

Quick Announcement Bar is a message bar app that Shopify store owners can use to quickly post announcements on their websites — no coding required. Broadcast a free shipping bar, or a bar that displays important information and special offers.

Pros

• Bars can be set to display only on certain pages, or only to users from specific countries
• Multiple bar rotation allows multiple bars to display every few seconds
• Animated CTA button to grab visitor’s attention
• Multiple language translations available

Cons

• Only one pop-up option (the announcement bar)
• Placement limitations

4) Pop! Sales & Live Activity Pop

Pop! Sales & Live Activity Pop creates automatic sales notification pop-up windows that make your store look busy without obstructing the customer experience. It’s great for building trust with prospects who are on the fence about purchasing a product — seeing that someone else recently purchased something triggers a fear of missing out (FOMO).

Pros

• Shows real-time purchases to help boost conversion rates and social proof
• Customizable designs and advanced CSS in paid plans for easy, consistent branding
• Quick, smooth setup process

Cons

• Not great for new sellers with low traffic (you will be charged if you go over 100 web visitors a month, whether it’s real people or bots)
• Multiple reports of unauthorized charges
• Slow responses from customer support

5) Promolayer

Promolayer doesn’t only offer basic pop-up templates — there’s a full suite of exciting options that will help your website stand out such as banners, spin-to-wins, full screen welcome mats, exit offers, and slide-ins.

Pros

• Easy to customize
• Ability to run A/B tests without affecting Google Optimize data
• Built-in spellchecker to ensure your pop-ups are well represented

Cons

• Reports of some minor glitches, but the main pop-ups work well

6) Email Pop Ups & Exit Popups

Email Pop Ups & Exit Popups by OptiMonk is a pop-up app that focuses on helping Shopify store owners grow and meet their goals. With this app, you can build intuitive and attractive pop-ups for web and mobile that help you convert more visitors and collect quality feedback along the way.

Pros

• Quick and professional customer service
• Over 30 intelligent targeting and triggering options
• A/B testing
• Free version available

Cons

• Hard to customize without a developer, support, or coding experience
• No customization options on spin-the-wheel function
• Somewhat confusing setup process

Pricing

• Free: Free
• Essential: $29/month
• Growth: $79/month
• Premium: $199/month

7) Privy

Privy is an ecommerce marketing platform that helps ecommerce store owners manage their marketing with ease. One of the best features of this platform is that it incorporates both SMS and email marketing.

Pros

• Simple to setup and track SMS marketing
• Easily build automation triggers based on website visitor behavior
• Great for sending messages to customers for abandoned cart recovery

Cons

• Complaints of limited reporting capabilities
• Have to export data to assess how email campaigns are performing
• More complicated than some alternatives; users report a bit of a learning curve
• Not many options for post-purchase emailing

📚 Read more: Our list of the best apps for Shopify merchants.

Chat campaigns: A less intrusive conversion tool

If a pop-up is a perfume counter employee suddenly spraying you with the latest scent, a chat campaign is a clerk tactfully approaching to see if you need any assistance. 

Gorgias’ pop-up chat campaigns are a softer way to interact with customers that don’t feel intrusive the way a full-screen pop-up does. With Gorgias’ chat campaigns , you can reach out to customers to proactively ask for support: “What can I help you with?”

Chat campaigns are a non-intrusive pop-up that appear at the bottom corner of the screen and offer help, rather than a hard sell. Gorgias customers report they can lift revenue by 13% and conversion rates by 25 to 30%.

You can set up chat campaigns that reach out to customers at key moments. For example, if a customer lingers on a product page, you can send them a discount code. If they linger with items in their cart, your chat could remind them that you have free shipping.

How ecommerce chat campaigns work

Chat campaigns can be set to active when a customer visits a particular product page, or when a certain amount of time has lapsed, or both.

When activated, the chat pops up with a message of your choosing, whether that’s an announcement, a discount, or an offer of support. When a customer replies, that’s sent directly to your customer support team in Gorgias’ helpdesk.

Chat campaigns are easy to set up in Gorgias by navigating to Settings, then Integrations, and clicking Chat. Adding a new campaign allows you to customize when the chat is fired and what message customers will see.

If a customer does respond and creates a ticket, Gorgias helps you set up Rules to determine priority level for your customer service agents.

In addition, the chat button can be programmed so when a customer clicks, they get automated self-serve options such as tracking their order, canceling an order, or filing a ticket.

Examples of chat campaigns

There are several ways to implement chat campaigns so we’ll go over some examples of chat pop-ups in action.

Spark conversion around specific products

The chat campaign can be used to give specific products a boost or offer help. For example, if your core product is shoes, the chat campaign could pop up with advice on sizing.

Think of it as another space for frequently asked questions. Using the pop-up, you can satisfy those questions without the customer having to go looking for answers themselves, or file a ticket.

Here’s an example from Franklin, a French pet food brand. They programmed chat campaigns to appear on product pages for specialized foods, so shoppers can ask questions and make sure they’re buying the right product.

Share limited-time offers and product-specific discounts

Traditional pop-ups are one way to announce an offer or sale, but a chat campaign can do this as well, in a more friendly way.

A chat campaign message with a special offer feels more exclusive than a flashy pop-up and can be customized for individual products, for example offering a percentage off your best-selling item.

Capture high-value customers

Let’s go back to Jaxxon for an example of how to get the attention of customers browsing your best-selling products.

When a customer clicks to view Jaxxon’s Cuban Link Chain, their top gold chain under $100, the chat campaign pops up to help. The campaign offers a list of styles under $100 and a style quiz.

Neither of these are hard sells but ways to engage the customer and help them find just the right product. From here, customers can click the links to type to reply and speak to customer support.

Why chat campaigns are better

Pop-ups are risky business. Although they can lead to conversions, pop-ups that are intrusive can turn customers away. A chat campaign is a solution that combines all the useful parts of pop-ups with excellent customer service and a gentler approach.

Chat campaigns:

• Are small, unobtrusive, and take up less screen space
• Less invasive with a time delay
• Employ a less aggressive sales approach
• Are fully customizable to target particular products
• Provide a direct path to human interaction
• Have a wide variety of use cases
• Are SEO-friendly

Boost your conversions with Gorgias chat campaigns

There’s a lot of ways to improve your ecommerce store’s conversion rate and chat campaigns are a proven method to do just that.

Chat campaigns are fully integrated into the Gorgias helpdesk, with your live chat and campaign options all available in one place. Plus, with the ability to bring in a customer’s unique information and order history, you can provide a truly custom customer experience.

Learn more about how Gorgias can help you provide amazing customer experiences.

You can — and should — prepare for these mishaps with a library of apology email templates. A timely apology email builds trust, prevents churn, improves your retention rate, protects your bottom line, and keeps your company name in good standing.

According to KPMG, 46% of customers who are truly loyal to a brand will remain so even after a negative experience. They’re also far more likely to recommend a brand to friends and family or write a positive review online. 

An effective apology email is your best bet to regain and reinforce customer loyalty after an error or delay. And loyal customers are closely linked to revenue. According to data from more than 10,000 Gorgias merchants, repeat customers generate 300% more revenue than first-time customers.

