Before you go looking for new visitors to grow your online store’s sales, find out where the people already coming to your site drop off on the way to an order, and fix the step where you lose the most. Taken in the order a customer moves through your store, the points to look at are: questions left unanswered on the product page, obstacles in the cart and the checkout form, abandoned carts and sold-out products, members who never place a first order, and customers who don’t come back for a second purchase. If you raise your ad budget before these leaks are closed, you will lose some of the new visitors at the same points.
By looking at your store’s own rates, you can decide which leak to close first, and you can use the same rates to measure whether a change you make is working. For the steps that call for a message, we have also included sample WhatsApp texts you can adapt. Bringing in new visitors through advertising or search engine optimization is not what this guide is about; for an overview of the tools that drive traffic, see our article on digital marketing tools.
Measure every step from product page to order separately
When your online sales seem low, the natural first move is to check monthly revenue. Revenue shows that a problem exists, but not where it lies. To find where, pull four numbers for the last 30 days: how many people viewed a product page, added a product to the cart, went on to checkout and completed an order. You can take these from your analytics tool or from your e-commerce platform’s reports. Then work out what share of people move from each step to the next. Divide the last number by the first, and you have your conversion rate based on product page views.
Here is an example with hypothetical figures. In one store, 12,000 people a month view a product page, 840 of them add a product to the cart, 420 go on to checkout and 250 complete their order. That puts the product-page-to-cart rate at 7%, the cart-to-checkout rate at 50% and the checkout-to-order rate at about 60%. The conversion rate based on product page views is about 2.1%. None of these rates is good or bad on its own; no single threshold fits every sector. The picture gets clearer when you split the same rates by device. If 75% of the people who reach checkout on desktop complete their order but only 50% do so on a phone, the product or the price can’t explain the gap; you need to look at your checkout page on mobile.
When it comes to deciding where to act, read the rates like this. If one category’s product-page-to-cart rate is clearly lower than in your other categories or in the same period last year, start with the product page. If more than half of the people who add something to the cart never see the checkout step, look at the shipping fee and the order total on the cart page. Where many people reach checkout but don’t complete their order, shorten the form and check that the payment methods your customers expect (installments, pay on delivery, bank transfer) are available. For abandoned carts, set up a WhatsApp cart recovery flow. If an obstacle such as the shipping fee is standing in the way on the cart page, remove it first; otherwise the reminder will only send the customer back to the same obstacle.
Keep an eye on a fifth number as well: how many first-time customers place a second order within a set period. For example, if 36 of the 300 people who shopped with you for the first time in January ordered again within 90 days, your repeat purchase rate is 12%. When you plan how to increase e-commerce sales, write this rate down next to your number of new customers; as the repeat purchase rate goes up, the same ad budget brings in more orders.
On the product page, highlight the details that help shoppers decide
A visitor who likes a product but leaves without adding it to the cart may have been left with a question they couldn’t find an answer to: when the product will arrive, what happens if it doesn’t fit, or whether they can trust this site with their card details. The same questions come up among the reasons shoppers give for abandoning a purchase after adding products to their cart. The reasons listed in Baymard Institute’s research on cart abandonment are based on a survey of online shoppers in the US. When respondents who say they were just browsing are set aside, 20% abandoned their purchase because delivery was too slow, 19% because they didn’t trust the site with their card details and 13% because they found the returns policy unsatisfactory. Your own customers may put these concerns in a different order, but answering all three questions on the product page, before the customer gets to the cart, is a sensible first step.
- Put the time you hand orders to the carrier and the estimated delivery time right below the price. A promise such as “Orders placed by noon ship the same day” builds trust only if you can keep it every day.
- Explain your returns and exchange terms on the product page in a single sentence: how many days customers have to return an item, who pays for the return shipping and how exchanges work. Link to your terms page for the details.
- For clothing and shoes, give the size chart in centimeters, and state the height of the model in the photo and the size they are wearing.
