How to Increase Ecommerce Sales in 2026: 12 Fixes That Hold Up

Quick answer: To increase ecommerce sales, start by plugging the leaks you're already paying for. Simplify your checkout page, show shipping costs early, speed up your ecommerce site on mobile devices, and get positive reviews onto your product pages. Then work on average order value with bundles and upsells, and on repeat business with post purchase emails and a reason to come back. You probably don't need more traffic. You need to stop losing the traffic you've got.

You've read the lists. "Offer free shipping." "Add urgency." "Use social proof." None of it is wrong, exactly, but it all gets written as though every online store sells the same thing to the same people at the same price. Some of these tips have actually been tested by researchers, and a few of them only help under fairly specific conditions. One of them reliably reduces sales in normal trading, which is awkward, because it turns up on practically every listicle you'll find.

So this guide sticks to the proven strategies that hold up, roughly in the order I'd tackle them, and where there's real research on a tactic I've said what it found even when that contradicts the usual advice.

Start by finding where the money's leaking

Get three numbers in front of you before you change anything.

1. Your conversion rate tells you what share of visitors become paying customers.

2. Your cart abandonment rate tells you how many people wanted to buy and gave up.

3. Your repeat purchase rate tells you whether anyone comes back.

Between them they'll point at your problem. If conversion rates are low across the board, look at your product pages or your prices. If people add to cart and then vanish, it's your checkout. If everything converts fine but nobody returns, you've got a retention problem, and paid ads won't fix it because you'll just keep renting new customers.

That's the whole ecommerce sales strategy in one move: find where customer journeys break, then fix that break. It's tempting to skip the diagnosis and start applying tactics at random, and an ecommerce store can stay busy for a long time that way without selling any more than it did last year. Pick the worst number and start there.

1. Fix your checkout before you touch anything else

This is the least glamorous work in ecommerce and it pays better than almost anything else you could do this month.

Baymard Institute pooled 50 studies and puts the average cart abandonment rate at 70.22%. You've seen that number before, usually attached to something someone was selling. The more useful part is the breakdown of why people leave. In that same research, about 42% of abandoners were only browsing, and you're not going to win those. Among everyone else, the reasons stack up like this:

Why shoppers drop out of checkout

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Source: Baymard Institute, reasons for abandonment excluding shoppers who were only browsing.

Hardly any of that is a marketing problem. It's shipping costs appearing at step four, a mandatory account nobody asked for, and a form with eleven fields where five would do.

So turn on guest checkout today, show the full cost including shipping before anyone reaches the payment step, and cut every form field you can't justify. Put your trust signals somewhere visible too, given that roughly one in five people walked away because they didn't trust the site with their card. We've covered checkout optimization in more depth if you want the full walkthrough, and there's a broader list of conversion fixes worth working through after.

2. Free shipping works, but probably not the way you've been told

The standard advice is that offering free shipping will boost sales, and since extra costs are the top reason people abandon carts, the logic seems airtight. Then some researchers ran an actual experiment and it got more complicated.

A 2025 field experiment in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management by Xueming Luo, Le Wang, Qingsheng Wu and Takeshi Moriguchi tested free shipping against free returns on a live retail platform. The results split along customer lines. Free returns did better with younger shoppers, people newer to the platform, and higher-priced products. Free shipping did better with older customers, longer-tenured ones, and cheaper items.

So the right answer depends on what you sell and who your target customers are. If your product costs enough that people hesitate over whether it'll suit them, free returns removes the fear that's blocking the sale, and shipping was never really the issue. If you sell lower-priced goods to a settled base of existing customers, free shipping is the move worth pulling.

It's worth knowing what the rest of retail is up to here. Deloitte's 2026 Retail Industry Outlook, based on a survey of C-suite executives run through late 2025, found 67% of retail executives expect to raise their free-shipping threshold this year, with 95% bracing for higher costs. Free shipping is getting more expensive to offer and your competitors are quietly moving the goalposts. If you're going to compete on it, do it deliberately, and set the threshold just above your current average order value so it pulls basket size up rather than only costing you margin.