Continue reading to learn the key components that every effective and sincere apology email should have, as well as some dos and don’ts, to keep customers on your side.

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How to write customer service apology emails (the dos and don’ts)

Apologies can repair the situation or make it worse. If you bungle the apology, you risk losing a customer forever. But a well-executed apology can strengthen your relationship with a customer, as Brianna Christiano, Gorgias's Director of Support, explains.

 “In my experience, proactively sending an apology email and admitting that maybe you made a mistake as a company, or you didn't provide the best experience, really builds trust with customers,” says Christiano. “You'd be surprised how many customers will forgive you for that mistake.”

This list will prepare you for creating your own customer service apology emails to make sure you correct the situation without making it worse.

Do: Create a library of brand-appropriate apology email templates

When a mistake happens, you don’t want to be left scrambling. Being prepared ahead of time with email templates will allow you to send out on-brand apology emails and correct the mistake as quickly as possible. 

It’s also critical that everyone on your customer support team has access to those templates. Make this part of your customer service training and onboarding to ensure that every customer is receiving the same level of care when an apology needs to happen.

With Macros, Gorgias customers can build a library of customer service responses, including apologies, to send as emails to customers. You can respond directly to tickets in your helpdesk using these Macros and ensure consistent messaging (and the right customer service words), no matter who responds. 

Macros are templates that you build for common ticket responses, such as shipping inquiries or apologies, that can be further customized with individual customer information.

Macros integrate with ecommerce platforms (like Shopify or BigCommerce) so you can insert personalized information for each customer. Here’s an example of how Macros use variables to pull customer data directly from BigCommerce (in this case) and automatically personalize the message:  

Don’t: Wait to apologize

Speed is of the essence when it’s time to send a customer apology email. You should send an apology as soon as you see something has gone wrong, rather than waiting for a customer complaint to come in.

Frustrating or negative customer experiences decrease loyalty. According to The Effortless Experience, 96% of high-effort experiences — such as having to contact the company — make the customer feel disloyal afterward. Frustrated customers can easily turn into angry customers. 

“Instead, you're reducing the escalation upfront by being proactive,” says Christiano. “When the company sends an email about an issue the customer didn’t notice, customers appreciate that the company has gone above and beyond.”

Gorgias analyzes incoming tickets for sentiment to detect angry and escalated customers so you can address them before they take their anger out on social media and cause further damage.

You can then apply rules (or automation) to filter tickets based on sentiment and prioritize your customer responses.

Do: Personalize the apology to each customer based on past interactions

A personal apology is always a more sincere apology. When you create your templates for customer apology emails, leave spots to insert personalized information about the affected customer, from the customer’s name to more detailed order information.

You can get even more detailed than that, though. Using Gorgias’ Customer Sidebar feature, your customer success or support team can see information in the sidebar such as:

• Past orders
• Reviews
• Loyalty status and points
• Previous conversations

For example, you could thank a customer for a past review (“Thanks so much for your kind words about our matcha powder!”), or reference a past order (“How did you like the matcha powder you ordered last month?”).

Or, go above and beyond ("Again, so sorry for this issue. I noticed you're a frequent shopper here and I want to thank you for your business and patience as we sort this out — here's a discount code for 15% off your next order: SORRY15!").

If you see a customer has left a negative comment in the past, mention it and tell them how that feedback has helped your brand to correct the issue and provide better service.

Taking the time to personalize customer interactions, including apology emails, directly impacts your revenue. According to a study by Twilio, 98% of companies say personalization increases customer loyalty. Additionally, customers around the world spend an average of 46% more when engagement is personalized. 

Don’t: Send your email to unaffected customers

Being proactive with your apology letters is important, but you can also go too far. Sending these emails to customers who haven’t actually been affected by the issue will just create more headaches for your customer support reps.

“Before you send a mass email to 50,000 customers, make sure that most of those people were impacted. Because if you don't, you're going to create more confusion,” says Christiano. 

If, for example, you’re having supply issues, don’t send a mass email to every single customer. Those whose orders are actually unaffected will now think there’s a problem with their orders even if there’s not. That’s going to mean more incoming and unnecessary tickets for you to deal with. 

Do: Maintain a tone that reflects your brand but also the severity of the mistake

Every company has a different brand identity and style of communication. For some, it may be on-brand to send communications with emojis and playful wording. Others may prefer something more simple and elegant. In any case, you may need to adjust that voice for customer apology letters.

This starts right from the subject line. If a customer’s order is delayed, whether due to shipping issues or stock shortages, that’s a serious issue. Sending a subject line with cutesy wording like “oops” and frowning emojis may communicate that you’re not taking the delay seriously.

“If it's a small inconvenience, I think you can keep it lighter. It really just depends on the severity of the problem,” says Christiano. 

Here’s an example of a small mistake that justifies a light-hearted tone:

And here’s an example of a graver issue, handled with more detail and a serious tone:

In the body of the email, use straightforward language that clearly acknowledges the problem rather than dancing around the issue and directly communicate how you’ve corrected the mistake. 

Again, this is where creating personalized email apologies comes in. Christiano says you should look at factors like:

• The price point of an order
• The customer’s order history
• The customer’s VIP or loyalty status
• The tone of past reviews and conversations

Adjust the templates below to fit with your brand’s unique voice, but don’t forget that the wrong tone can make an apology email less effective.

Don’t: Leave the customer empty handed

A sincere apology to your customers should directly acknowledge the issue, take full responsibility, tell them what steps are being done to correct it, and give them a reason to come back and shop again.

Consider ending apology letters with some sort of offer — a voucher code for free shipping, a discount coupon code, store credit, or other perks. This demonstrates that you understand the customer has dealt with an inconvenience and you want to make it up to them beyond sending your “sincerest apologies.”

Christiano says it’s a good rule of thumb that if an issue is serious enough that you need to send an apology email, it’s worth considering including some sort of offer. For the most serious issues, you may even want to offer a full refund to retain that customer.

Here’s a great example of a mass email apology that extends the discount for goodwill (and more sales):

Don’t think of offering a coupon code as a further loss. It’s better to take a small hit on the next purchase than to not get the next order at all. Plus, an angry customer may leave negative reviews on your site or social media, driving away other potential customers and impacting your customer satisfaction (CSAT) score. 

10 apology email templates for every type of mishap

Below you’ll find useful email templates for every type of apology you may have to send as a brand. These apology email examples have spaces for you to insert personalized information for each customer, such as the customer’s name and shopping history. Use these as a starting point to craft your own letter templates.

1) Service or website outage or downtime (mass email)

This template is for when you’ve had site-wide technical issues or glitch that has impacted your entire customer base. Mass emails are less customized than individual emails, but should still contain all the key parts of a good apology.

Hi {{Customer first name}},

We’re currently experiencing a service outage for {{Website / Product / Service}}. We’re actively working on resolving the issue, which we believe is due to {{Reason for outage}}. We apologize for the inconvenience and assure you we’ll have everything up and running as quickly as possible.

Stay tuned at {{Website / Social media page}} for the latest updates.

Thanks, 

{{Current agent first name}}

2) Late shipment or delivery (individual)

This is for when a customer’s order will be sent out late. This is when you should consider how to tailor your apology letter to the unique customer and their history with your brand.

