Plug the 14% of revenue that leaks from every e-commerce site

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A considerable amount of time, effort, and money is spent driving traffic to e-commerce sites. Achieving sales goals is based on simple math: for every, say, 100,000 visitors, 3% convert, spending an average of $100, which generates $300,000 in revenue. From there, a customer acquisition treadmill begins, constantly trying to find a new way to reach the same audience, find new audiences, and get them to click on your site.

But there's a catch: Where visitors land (and how they experience it) has a huge impact on what happens next. Today, 25% of traffic lands directly on the product detail page, something it was never designed to do. As a result, traffic bounces 79% more and converts at just 1.5%, half the rate of all other pages. In total, that's 14% of site revenue from your product pages and $700 billion in lost revenue across the industry. But all is not lost; understanding why consumers bounce leads to practical solutions that e-commerce teams can implement relatively quickly.

To fix this, we need to go back to how we got here and why customers are bouncing off product pages so often.

Believe it or not, we've been working with the same e-commerce funnel concept for over 30 years. Over time, we've optimized e-commerce sites and standardized different page types, bringing familiarity and reassurance to new visitors coming to a brand's site for the first time. Most homepages follow the same basic layout, as do category pages, product detail pages, and checkout flows. This familiarity makes sites intuitive to use and helps buyers to trust the site, which is critically important in converting a browser into a buyer. It works well: out of 100 visitors arriving on the home page, 11 will arrive at the shopping cart and three on average will make a purchase. As mobile commerce has become more and more important, we have adapted these pages to work well on touch screens in portrait mode rather than being designed for desktop use in landscape mode. But aside from adapting to mobile, little has changed in how a typical e-commerce site sales funnel works.

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But now there's a different problem, accelerated by the pandemic: Shoppers are changing the way they buy, and the traditional e-commerce funnel is proving insufficient. Many shopping journeys now start at the periphery, with customers discovering brands and products on social media, not the main e-commerce site. It also means that the beginning of the buying journey is completely different, and customers land on the category and product detail pages halfway through the funnel. These pages were never designed to generate traffic and therefore do not work well for this type of traffic.

We also need to understand why customers are bouncing off product pages so often before we think about fixing it. The product detail page deliberately removes customer distractions, presenting them with everything they need to know about a specific product and a simple call to action...