3. Treat your return policy as a sales tool

If your return policy reads like it was written to protect you from your own customers, it's costing you money. Lenient returns lower the risk a shopper feels at the moment of purchase, and the research is fairly consistent that they bring in more sales than they cost in returns.

There's a second effect that gets almost no attention, though. A study in the Journal of Business Logistics by Sebastián García-Dastugue, Rahul Nilakantan, Carl Marcus Wallenburg and Shashank Rao looked at 3,949 transactions from an online retailer and found that more generous return windows produced better reviews. Higher ratings, yes, but also longer and more detailed ones.

Reviews are what convince the next shopper, so a generous return window is buying you better review content on top of the sales it brings in directly. Put the policy where people can find it and state the number of days in plain language on the product page instead of linking off to a legal document.

4. Go easy on the low stock alerts

This next one tends to start arguments. "Only 3 left in stock" appears on every conversion checklist ever written, and it feels obviously right, because scarcity drives action.

Sungho Park, Elliot Rabinovich, Christopher Tang and Rui Yin tested it and published the results in the Journal of Operations Management. In ordinary trading conditions, inventory scarcity messages reduced daily sales from 0.77 to 0.63 units a day, a fall of roughly 18%.

The mechanism explains when the tactic does work. Scarcity messages did shorten the gap between purchases for slow-moving items, so people bought sooner. But shoppers also bought smaller quantities when they did buy, presumably because the message suggested they couldn't get more later. For anything customers normally buy several of, the smaller basket wiped out the gain and then some. The authors concluded that applying low stock alerts across a whole catalogue produces worse results than not bothering, and that they work best during genuine flash sales with real discounts, on slow-moving products people buy one at a time.

Use them surgically, then. Real limited runs, real flash sales, one-per-customer items. Take them off your everyday catalogue and definitely take them off anything people buy in multiples. If you're running countdown timers alongside, make sure the deadline is a real one, because shoppers have seen enough fake urgency to spot it.

5. Make your product pages do the selling

Your product page is where the decision happens, and it's probably doing less work than it could.

High quality images matter more than anything else on it, because online shoppers can't pick the thing up. Show scale. Show it in use. Show the parts potential buyers will worry about, like the stitching, the back, the underside, the plug. If you're short on photography budget, an AI photo editor will get you further than another round of stock imagery.

Product descriptions should answer the question the shopper is actually asking, which is some version of "Will this work for me?" Lead with what it does for them and put the specs underneath for the people who want them, since both audiences land on the same page needing different things.

Then there's the supporting cast, which matters more than it looks when you optimize product pages.

• A specification table covering dimensions, materials, weight, compatibility and what's in the box, because shoppers scan those and so do AI shopping assistants, which increasingly send high-intent traffic.

• Structured data marking up price, availability and ratings so search engines and assistants can read the page properly.

• Sizing and fit guidance, which cuts returns and protects the margin you're working so hard to build.

• And plain answers to the obvious objections right there on the page: shipping time, return window, what happens if it breaks.

Personalised recommendations belong here too. Showing related products based on customer behaviour, either through your platform's built-in engine or an AI recommendation tool, lifts conversion and basket size together. Base it on what someone is browsing rather than on everything you happen to know about them.

Beware of the hyper personalization drawbacks though. We've tapped into it in our ecommerce marketing guide for 2026.

6. Speed, especially on phones

A large share of your traffic is on mobile devices, and mobile shopping is where a slow site does the most damage. Someone on a phone is often somewhere else doing something else, with less patience than they'd have at a desk.

Mobile optimization starts with making sure your site loads quickly, and under three seconds is a sensible target. Compress your images and serve them in modern formats. Use a content delivery network so people far from your server aren't punished for the distance. Get rid of the apps and scripts you installed once and forgot about, which is where the weight tends to accumulate.