Hi {{Customer First Name}},

We regret to inform you that your order {{order number}} has been delayed.

We apologize for any inconvenience, and we appreciate your understanding. The reason for the delay is {{reason for the delay}}.

You can track the status of your order using this tracking link {{Link to tracking portal}}.

If you’d like to return or exchange your order, you can do so here {{Link to return/exchange portal}}.

Once again, we apologize for the inconvenience. Please let us know if you have any questions or can provide further assistance. 

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

3) Late shipment or delivery (mass email)

This is for when you have a company-wide issue with delivery times, such as stock shortages or even shipping issues beyond your control, and need to send a mass apology email.

Hi {{Customer First Name}},

We’re reaching out to let you know that we’re currently experiencing shipment delays, largely due to {{Cause (e.g. supply chain issues, holiday rush, broken workflows, etc.}}. There will most likely be delays of {{range of business days}} on recent orders.

We understand this is a serious issue and are doing everything in our power to fulfill your orders as quickly as possible. For more information on shipping delays, you can check out {{link to FAQ page}}. If you have any other questions, please feel free to reach out to our team by responding to this email.

Best,

{{Current agent first name}}

4) Package never arrived

This is a customer whose order has been lost This will likely be sent in response to an incoming ticket from an upset customer.

Hi {{Customer First Name}},

Thank you for reaching out! I’m so sorry to hear that you were unable to locate the missing package. Rest assured we will remedy this situation for you. 

I have two options to offer: we can ship a replacement to you or issue a full refund for the order instead. If you prefer a replacement order, we kindly ask that you confirm the shipping address of where you would like the replacement order sent. We look forward to receiving your reply.

{{Current agent first name}}

5) Item arrived damaged

This is for when a customer receives a defective product. You’ll need to provide instructions on what the customer should do next, in addition to an apology. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}}, 

Thanks for reaching out about your recent order {{Number of last order}}. I’m sorry to hear about your experience. As we try our best to provide exceptional service, some factors like shipping and handling are out of our control and issues like this can happen.  

Please send us a photo of the broken/damaged item(s) you received and we’ll do our best to resolve this as soon as possible. 

{{Current agent first name}} 

6) Incorrect item delivered

If the incorrect item, or incorrect quantity of an item, is delivered you’ll need to apologize but also tell the customer what they should do with any incorrect items.

Hi {{Customer First Name}},
‍
Thank you for letting us know we sent you the wrong product. We apologize for the inconvenience. We are sending you the correct product, the {{correct product name}} and it will be shipped by {{estimated shipping date}}. 

We sent it using expedited shipping, so you should receive it {{estimated delivery date}}. Please return {{old product}} in the original shipping box and packaging using the attached shipping label and instructions. Please contact us with any additional questions. 

{{Current agent first name}}

7) Previous communication mistake

If you sent a piece of email marketing with an incorrect or missing discount code, for example, you should follow up with an apology and correction. And, if it’s not too complicated, explain what caused the miscommunication in the first place, and the steps you’ve taken to prevent it from happening again. 

Hi {{Customer First Name}},

On {{day of the communication mistake}}, we experienced a hiccup with {{cause of the error}}. This resulted in you receiving a confusing email — sorry about that!

We addressed the issue and hope to avoid this happening in the future. As a way to apologize for any confusion caused by the last email, we {{Insert policy: temporary discount, free shipping, personalized code, added a credit, etc..}}. 

Thank you for understanding. Please respond to this email with any questions!

Best,

{{Current agent first name}} 

8) Reply to a bad customer review

When a customer is upset, a professional apology can go a long way to correcting the issue and retaining their business.

{{Customer First Name}},

Thanks so much for your feedback on {{Customer survey, review site, etc.}}.

I wanted to check in and get a little more information from you about your experience. This will help our team improve future experiences for you and other shoppers. If you’re open to it, you can just reply to this email and share your thoughts.

Thanks for your time, 

{{Current agent first name}}

9) Poor service experience

As we’ve discussed, poor customer experience can decrease loyalty. Correcting the issue and apologizing can help get that loyalty back.

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your experience with us. This is not up to our standard and I've passed this along to our team to ensure this doesn't happen again. 

In addition, I've {{Insert policy: refund, added a credit, send a replacement, etc.}} to make this right. 

We truly value you as a customer and apologize for the inconvenience this caused.

Please let me know if I can help with anything else.

{{Current agent first name}}

10) Escalated customer

If a customer is already escalated, you need to have an apology email that reflects how the customer feels. Unhappy customers can cause lots of damage beyond lost business, including damage to your reputation through social posting and reviews.

Hi {{Customer first name}},

Thank you for reaching out and letting us know about your experience with us. This is not up to our standard and I've passed this along to our team to ensure this doesn't happen again.

I have CC’d {{Technical/Lead agent first name}} on this email. They will be able to figure out what happened here and ensure that we resolve this for you. 

{{Current agent first name}}

Winning back upset customers is worth it

When mistakes happen, remember that your most valuable customers are the ones who come back again and again. Mistakes create a risk of losing a customer, but it’s also an opportunity to rebuild loyalty and turn a bad situation into a chance for a positive customer service interaction.

Your customer service team should have a clear process in place for winning back upset customers and having a thorough library of sincere, on-brand customer apology emails is a key piece of the process. 

For further reading on customer responses, read about Gorgias’ other customer email templates and customer service scripts inspired by top ecommerce brands.

Start a demo with Gorgias today to streamline your customer responses and get the best possible return on investment with customer service.Mistakes happen. Even with the best-laid plans, your ecommerce business will inevitably run into shipping delays, website outages, and other mishaps that cause customer complaints.

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The trick to ecommerce is having great products and attracting a bunch of people to your website. Right? Not quite. 

Great products and brand awareness are important, but so are all the little details that make up your website’s shopping experience. Everything — from the way your products are categorized to the live chat widget (or lack thereof) — impacts how successfully you can turn browsers into buyers, also known as your site’s conversion rate. One of the most important of those elements is your online store’s shopping cart. 

In this article, we’ll explore everything that happens after a website visitor clicks “Add to cart,” including the reasons customers abandon carts and 14 shopping cart best practices to encourage customers to keep shopping and place an order.

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How damaging is cart abandonment for your brand’s revenue?

Shopping cart abandonment is when a customer adds items to their shopping cart on your website, but leaves before making the purchase. Recent data from the Baymard Institute shows that the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.82%. This means that about seven out of every 10 shoppers at your store will not click “purchase.” 

Baymard also crunched the numbers to find out that companies across the U.S. and Europe collectively lost out on $260 billion worth of revenue due to cart abandonment. This revenue could be recovered through a stronger checkout flow and cart design. 

What causes shoppers to abandon shopping carts?

The next layer of navigating how to address checkout abandonment issues revolves around reasons for abandonment, which run the gamut. Baymard’s research reveals the top reasons for cart abandonment:

Let’s dive into some of the top reasons.

Multi-step checkout processes 

A checkout process that requires the customer to go through multiple steps is one reason that customers abandoned their carts, as cited by the Baymard survey from late 2021. Of those surveyed, 17% say that they didn’t complete their purchase because the process was “too long or complicated.” 