- Don’t wait until checkout to show the cards you accept, your installment options and, if you offer it, pay on delivery; show them on the product page too.
- Don’t remove sold-out sizes from the list; show them as unavailable and pair them with the back-in-stock notification described below.
Customer reviews are one strong answer to the trust question, because they come from buyers rather than from the seller. If you also sell your products on the Trendyol marketplace, a large share of your reviews may have built up there; with the Trendyol reviews display module, you can bring the reviews written for your store onto your own product pages as well. For products with few reviews, send customers a WhatsApp feedback survey once they have received their order. Reviews that mention delivery time, sizing or returns also answer visitors’ questions about delivery and returns. As for counters that show the number of views or sales, use them only with your store’s real data.
Instead of guessing which question weighs most, you can ask your visitors. When a visitor is about to leave, show them a one-question exit-intent popup survey and offer options such as price, shipping cost, delivery time, product information, “I’m comparing with other sites” and “I was just looking.” Once enough answers have come in, set aside the “I was just looking” responses and see which option the rest chose most often; that tells you what to fix first on the product page. Our guide to e-commerce exit surveys covers how many responses to wait for and how to word the options.
Remove every source of friction in the cart and at checkout
A customer who adds a product to the cart has already shown interest; some of the losses after that point are created by the site itself. In the same Baymard list, 18% of respondents abandoned their purchase because the site wanted them to create an account, and 12% because they couldn’t see or calculate the order total up front.
Take the surprise out of the order total. Show the shipping fee and your free shipping threshold on the cart page. Right below the cart total, add a line showing how much is left to reach the threshold: “You’re 150 TL away from free shipping.” A line like that makes the threshold visible from the start and gives the customer a reason to add one more product to the cart. If you charge a pay-on-delivery fee or an installment surcharge, show those as well before you ask for payment details. Article 4 of Türkiye’s Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce also requires that buyers can clearly see the total price they will pay before they enter their payment details.
Alongside your order count, keep an eye on your average order value; revenue is the number of orders multiplied by the average order value. Setting the free shipping threshold a little higher than your average order value and showing complementary products on the product page can help you get larger orders from the same visitors. After you change the threshold, watch the cart-to-checkout rate as well; if it drops, the new threshold may be putting customers off.
Turn on guest checkout and offer account creation after the order. The customer’s email address and phone number are already in the form at that point, so all you need to ask for is a password. Next, count the fields in your checkout form one by one. According to Baymard’s benchmark data, the average US checkout flow displays 23.48 form elements by default; counting only the fields to be filled in, the figure is 14.88. An ideal flow can be as short as 7–8 fields. If the billing address is the same as the delivery address, keep the second address form collapsed by default, and tuck optional fields behind an “Add more details” link.
Then try the whole thing yourself on a phone. Place a real order in your own store, as a guest and over mobile data, and note every point where you hesitate. Check that the phone number field brings up the numeric keypad, that the card form fits on a single screen and that you are taken back to the order confirmation page after 3D Secure verification. If you get traffic from Instagram or Facebook ads, run the same test on the page as it opens inside the app, and make sure the cart is still there when you switch to your banking app and come back. If you accept bank transfers (havale or EFT), also confirm that your bank details reach the customer the moment the order is placed.
Build your list of opted-in customers before you send messages
The cart reminders, first-order offers, replenishment reminders and win-back messages in the following sections are all WhatsApp marketing messages meant to sell the customer something; send them only to customers who have given you permission. If your opted-in list is small, those messages reach few people and their impact stays limited accordingly. Each month, track the number of customers who have given consent alongside your order count. If a cart reminder, a campaign announcement and a replenishment reminder could all reach the same customer in the same week, use a single calendar to plan which one goes out first.
Article 6 of Law No. 6563 makes the recipient’s prior consent a condition for sending commercial electronic messages. WhatsApp’s Business Messaging Policy sets two conditions as well: the person must have shared their phone number or username with you, and they must have opted in to receiving messages from you. When a customer wants to leave the list, remove them without delay; Article 8 of the Law requires you to offer an easy, free way to opt out in every message and gives you no more than three business days to stop sending.