Then go and buy something from your own ecommerce website on your phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi. It can be a humbling exercise and you might find at least two things worth fixing. If you'd rather start from a foundation that's already quick, our page speed setup handles most of this by default.

7. Let other customers do the convincing

People trust other shoppers more than they trust you. That has nothing to do with your brand, it's just how buying works when you can't handle the product first.

Get reviews onto your best sellers before you worry about the rest of the catalogue, since twenty products with solid review counts will do more for sales than a thin scattering across two hundred. Ask by email a sensible interval after delivery, once your customers have used the thing, and make saying yes a single click. Satisfied customers generally will.

Photos from real buyers are worth chasing harder than star ratings alone. User generated content shows the product in rooms and on people who look like your target audience, which does something a studio shot can't.

Two things are easy to get wrong here.

The first is where your reviews live: render them as regular text on the page rather than inside an embedded widget, because if they sit in an iframe, search engines and AI assistants often can't read them, and you've hidden your best selling material from the systems sending you traffic.

The second is how you handle criticism. Reply to the bad reviews publicly and without getting defensive. A product page carrying a few critical reviews with sensible replies underneath tends to convert better than one showing a flawless five stars.

8. Answer questions before they turn into abandoned carts

Someone shopping online lands on a product page with a specific question, can't find the answer in ten seconds, and leaves. In your analytics that looks like an ordinary bounce, so the problem never surfaces.

Live chat fixes a surprising amount of it. A shopper who gets an answer in under a minute tends to buy, and the same shopper left to hunt through a FAQ page tends not to. If staffing real-time chat isn't realistic, a well-built chatbot handling your top twenty questions will cover most of the volume, with a handoff to email for anything unusual.

Pay attention to what people ask, because those questions are free product page research. If four people a week want to know whether it fits through a standard doorway, that measurement belongs on the page.

All of this rolls up into customer satisfaction. A seamless shopping experience means someone can find, understand, buy and receive your product without needing to contact you, and can reach a human easily when something does go wrong. Fast and decent support cuts abandoned carts and gets people ordering a second time.

9. Set up the emails once and let them run

Email is where repeat sales come from, and the useful part is that four automated flows do most of the work once you've built them.

Abandoned cart. The obvious one, and still the highest-earning. Send within an hour while intent is warm.

Welcome. Someone just signed up, which is the most attention you'll ever have. Tell them what you're good at and give them a reason to buy now.

Post purchase emails. These are the ones that get skipped, and they're the ones that build customer lifetime value. Confirm the order, help them use the product well, ask for the review, then suggest what goes with it.

Winback. Sixty to ninety days quiet, one honest email. Cheaper than acquiring anyone new.

Personalizing these by what someone bought, rather than sending everyone the same message, is the biggest lift available in email. It keeps customers engaged without increasing send volume, and customer engagement is what stops a list going stale.

Add SMS marketing for the time-sensitive messages if your customers are the sort who'd welcome it. Shipping updates and genuine flash sales are fine. Anything beyond that and you'll burn the channel fast. There's more detail in our ecommerce email marketing guide, and the automation setup covers the flows themselves.

10. Sell more to the people already buying

Raising average order value is the quietest way to increase sales, because it costs you nothing in acquisition. The customer is already there with a card out.

Order bumps at the checkout page are the easiest place to start, offering the small obvious companion item. One tick box, no new decision to agonise over.

One-click upsells come next, after the purchase is confirmed. The buyer has already committed, the payment step is gone, and a relevant offer at that moment converts far better than the same offer earlier in the sales funnel. We've written up the upsell moments worth catching if you want specifics, plus a broader set of upselling techniques.

Product bundles round it out, especially ones that solve a whole problem rather than selling a single component of it. Bundles also give you a clean way to shift slower stock without discounting your hero product. And if you set your free shipping threshold a little above your current average order, it'll do some of this work for you, which loops back to the shipping decision in section two.