It’s vital to get your shoppers to quickly find a checkout button that actually completes the purchase, in as few clicks and screens as possible. 

Gated checkout processes

If you require customers to create an account before checking out, you’re most likely losing some of them before checkout. Simply put, people don’t want to be forced into creating an account (that will most likely lead to emails they do not care for in their inbox) just to purchase a product from your company. In the Baymard study, 24% of consumers report “the site wanted me to create an account” as their top reason for abandoning during checkout. 

Even if customers do comply and create an account, they may be annoyed or frustrated by having to do so — which your company should avoid at all costs in order to ensure an excellent customer experience. 

Not enough payment options (or missing convenient options)

Another reason for cart abandonment cited in the Baymard survey was “not enough payment methods.” This could mean that an ecommerce company doesn’t accept certain credit cards or other payment options like PayPal.

When your online store accepts multiple payment methods, you are more likely to meet each customer’s individual expectations. This leads to a sense of convenience and a smoother customer experience. 

Lack of trust in the shopping cart’s security 

Most online shoppers want to feel a sense of trust before plugging their credit card details into any website. Baymard’s 2021 survey finds that 18% of customers say they abandoned their online cart because they did not feel that the ecommerce store was trustworthy. 

It’s important to make your customers feel secure, specifically when dealing with privacy and sensitive data like credit card numbers and personal information. Social proof like customer reviews on your products, as well as security guidelines like secure sockets layer (SSL) and payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS), are a great way to bolster trust among first-time visitors. 

Surprise shipping charges or long delivery wait times

Finally, the most commonly cited reason for cart abandonment among consumers is surprise shipping costs or long delivery wait times. According to Baymard, “extra costs” and “delivery was too slow” made up 68% of survey responses. This shows just how much shipping can impact whether or not someone chooses to go through with ordering your product.

Related: Trying to improve your shipping experience? Check out our guides on shipping for ecommerce and how to offer free shipping. 

14 optimization tips for the best shopping cart experience

1. Offer the right payment options
2. Don’t require shoppers to create an account in order to buy 
3. Add “mini cart” functionality to keep your cart visible
4. Make product descriptions and thumbnails visible on the shopping cart page
5. Limit the customer information you collect
6. Provide total cost estimates during checkout
7. Use breadcrumbs to show the number of steps in your checkout process
8. Create an abandoned cart workflow automation
9. Give your customers multiple shipping options
10. Implement an auto-save feature for items in shoppers’ carts
11. Offer a live chat feature on the checkout page
12. Make it easy for customers to move between their cart and product pages
13. Use your shopping cart for upselling and cross-selling
14. Add a “Buy now” button to skip the shopping cart

Now that you know some of the top reasons customers are abandoning their carts, let’s look at some best practices you can implement to give customers a positive shopping cart experience — and lower your cart abandonment rate.

1) Offer the right payment options for your customers 

As mentioned, a lack of payment options is one reason customers abandon their online shopping carts, so ensuring your ecommerce website has options is vital. According to SaleCycle, the majority of online shoppers want the option to pay for purchases online with either a digital wallet (digital payments not attached to a card), credit card, debit card, or bank transfer. 

The more options you have available, the better. Additionally, some payment options can also make checkout faster and easier for customers, which also helps with cart abandonment rates. 

Pro tip

Be sure to think about which payment types will make the most sense for your customers and your business size. If you are just starting out and have a limited budget, consider starting with PayPal or Venmo. Once you start growing, expand to include all the major payment options: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Apple Pay, PayPal, and maybe even a buy-now-pay-later option like Klarna or Afterpay. 

Also, consider investigating whether your ecommerce platform has express checkout options. Shopify, for example, has express checkout options that let people pay through services like Amazon so they can skip typing out contact, payment, and billing information. Here’s an example of express pay on CROSSNET’s website:

Read more about choosing payment options for your ecommerce business. 

2) Don’t require shoppers to create an account in order to buy 

Shoppers don't want to create an account in order to make a purchase, so eliminating this requirement (if you’re using it within your online store) can be a quick fix for boosting conversions. 

The National Retail Federation reports that 97% of cart abandonment is due to inconvenience. So, keep the shopping cart design as simple as possible — give customers the option to create or sign into an account, but also provide a guest checkout option with a prominent checkout button.

Pro tip

Give customers the option to create an account via social media or their Google account after they purchase. This taps into the convenience factor, and gives you a chance for future email marketing or customer loyalty programs. 

Also, if you have subscribe-and-save functionality, make the discount clear to customers throughout the checkout process — again, without making it mandatory. Olipop’s “Add to cart” option is a great example of advertising the better deal without sacrificing usability for the shopper:

3) Add “mini cart” functionality to your ecommerce site to keep your cart visible while browsing

Keeping a customer’s online shopping cart accessible while browsing is another best practice that can help decrease cart abandonment. A mini cart makes the shopping process much more seamless because customers can easily add products to their cart — or review current cart contents — in a drop-down and without being directed to a new page. This can help minimize potential website loading issues, which Baymard’s survey cites as a top reason that customers abandon their carts during checkout. 

Pro tip

Mini carts are usually a simple add-on, depending on which platform your online store is based. Both Shopify and WooCommerce offer mini cart options that you can easily add to your shop. If you’re looking for a brand that has a successful mini cart, check out fashion retailer Marine Layer. Here’s the drop-down that happens if you hover over the cart icon:

Looking for more Shopify-specific tips on abandoned cart recovery? Read more here.

4) Make product descriptions and thumbnails visible on the shopping cart page (where it makes sense) 

Adding your product details to customers’ carts can be extremely helpful — if it makes sense for your business. 

For example, if you sell power tools and a customer is purchasing new drill bits, they may want to double-check that the drill bits they put in their cart are the correct size. So, in order to keep them on the checkout page, include a brief description below the product name. This eliminates the need to go back to the main product page, which eliminates the potential for slow page loading and frustrated customers.

Pro tip

The product description on the checkout screen doesn’t need to be long or complicated — one or two solid sentences from the original product page will do. Or, if your company sells highly visual merchandise, a thumbnail — a picture’s worth a thousand words, after all. One store that add thumbnails to their shopping carts is Glamnetic:

5) Limit the customer information you collect to only the essentials

Everyone values their personal privacy, especially when shopping online. ROI Revolution reports that ”39% of consumers say they have maintained the same level of concern about their online privacy over the past year and 20.5% of consumers say they’re much more concerned about their online privacy compared to one year ago.” Only 8.6% of online shoppers say they’re less concerned now than they were a year ago. 

This is why it’s so important to only collect information from your customers that is absolutely necessary. In a typical shopping transaction, these essentials would include things like email address, phone number, and street address. In some cases, you might also ask for some basic demographic info that’s important to your company’s segmentation, such as gender and purchase habits. You may offer the option to keep customers’ credit cards on file, but we don’t recommend doing this without their permission. 

If customers do opt to keep their credit card information stored on your site, be sure to let them know exactly how this works. Most companies take advantage of encrypted online or cloud-based storage systems. Let customers know there are even regulations that dictate what you can and can’t do with your information. This will help put them at ease and show that your brand is trustworthy. 

