Hans Audun works with e-commerce at Frontkom and helps online stores turn traffic into actual sales. He sees the same patterns repeating, and they are more solvable than most people think.
Let us start with what is not the problem.
It is not that customers do not want to buy. It is not that the prices are too high. It is almost never that the products are wrong. And it is rarely that the marketing is failing to reach people.
The average conversion rate for online stores is between two and three percent. For B2B e-commerce it is lower, around 1.8 percent. That means between 97 and 98 percent of everyone who visits an online store buys nothing. And most of them were actually interested.
It is the online store's job to make the purchase decision as easy as possible. A surprising number of stores make it unnecessarily hard.
What is actually stopping customers from buying
Product pages do not answer the real questions. When a customer is considering a product, she is not really interested in the technical specifications. She wants to know if the size will fit, whether delivery will arrive in time, what happens if she wants to return it, and whether other people were happy with their purchase. A product page that answers these questions converts far better than one that does not.
The checkout is too long and too demanding. Baymard Institute, which runs the most respected research on e-commerce experience, has documented that 22 percent of all abandoned purchases are due to a checkout process that is too long or too complicated. Forced account creation is the single biggest cause. It is 2026. People expect to buy as a guest.
Trust signals are placed incorrectly. Security badges, reviews and guarantees work, but only when they are visible at the point in the purchase journey where uncertainty is highest. A review section on the homepage is useful for first-time visitors. A guarantee visible on the product page is useful when the customer is considering the purchase. A simple returns policy visible in the checkout is useful when she is about to click buy.
Mobile experience is not prioritised. Over 60 percent of all global e-commerce traffic comes from mobile. And yet there are online stores where it is noticeably easier and faster to complete a purchase from a desktop than from a phone. That is money going straight out the window.
Conversion optimisation is the most underinvested growth lever in e-commerce
Most online stores spend a large proportion of their marketing budget on getting people to the website. Relatively little is spent on understanding why they do not buy once they are there.
Think about it this way: if your conversion rate is 2 percent and you double it to 4 percent, you have in principle doubled your revenue without spending another penny on traffic. You do not need more visitors. You need to make more of the ones you already have.
That requires insight into what actually happens when people are on your site. Heatmaps, session recordings, A/B testing and systematic analysis of checkout abandonment are the tools. But it starts with taking the question seriously: why are they not buying?
Want to know what your online store's biggest friction points are and which specific actions have the highest potential impact? Frontkom offers a structured review. Get in touch with Hans Audun to find out more.