Ask for consent on your sign-up and checkout forms with a separate checkbox that states clearly what the customer is agreeing to. Under the Regulation on Commercial Communication and Commercial Electronic Messages (Ticari İletişim ve Ticari Elektronik İletiler Hakkında Yönetmelik), the box cannot come pre-checked, and giving consent cannot be made a condition of completing the order. Any consent to commercial messages that you collect outside İYS (İleti Yönetim Sistemi, Türkiye’s national system for registering consent to commercial electronic messages) must also be registered in İYS within three business days; consent that isn’t registered is treated as invalid.
Win back abandoned carts and customers waiting for a restock
Even once you have reduced the obstacles on your site, some carts will still be left unfinished. A phone call, a meeting or another browser tab may have interrupted the customer. A short WhatsApp message sent a while after the customer leaves without completing the order gives them a reason, and a link, to come back to their shopping. How long to wait before the reminder goes out is covered in our guide to timing your cart messages. You can decide whether to include a discount code in the message using the margin calculation in our article on discount codes for abandoned carts. Count the orders that come from the reminder separately from your other orders; otherwise, at the end of the month you won’t be able to see what the flow has earned you.
A sold-out product is an unfinished sale too; the customer just never got the chance to add it to the cart. Writing “Sold out” and leaving it at that, or taking the product page down, loses you that demand. Keep the page live, offer a “Let me know when it’s back in stock” option and let the customer choose the size or color they are waiting for. With Pushouse’s WhatsApp back-in-stock alerts module, customers don’t have to sign up for an account to leave their number. The alert goes out only when the exact size or color they want is available again.
If you can see how many people are waiting for each size, that list is also data for your purchasing plans. When 40 people are waiting for size 38 of a particular style, ask your supplier for more of that size in your next order. You can check what to put in the notification, and what to leave out, against the examples in our article on back-in-stock notification messages.
Invite members who haven’t ordered yet to make their first purchase
Someone who has signed up but never ordered already knows your store and has left their contact details, but hasn’t taken the first step. To see how big this group is, match the people who signed up in the last six months against your order records. Take the number of members who still haven’t placed a single order more than two weeks after signing up, and divide it by the total number of people who signed up in the same period. It wouldn’t be right to give a one-size-fits-all target for this rate, but if it rises from month to month, you may not be giving customers a good enough reason to shop in the first days after they sign up.
Weigh the cost of your first-order offer against that customer’s later orders, not against a single order. A 10% discount on the first order turns into a small acquisition cost if the customer goes on to shop with you three more times a year. Don’t message the customer straight after sign-up; first give them a reasonable amount of time to come back to the site on their own. In the WhatsApp first-purchase incentive module, you decide how long that waiting period is.
State the terms of the offer clearly in the message. Article 5 of Law No. 6563, which sets out the principles of commercial communication, requires that in a promotion involving a discount or a gift, the customer can easily find the conditions for taking part and benefiting, and can understand them in a way that leaves no room for doubt. Make sure the message states the minimum order amount and the last day the code is valid:
Hi {{customer name}}, thanks for signing up with {{store name}}. Here is a 10% discount code for your first order: {{discount code}}. The code works on orders of 600 TL and above and expires at 23:59 on {{end date}}. New season products: {{link}}. If you’d rather not get promotional messages, a tap on the button below this message is all it takes.
Word the opt-out sentence in the example to match the button or phrase that the system you send messages through actually recognizes; before you make the template available to customers, send it to your own number and check that tapping the button takes you off the list. If you are a merchant (tacir), the Regulation on commercial messages also requires your MERSİS number (your registration number in Türkiye’s Central Registry Record System) and your trade name to appear in the header or the body of the message; check with a lawyer how to include these details in the template.