Pro tip

Offer customers two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA) when shopping on your site, which signals to your customers that you take their privacy seriously. Many companies have opted for MFA or 2FA in the past few years, and you can use Amazon Pay or Google Pay as a version of 2FA on your ecommerce site. 

6) Provide total cost estimates during checkout to reduce sticker shock

As pointed out earlier in this article, unexpected fees are cited as the most popular reason that customers abandon their carts before checkout. To avoid this, give customers an estimated subtotal before they get to the checkout screen. This can be especially important for larger-ticket items because shipping a $1,000 sofa will most likely come with a higher shipping fee (and more tax) than a box of clothing. 

Pro tip

When a customer is on a product page, include an option to enter their zip code to calculate a preview of tax and shipping before they click “add to cart.” Native Union does an excellent job of this on its website. They even break down the costs for various shipping options like standard and express delivery:

7) Use breadcrumbs (progress indicators) to show the number of steps in your checkout process

The breadcrumb feature can be used in many ways on websites but has a specific use for ecommerce checkout processes. Letting customers know how much time, or how many steps, they have left in the checkout process is important to ensure they complete their purchase. Progress indicators can be as simple as a little block of text on the checkout screen that says “1 of 3,” or can use graphics for more visual appeal.

Pro tip

Take this time to think about each step of your business’ checkout process and make it as simple as possible. The more steps a customer has to go through, the more chances you have to lose them. Shopify’s default checkout page has a clear progression from Cart > Information > Shipping > Payment, which you can see on Comfort One Shoes’ site:

8) Create an abandoned cart workflow automation for customers that leave items for later

Some ecommerce sites let customers add items to a wish list or “save for later” to reduce the number of times customers add items to a cart without plans to buy them in that shopping session. Regardless of whether you have that functionality, you should create a workflow for customers who leave items behind. 

This workflow could include things like email reminders, on-screen pop-ups, retargeting ads, and sending follow-up coupon codes. It’s important to keep in mind the specific goals of your ecommerce business. What may be right for some brands may not be right for yours. 

Pro tip

Timeliness is everything when it comes to your abandoned cart workflow. When customers are ready to buy, you must be there. Some sites use exit-intent pop-ups as a hail mary for customers about to abandon carts. And while this is effective, some customers find it disruptive. 

Consider instead adding live chat to your website, ideally with proactive functionality. Live chat can have an incredible impact on sales — Ohh Deer generates about $12,500 per quarter in sales through Gorgias’ live chat — because you can reach out to customers with certain order values in their cart to ask if they need support or offer a discount to stop them from leaving. 

"When you make sales thanks to your good service, customers will come back and recommend you. That's revenue-generating."

Alex Turner, Customer Experience Manager at Ohh Deer

Check out our guide to shopping cart recovery for more recommendations on winning back lost sales.

9) Give your customers multiple shipping options

Every customer has different expectations and needs when it comes to shipping. Offering robust shipping options expands the number of situations your ecommerce business can seamlessly respond to. Beyond helping to decrease your brand’s cart abandonment rate, providing various shipping options can lead to more sales as well as higher retention and customer satisfaction. 

Pro tip

Take into account your target customers’ needs and try to cater to every shipping scenario, which could include the following options:

• Flat-rate shipping (4-5 business days)
• Expedited shipping (3 business days)
• Next-day/overnight shipping (1-2 business days)
• Local pick up, especially if you have a large number of customers in the city where you operate

Regardless of your options, clarify the price as early as possible to avoid unwanted surprises. Here’s the clear layout of shipping costs on Sol de Janeiro’s website:

10) Implement an auto-save feature for items in shoppers’ carts

At this point, you know many of the reasons customers may abandon their shopping carts online. From frustration and slow page loading speed to simply being distracted, customers leave their carts a lot, so implementing an auto-save feature on your website can help decrease your shop's cart abandon rate. A customer may be distracted and leave your website, but then come back to it a few days later. When they reopen it, their saved cart will remind them of their previous intent to purchase. 

Pro tip

Tap into your website management software to see if an auto-save feature is available. It may be as easy as flipping a toggle. If you use Shopify, you can also save carts between visits so customers can retrieve their old carts when coming back to your site.

11) Offer a live chat feature on the checkout page for customer questions

Most customers (90%) expect an immediate response to their customer service inquiries, according to HubSpot. Being able to provide your customers with this support through a live chat feature can boost the overall customer experience, as well as improve your store’s cart abandonment rate. Even more, Kayako reports that 79% of businesses say offering a live chat feature positively impacted sales (including upsells), revenue, and customer loyalty.

Pro tip

Use Gorgias for live chat (and more). The live chat widget can seamlessly integrate with your Shopify store and provide a solution for customers who may have questions at the time of purchase to drive sales. You can even use chat campaigns to target certain customers — like those lingering on a checkout page — to see if they need information or a discount to complete the purchase:

Want to learn more about the power of live chat for ecommerce? Check out these lists:

• The best live chat apps (general)
• The best live chat apps for ecommerce
• The best live chat apps for Shopify
• 22 statistics about live chat

Alternatively, if you already have a live chat app in mind, learn how to install it into your Shopify store.

12) Make it easy for customers to move between their cart, product pages, and more in your online store 

Ensuring the design and user experience of your ecommerce shop is up to par is the last but extremely important best practice when it comes to lowering your cart abandonment rate.  You’ll want to ensure customers can move through all areas of your website with ease. 

Pro tip

Explore new features and add-ons that your website software offers. If you’re currently building everything yourself, we encourage you to check out how a tool like Shopify can drastically elevate your customers’ experience while not taking too much time away from your team. For inspiration from an online retailer who does this well, check out skincare brand Then I Met You. 

Related: Learn how to offer proactive customer service to improve your customer experience.

13) Use your shopping cart for upselling and cross-selling — with limits

Your shopping cart can be a good place to recommend additional products to browsers. This is especially true if some of your products require others for full functionality. 

As you can imagine, pushing items onto customers before they’ve even decided whether they want to make a purchase in the first place is dangerous. They could get annoyed and abandon the purchase altogether. So, if you do decide to add this to your store, do so strategically. For example, Little Poppy Co. uses in-cart recommendations to offer a discount and subscribe-and-save option, which many customers may appreciate.

Tools like In Cart Upsell and Cross Sell can activate this feature on your store. 

14) Add a “Buy now” call to action (CTA) button to skip the shopping cart altogether

As we described above, the shopping cart is a bit of a minefield. Customers can fall off at any second and decide not to buy anything or, worse, check out your competitor’s website. One way to avoid issues is to let shoppers skip the shopping cart altogether and let customers just buy the product. 

If you use Shopify, check out their article on Buy Buttons for more information, including some words of warning about the button’s shoddy functionality. 

Check out Loop Earplug’s website for a good example of a clear, visible button to skip the checkout process and buy now:

Check out our customer story on Loop Earplugs to learn how Gorgias helped them increase 43% of their revenue from CS.