11. Turn buyers into regulars

The second purchase is the one that matters. Someone who buys twice is far more likely to buy a third time, and your acquisition cost on them is zero.

Loyalty programs help, though often not for the reason people assume. What you're really buying is a reason to come back, plus the customer data you collect along the way. The discount is secondary. Reward customers with early access, better shipping, or something genuinely useful before you reach for another percentage off, because discounts mostly train people to wait for discounts. Perks encourage customers to return on their own schedule, and that habit is what customer loyalty looks like. Brand loyalty grows out of being worth returning to.

If what you sell gets used up, a subscription option is the strongest customer retention tool available, and it turns an unpredictable business into a forecastable one.

A lot of this is just customer experience. Be pleasant to deal with when something goes wrong: fast replies, easy returns, no arguing over small amounts. It rarely shows up in a marketing report, and it does more than any campaign to turn first-time buyers into loyal customers and build the long term customer relationships an ecommerce business runs on.

12. Then, and only then, go get more traffic

Traffic sits last on this list deliberately, because buying more visitors for a store that leaks just costs you more per leak.

Once the fundamentals hold, the digital marketing channels worth your time are much the same as always. Search engine optimization on your category and product pages compounds and keeps paying long after the work is done, which is why an SEO strategy beats paid ads on lifetime economics even though it's slower to start. Paid ads buy you speed and let you test messaging quickly. Social media platforms and influencer marketing get you in front of potential customers who've never heard of you, and creator content often makes better ads than anything produced in-house.

Whatever your marketing strategy ends up looking like, track it in your own analytics rather than in each platform's dashboard. Two channels will happily claim the same order, so judge your marketing efforts on total revenue.

If you've only got a week

Start with guest checkout and shipping costs on the first step, since that's the biggest single leak in most people's numbers. Then test your own store on a phone using mobile data and fix whatever's slow. Put your return window in plain language on every product page. Turn off low stock alerts on anything people buy in multiples. And switch on abandoned cart emails if they aren't already running.

None of that needs a developer or a budget, and for a store that's never been through this exercise it's most of the available upside. Once it's done, work back up the list.

Frequently asked questions

How can I increase ecommerce sales quickly?

Fix your checkout page first. Enable guest checkout, display the full cost including shipping before the payment step, and cut unnecessary form fields. These changes take hours and they target the biggest documented reasons shoppers abandon carts, so they tend to pay back faster than any campaign you could launch.

Does offering free shipping actually increase sales?

Often, but it depends on your customers and products. A 2025 field experiment in Manufacturing & Service Operations Management found free shipping worked better for longer-tenured customers buying lower-priced items, while free returns worked better for younger shoppers and higher-priced products. Test both rather than assuming free shipping is automatically the stronger offer.

Do low stock alerts increase ecommerce sales?

Not in normal trading. Research in the Journal of Operations Management found inventory scarcity messages cut daily sales from 0.77 to 0.63 units, a drop of roughly 18%, because shoppers bought in smaller quantities when they saw them. They work best during genuine flash sales on slow-moving products people buy one at a time.

What's a realistic conversion rate for an online store?

Conversion rates vary so widely by category, price point and traffic source that a single benchmark isn't much use. A store selling $15 consumables and one selling $2,000 furniture should expect completely different numbers. Compare your own funnel instead: look at product page, cart and checkout drop-off, and work on whichever stage leaks worst.

How do I get more repeat purchases?

Focus on the second order. Set up post purchase emails that help people use what they bought, ask for a review at the right moment, and suggest the natural next product. Add a subscription option if your product gets consumed, and make returns and support genuinely easy.

Should I invest in SEO or paid ads to increase sales?

Both, in that order of patience. Paid ads deliver traffic today and let you test what messaging works. SEO takes months and then keeps delivering without ongoing spend. A common approach is to use paid ads to learn quickly and SEO to bring blended acquisition cost down over time.