Don’t leave the second order to chance
The decision to order a second time begins with how the first order was delivered. A customer who learns that their order has been received, that it has shipped and where it is, without having to ask, has already seen what to expect by the time they place a second order. Send the customer the tracking number and tracking link on the day the order is handed to the carrier; your support line will get fewer “Where’s my order?” questions. Then set up two separate flows, depending on how often your products are bought again.
For products that get used up, remind customers when it’s time to buy again
With products such as coffee, pet food, skincare or detergent, the need comes back at regular intervals. Don’t guess the interval; work it out from your order data. For customers who have bought the same product at least twice, note how many days passed between their two orders and take the middle value, known as the median. If the median comes out at 32 days, for example, about half of the customers who buy the product again do so before 32 days are up. Setting the reminder for day 27 or 28 gives you a better chance of reaching customers who haven’t reordered yet before their current supply runs out; remove from the list anyone who has already bought the same product again by that day. Launch your first WhatsApp reorder reminder flow with a single product group; as you move on to other groups, calculate the median for each one separately.
Hi {{customer name}}, your {{product name}} from {{store name}}, bought on {{order date}}, may be running low. You can find the same product here: {{product link}}. If you’d prefer not to receive these reminders, you can tap the button below this message.
Keep each message to one product and one link; the customer shouldn’t have to search your site for the product again. If the product’s packaging has changed or the product has been discontinued, check that the link goes to the right page before you send. When a new product has taken its place, rewrite the message to mention the new one.
Give customers who haven’t been back in a while their own message
Categories such as clothing, home goods or gifts have no regular replenishment cycle. Even so, the time since a customer’s last order is a sign of whether they are starting to drift away. In our guide to customer groups to keep separate in campaign messages, we explain how many days to wait before moving customers who haven’t ordered for a long time into a separate group. When you pull this audience from your order export, write the definition in concrete terms, for example “customers who have shopped at least twice but haven’t ordered for four months.” Set up the win-back message as a WhatsApp We Miss You flow, separate from the replenishment reminder for regularly bought products, so that the same customer doesn’t get messages from both flows in the same week.
Hi {{customer name}}, it’s {{store name}}. Since your last order, we’ve added new products to our {{category name}} section. Take a look here if you like: {{link}}. If you’d rather not receive promotional messages, you can tap the button below this message.
Before you add a discount to a win-back message, look at why the customer drifted away. If their last order involved a return, a delayed delivery or a complaint that went unanswered, a discount code won’t fix that problem. Ask about that order first, and save the offer for a later message.
Test each change on its own
Roll out changes one at a time; when two changes go live together, you can’t separate their effects. Open a simple spreadsheet and record four things for each change: the date, what you changed, which rate you expect it to affect and what that rate was over the four weeks before the change. If you added delivery times to the product page, look at the product-page-to-cart rate; if you turned on guest checkout, look at the checkout-to-order rate. Don’t use total revenue as your yardstick; revenue also moves with campaigns, the season and your ad budget.
For automated messages, track two figures side by side: the number of orders that come in after a message and the number of people who ask to leave the list. Some of the orders that arrive after a message might have come in even if it had never been sent. If you can, hold the message back from a small part of the list and compare the order rates of the two groups; the difference gives a more realistic picture of the extra orders the message brings in. When opt-outs climb fast while orders rise, the timing, frequency or wording of the message is wearing customers out.
Track your repeat purchase rate in groups based on the month of each customer’s first order. Compare the 90-day rate of customers who placed their first order in January with that of customers who first ordered in April, and the effect of your replenishment and win-back messages shows up far more clearly than in a single monthly revenue figure.
Add one more column to the spreadsheet: whether you changed anything else in the same weeks, such as prices, a campaign or the ad budget. If you did, wait for the next clean week before reading anything into that rate. With small weekly order numbers, don’t treat a swing of a few percentage points as a result; look for a change that holds in the same direction for several weeks. Once you have filled in the spreadsheet for a few months, you can write to us through our contact form if you’d like to go through the figures together.