“We’ve seen 43% increase in revenue from customer support since we launched pre-sales flows. Quick response flows give us the ability to build trust with our customers and that’s priceless. When customers get a quick and honest answer, they often end up buying more than one product in a short span of time. Seeing customers live the life we’re aiming to create for them in Loop Earplugs is extremely rewarding for us.”
‍‍- Milan Vanmarcke, Customer Service Manager at Loop Earplugs

3 amazing ecommerce shopping cart experiences to inspire you

Finally, let’s take a look at what we consider to be the gold standards of ecommerce shopping experiences. Don’t hesitate to take some ideas back for your online shop — they may be exactly what your ecommerce strategy needs.

Revolve

Clothing retailer Revolve is a top example of a clean, efficient customer checkout process. The brand doesn’t force customers to log in or sign up for an account in order to purchase — but does give the option. Revolve also provides a live chat option, as well as text and phone numbers to get a hold of a customer service rep should a question come up. 

Amazon

Amazon is another leading example of a shopping cart experience that covers a lot in a small amount of space. Though it may seem busy for some customers, Amazon features additional information about the product a customer is buying right in the checkout screen, such as the stock count (if there is a low number), eligibility for free shipping, and even information about if the product is Climate Pledge Friendly. 

Nike

Third, we’re highlighting the athletic wear brand Nike. The company takes a similarly minimalistic approach to Revolve, but is a top-tier example of breadcrumbing and providing estimated additional fees like shipping and tax. The brand also provides a product description on this page, which can be especially helpful when purchasing shoes. 

Take your ecommerce customer service to the next level with Gorgias

Providing a smooth shopping and purchasing experience can lead to a satisfying, stress-free customer experience. Ensuring a positive customer experience will lead to greater customer experience which has a huge impact on your revenue.

To make the process even more seamless, we recommend checking out Gorgias to manage all of your customer support in one place. The all-in-one platform was built specifically for ecommerce businesses and can integrate easily with other online shop platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento. Learn more about how Gorgias can optimize all customer interactions and streamline your business.

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A frequently asked questions (FAQ) page is a simple resource with a big impact. 

It proactively answers common customer questions, clears up any confusion that might get in the way of a purchase, and limits the number of repetitive tickets your customer support team receives so they can focus on higher-impact conversations. 

Plus, an FAQ page sets the foundation for a larger knowledge base or content marketing effort — such as a help center or a blog.

Prepare for a deep dive on FAQ pages: We’ll share FAQ page examples ranging from household brands to smaller ecommerce retailers, simple tips for building your page, and a template generator to get you started. 

We’ll also discuss when it’s time to upgrade your FAQ page into a more thorough help center to provide an even better, more proactive, customer experience. (It’s earlier than you think.)

What is an FAQ page?

An FAQ page is a page on your website that answers your customers’ most frequently asked questions. The questions included on an FAQ page tend to cover key information that’s relevant to most (if not all) visitors: questions about operating hours, product availability, pricing, return policy, basic troubleshooting, and more.

By providing these answers, your customers can get the information they want immediately, without contacting your support team.

FAQ pages are fairly low-tech, but they’re highly strategic. You can spin up an FAQ page in just a few hours and start seeing the benefits immediately, whereas more advanced customer service strategies like customer service automation and omnichannel customer support require a bit more investment.

7 FAQ page examples to emulate and learn from

Now that we’ve discussed the benefits and tips to create the best FAQ pages, let’s study what works (and doesn’t work) on the screen. Check out these seven visual examples of FAQ pages from brands of all sizes and industries.

1) Twitter/X: A great example for large companies

Twitter’s new-user FAQ places all FAQs onto a running, searchable page. You’ll see plenty of internal links, and notice the navigation bar on the left. Clicking any of those lines will jump users to the relevant section of the FAQ.

On the business side, Twitter has other FAQs that are harder to navigate and much more detailed. But there, the company assumes the user has a higher level of tech familiarity and more specific needs.

For such a behemoth company, multiple FAQ pages make sense. If your company sells many complex products or services, follow Twitter’s lead and consider multiple FAQ pages. But for most companies, the simplicity of one FAQ page is preferable.

2) McDonald’s: Poor organization, good searchability

It’s hard to miss the gigantic search bar on McDonald’s primary FAQ page. Just in case you do miss it, they include a helpful (if gigantic) prompt telling you to search for a question.

For such a sprawling FAQ page, a search bar is a good choice for organization’s sake. The top three questions pictured above don’t seem connected to one another, nor do they seem likely to be the three most popular questions McDonald’s support receives.

Still, for its excellent search and filtering options, McDonald’s is doing good FAQ work.

3) Microsoft: An organized way to provide FAQs for a complex product

Microsoft’s previous central FAQ page was centralized to the extreme, but the company has recently given every service its own FAQ page. Again, for companies with many complex products, this is a good decision. Here’s the page for Microsoft 365, which uses a navigation bar at the top with numerous questions in each section.

The “top questions” section is a smart move, pulling out the most-asked questions from each category and placing them at the top of the page.

Unfortunately, the page isn’t fully searchable: Each answer is hidden from the main page search until you expand the dropdown sections.

4) Nintendo Switch: Great visuals and categories

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The FAQ page for the Nintendo Switch does many things very well. All the questions are on one page, but Nintendo goes above and beyond by providing six visual buttons that jump users to the relevant section on the page. The questions are listed clearly and organized logically, and some questions match search queries closely (“How long will my Nintendo Switch battery last?” and “Can I watch movies on Nintendo Switch?”).

One drawback is that, like Microsoft, Nintendo is using collapsed answers, meaning on-page answers aren’t easily searchable. Worse, there’s no button to expand all answers at once.

5) Wikipedia: Searchable, succinct questions and answers

Wikipedia’s main FAQ page is well-built. It conforms to the overall site design (at first glance, it looks like any other wiki page), which is always a good choice. It’s fully searchable, both on-page and using browser search. You can quickly and easily see a list of the 11 questions on the page, and each question is linked to its answer lower down on the page. The answers themselves are succinct and chock full of internal links (as Wikipedia pages tend to be).

Wikipedia also has a FAQ index page, which lists out the 20+ different FAQs on the site. This page is well designed, too: While it doesn’t (and can’t) list out all the questions for every FAQ, it does include strategic keywords that can quickly guide the user to the right FAQ for any use case.

6) Zappos: Great categorization for a complex service

What the Zappos FAQ page lacks in attractiveness, it makes up for in utility. Every question is listed in the navigation section at the top, neatly organized into categories. Each one is linked, too. Scroll down, and you’ll see complete questions and answers without collapsable menus, which is great for on-page searching.

You’ll also see a ton of keyword-rich answers and internal links to other Zappos web pages, increasing the SEO value of this FAQ page.

7) Parade: Good navigation and showcase of company values

Parade, a DTC underwear brand, has an FAQ page with great navigation thanks to the buttons in the left column. And while the dropdown menu might be an opportunity for improvement, Parade is very wise to include a section on sustainability.

Parade markets itself as a sustainable underwear company and attracts customers because of it. Calling yourself sustainable is one thing, but detailing your sustainability efforts in a public, visible place could help convince skeptics that you practice what you preach.

If your brand rests on unique values like Parade, consider including a section in your FAQ page to highlight and explain those values in more detail.

