Focusing on your overall conversion rate is probably the biggest waste of time in ecommerce. That single number is a blended average of every person who visits your site, and as Sabir Semerkant puts it on the 2X eCommerce Podcast, it's a generic number that has no real meaning. Obsessing over it is a classic case of premature optimization, and it actively distracts you from the levers that actually grow your business.
The common advice for conversion rate optimization is a tactical playbook. You'll hear about moving buttons, changing their color, testing new headlines, or removing fields from your checkout page. Nik Sharma and Moiz Ali ran through a whole list of these on Limited Supply. This advice isn't necessarily wrong, and these small wins can add up. But it’s a bottom-of-the-funnel activity that completely ignores the much bigger questions of who is arriving on your site and why they came in the first place.
The problem with a blended rate is that it hides the truth. Imagine you have a 10% conversion rate from your loyal email list and a 0.5% conversion rate from a new TikTok ads campaign. Your Shopify dashboard might show an average of 2%, which sounds okay. But that 2% is lying to you. The real story is that your email is performing incredibly well and your TikTok traffic is either unqualified, seeing the wrong landing page, or has completely different expectations. Lumping them together prevents you from doubling down on what's working and fixing what's broken.
Claus Lauter made a crucial point on the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast: you have to fix your conversion before you can scale your traffic. If your rate is below a certain threshold, like 2%, pouring more money into ads is just burning cash. You can’t optimize your way out of a traffic quality problem. The first step of CRO isn't on your website at all; it's in your ad platform. Are you targeting the right audience? Does your ad creative set the right expectation for the landing page experience? Fixing this is far more impactful than any A/B testing you could run.
Instead of chasing a site-wide metric, you should treat CRO as a diagnostic process. As Jesse Hanley discussed on Ecommerce Exits, the goal is to understand and reduce customer anxiety. It’s about mapping the customer journey and seeing where the friction is, not just trying things at random. Experts like Jon MacDonald, who appeared on both Amazon Legends and The eCom Ops Podcast, advocate for a more scientific approach based on data-driven hypotheses. This means looking at heatmaps, session recordings, and analytics to form an educated guess about why users are dropping off before you decide what to test.
Ultimately, you need to re-frame the goal. Don't ask how to improve your conversion rate. Instead, ask how you can improve the session value from Google, from organic search, or from your email list. That forces you to think about the entire funnel for each channel, from targeting to messaging to a tailored on-site experience. When you get that right, the overall conversion rate takes care of itself.