Key benefits of an FAQ page

We identified the FAQ page as one of our top customer service trends because more and more brands have realized just how much time their customer support teams can save by implementing effective self-service resources.

FAQ pages aren’t just great for agents, they’re great for customer experience. A Microsoft study shows that 66% of all customers consult self-service resources before contacting an agent. Think of all the tickets that would save your team.

Ticket deflection is one of four key benefits of an FAQ page, which include:

‎‎Deflects repetitive, low-impact tickets from your customer support teams’ queue

FAQ pages free up time for customer support team members by deflecting all the simple frequently asked questions that would otherwise find new life as tedious tickets. Your agents don’t need to spend hours of their day answering questions about your return policy, your shipping rates, or your customer’s order status. These tickets aren’t conversation-starters or relationship-builders — in other words, you’re not missing out on an opportunity to “surprise and delight” your customers by making this kind of administrative information easier for them to access.

Reducing repetitive tickets improves your customer service response time and frees up agents to work on sensitive, urgent, or higher-value support tickets that would otherwise get buried in your helpdesk.

By the way, creating an FAQ page to answer common customer questions is one of our top tips in our CX-Driven Growth Playbook. The playbook shares 18 actionable tactics to boost revenue by 44% by improving CX, which our team put together based on data from 10,000+ merchants who use Gorgias and in-depth interviews with 25 top ecommerce brands using the platform.

Saves customers valuable time

Customers who visit your FAQ page will immediately find answers to your most commonly asked questions in one easily searchable page. They can learn about your product, shipping costs, return and refund policies, and much more — without having to contact or wait for an agent. 

For simple inquiries like these, 68% of people would rather use self-service resources like an FAQ page than contact an agent (and wait for their response). They may click a help button on your website, search on Google — more on that below — or even click a link to your FAQ in post-purchase email. Regardless, you want to make information easily accessible, no matter how a customers tries to find it.

Of course, some customers prefer human support, and many questions are too complex for an FAQ page. So, offer a healthy combination of self-service and human support to cover the entire range of customers and questions.

Adds value to search engine optimization (SEO) efforts 

FAQ pages also contribute value to your company’s SEO efforts. FAQ pages, and especially more in-depth help center articles, are a great place to include keywords relevant to your business. If properly search-optimized, your FAQ page can be another entrance point into your website from a search engine results page.

Here’s an example: Someone who wears scrubs at work might Google whether they can wash their scrubs in hot water. A help center article from FIGS, a DTC scrubs brand, appears on the first page of Google’s search results for the question:‍

The person who searched the question might click on this link, find their answer, explore FIGS’ website, remember the brand, and eventually return to make a purchase. 

Featured snippets are another SEO consideration. These are the boxes that pop up on search engine results and provide an answer to the query directly at the top of the page. You likely won’t capture featured snippets with a short FAQ page, but an in-depth help center or blog could help you capture that valuable real estate.

If you’re interested in getting your FAQ page to rank on Google, check out this resource on creating SEO-friendly FAQ pages. It walks you through SEO tactics like internal linking and keyword placement to help you appear in more search results.

Also, if you’re just interested in appearing in more Google search results (even if it’s not for your FAQ page), check out our guides on ecommerce SEO and creating ecommerce blog content that ranks on Google.

Encourages trust with your website visitors (which may turn them into customers)

Shoppers — especially potential customers visiting your site for the first time — tend to be a bit distrustful. This is even more true in the world of ecommerce. Everyone has been burned by long shipping times, lost packages, or poor product quality from online shopping.

Earning shopper trust is key to growing your store, and a good FAQ page goes a long way toward that goal. It shows your site visitors that you have clear policies for essential buying considerations like shipping and returns and care about providing a helpful, low-effort customer experience.

Serves as great material for a larger help center or templated responses

An FAQ is helpful on its own, but it can also serve as the bones for additional resources. Specifically, you can use the answers in your FAQ as a templated response — we call them Macros at Gorgias — to quickly answer repetitive questions even if they do submit a ticket.

Likewise, your FAQ can be the beginning of a larger help center or knowledge base. These resources are more robust, organized, and searchable databases of help content that customers can also access on their own, no agent needed. Gorgias takes these self-service help centers a step further by giving customers access to real-time information (like the status of their order) or even modify orders, no agent needed.

Learn more about these advanced self-service tools that make up Gorgias’ Automate.

What should your FAQ page cover?

Your primary FAQ page should answer questions related to your brand’s:

• Order tracking and management: Explain how and when customers can locate, edit, and cancel their order
• Shipping policy: Explain the cost and estimated time it takes to ship a product (including internationally, if applicable)
• Payment and tax FAQs: Explain how and when sales tax applies to purchases in your store 
• Location and hours: Explain when your staff is available on support channels and (if applicable) your physical location
• Returns policy: Explain how and when customers are eligible to return a product
• Refund, return, and exchange policies: Explain when and how a customer can return a product for an exchange, cash refund, or store credit
• Product FAQs: Answer common questions about your products, including sizing, compatibility, and troubleshooting
• Company FAQs: Summarize your company’s backstory, mission, and any important brand values
• Contact options: Explain how customers can reach your support team, including the estimated response times of each channel
• Safety and security: Explain the precautions you take to protect sensitive customer information

Try to provide succinct, accurate answers to questions in these categories, plus any other common queries your website visitors ask your support team. If you try to cover too many questions on your FAQ page (or answer questions with too much detail), you risk information overload and burying key information.

That said, your FAQ page should not be the entirety of your website’s self-service information. Consider adding more specific, contextual information throughout your website, like product-centric FAQ sections on product pages, or an in-depth, searchable knowledge base with much more information.

A step-by-step guide to creating an FAQ page

If you’re building your first FAQ page from scratch — or revamping an existing one — follow this step-by-step guide.

1) Gather the questions your customers actually frequently ask

The first step is to compile your brand’s most frequently asked questions into a single document. While every brand should cover some essential information — like the categories in the checklist above — you should also compile a list of questions customers have actually asked to make your FAQ page strategic and complete.

If you’re using customer support software, review all your tickets from the past one, two, or six months (depending on the volume of tickets you receive). Sort those tickets into categories like “shipping,” “product,” and “order status” to give you a sense of the areas your FAQ page should cover.  

If you use Gorgias, our customer intent detection can automatically give you this information:

2) Create concise answers to every question

A great FAQ page will provide concise, no-frills answers to specific questions. Keep it brand-friendly, even fun — but keep it concise. 

If your FAQ page starts to look more like Wikipedia than a clean, friendly web page, you might need to scale back your FAQ page and build a more organized knowledge base.

3) Provide a navigation system to keep your page clean

Ideally, you’ll continue adding new questions to your FAQ over time. But as your FAQ page grows, the customer experience could suffer without a clear navigation system. Here are a few navigation ideas you might implement:

• Consider organizing your questions into topic areas with their own headers
• Add a navigation bar to the web page’s sidebar that jumps to topic headers on the page
• Add a search function or search bar (don’t assume all users know how to ctrl + F / command + F their way through your page)

Some of these FAQ page design elements will require some extra coding, but your customers will appreciate this level of page enhancement.

If you use Shopify, you can also search the Shopify App Store for pre-built FAQ page apps with some of these advanced elements.

4) Make the FAQ accessible

When building your FAQ page, aim to make information findable for every customer, no matter how they might phrase a question or try and find the answer. A recent Feefo survey finds that 53% of consumers rank not being able to find the answers to their questions as their top online shopping frustration, so we recommend prioritizing clarity, searchability, and user experience over other aesthetic factors.

When it comes to phrasing, consider all the ways someone might find an answer for the most user-friendly search experience. In your section on refunds, for example, also use phrases like “money back” and “return.” This way, if someone uses Ctrl + F or a search bar, they’re more likely to find the information quickly.

On the topic of Ctrl + F, consider the limiting factor of design elements like dropdowns, or accordions. FAQ pages with dropdown answer sections that collapse and expand may make your FAQ page a little less searchable because collapsed sections don’t always appear with a Ctrl + F search. 

Also, make sure your FAQ page is accessible and highly visible within your website. If the page is buried it won’t serve a purpose. Link to your FAQ from key pages on the website, like the homepage, the checkout page, and product pages. 

5) Make timely updates and refreshes when necessary

An FAQ page is only useful if its information is trustworthy, relevant, and up to date. As a part of your content strategy, make sure you schedule reviews and refreshes of your FAQ page at least once every few months. This way, it will never become outdated or inaccurate.

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Expanding your FAQ page into a full knowledge base or help center 

While an FAQ is a great starting point, a comprehensive knowledge base (also called a help center) is much more effective in preventing unnecessary support questions. Help centers require a bit more front-end work than basic FAQ pages, but their depth and flexibility make them one of the most powerful customer self-service tools.

Your customer support platform should help you create a help center. Gorgias’s native Help Center integration makes it easy to spin up an in-depth help center to ease the burden on your customer service team and improve customer experience. You can include screenshots, videos, and GIFs to give your customers more user-friendly resources for learning about your products and services.

FAQ page vs. help center

The main difference between an FAQ page and a help center is that FAQ pages are simpler, more concise, and occupy a single page on your website. Help centers are more comprehensive, including multiple categories with several pages or articles in each one.

‎A help center can be as simple as having multiple FAQ pages by category, or it can be a robust resource for customers that includes tutorials with videos and images, articles for common questions, and even technical documentation. 

Even if you build a help center, keep a separate page for FAQs. This way, you can answer the most common questions on the FAQ page without crowding them with other, more specialized help center articles.

When to start building a more robust help center

Several signals indicate your ecommerce store needs to expand beyond a simple FAQ page. You might need a more robust help center if:

• Your website analytics show heavy traffic to your FAQ page
• You see fewer support tickets after launching your FAQ page, but still get several tickets asking repeat questions (that aren’t addressed on the FAQ page)
• You need categorization and organization as you build out your FAQ page to capture the full breadth and depth of your services

Considerations for building a help center that’s actually helpful

Help centers are valuable resources for ecommerce customers and ecommerce support teams — but only if they’re done right. Keep some of the following tips in mind when planning your help center to ensure that it’s as helpful as possible.

• Use clear category headings and subheadings to help people find the information faster
• Include a search bar to make it easier to find specific articles
• Link to articles that answer related questions to improve searchability and navigation within your help center
• Put your help center in a prominent place in your website’s navigation bar so it’s easy to find, and link to help center articles in relevant content you publish

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How Gorgias makes it easy to launch a full help center

Building a help center from scratch can seem intimidating, but Gorgias has you covered. You can easily customize your Gorgias Help Center and spend more time crafting effective answers with your internal expertise.

The Gorgias Help Center is clear and easy to navigate, so your customers can always find what they need. And because Gorgias’ Help Center integrates with the rest of the customer service platform, it’s easy to incorporate help articles into customer communications. This is a seamless way to give customers more support resources, contributing to a better customer experience.

If you have Gorgias Automate, you can also let customers track and manage their orders from within the Help Center — no need to contact an agent.

Once a customer clicks “Track” and identifies themselves, they’ll receive detailed order information without talking to an agent (or having to wait):

5 help center examples

Take a look at how these four companies keep their help centers organized, easy to search, and comprehensive. 

1) Yoto: Great organization and contact form

Yoto’s help center is an excellent example of an effective, well-organized, and searchable customer resource. This Gorgias-run help center is divided into FAQ blocks under several categories: deliveries and returns, general troubleshooting, using the product, FAQ, and other popular questions.

On top of great organization, Yoto’s help center offers a contact form where shoppers can send a detailed message to the customer care team at Yotpo. The contact form features customizable topics, which get automatically tagged in Gorgias. 

2) Dropbox: Prominent, auto-fill search bar

The Dropbox Help Center (not built on Gorgias) straddles the line between FAQ page and knowledge base, but it does so very intelligently. You’ll find top articles with tons of internal linking, plus links to significant service areas.

But the best part by far is the search bar. It’s quite responsive, proactively suggesting full article titles even as you begin typing a portion of a keyword.

3) Bank of America: Detailed organization and trending topics

Banking can get complex in a hurry, which is why Bank of America’s Help Center (also not built on Gorgias) impresses. After choosing your state of residence (which customizes certain rate information), you’ll land on a rich page with six service areas, each with five or more sub-areas. You’ll also find trending topics across the top, a powerful search bar, and a button that breaks out several additional topics.

4) Branch: Helpful self-service order tracking

Branch’s help center is another prime example of a well-executed self-service strategy. It includes a search bar, self-service order tracker, issue reporter, and a host of support articles under nine different categories. This is all possible because the help center brings in the full power of Gorgias’ self-service features.

And if the customer can’t find what they’re looking for within the articles, Branch provides contact information at the bottom of the main help center page with two simple options: chat or email.

5) Bully Max: Integration into the core website

Bully Max’s help center, which runs on Gorgias, features the same great search bar, automated order tracking, and clear categorization of Branch’s help center. The major difference is that (with the help of some additional coding), Bully Max embedded the help center in their core site. 

This way, customers can still see the store’s regular header and footer, and will still get notifications, pop-ups that offer discounts, and any other features that would get left out of a standalone help center.

Ready to build an FAQ page? Use Gorgias’ template generator to get started 

Ready to add an FAQ page to your website? Use our free FAQ page template generator to create a page with general categories like payments, shipping, and returns. Use this template as a starting point — most brands will need to add sections:

• A section on product FAQs: This is where you can answer questions that tend to occur around your product, like sizing for clothes or compatibility for electronics
• A section on brand values: This is where you can show off any differentiators you want to show off, like sustainability or locally sourced materials

Combine self-service with agent support for the ultimate customer experience

Your new FAQ is just the beginning of your investment in customer experience. As your brand grows, improve your customer experience with other self-service tools like auto-responses and self-service flows in your live chat widget. And your helpdesk can still send customers who need human support to live agents — who will actually have time to answer.

Gorgias is the ecommerce helpdesk solution that powers exceptional customer service on every channel, including email, live chat, social media, text, voice, and more.

By combining Gorgias’ self-service features with empowered agent support, you can create a customer experience that reduces effort shoppers, lets your customer support agents focus on high-value tickets, and ultimately drives revenue.

Ready to see what Gorgias can do for you? Sign up for free today.

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