Conversion optimisation for your webshop: the complete roadmap

According to Becom, Belgians spent 18.3 billion euros on online purchases in 2025, yet most webshop visitors leave without buying. Conversion optimisation is the discipline that changes that: earning more revenue from the visitors you already have, without extra ad budget. In this guide you get the complete roadmap as we apply it at ClickForest to SME webshops in Flanders: which benchmarks you can trust, where you lose the most customers, how to fix the checkout and how to run smart A/B tests as a smaller webshop.

What is conversion optimisation for a webshop?

Conversion optimisation (CRO, conversion rate optimization) is the systematic increase of the percentage of visitors your webshop turns into buyers. You do that with a fixed cycle of measuring, forming hypotheses, testing and implementing. The starting point is always data on where visitors drop off; the result is more revenue from the same traffic.

That last point makes it so interesting for SMEs: you pay again for every ad click, while an improvement to your webshop keeps paying off on every visitor who arrives afterwards, from whatever channel. Conversion optimisation is thereby the lever behind your performance marketing and SEO: the same marketing investment, more results. Want to know first why your webshop underperforms? Then start with our diagnostic guide on why your webshop is not converting.

What is a good conversion rate for a webshop?

Honest answer: the average does not exist, and anyone promising you an exact figure is selling false certainty. Definitions differ (per session or per visitor), sectors differ (food converts differently from furniture) and most published “averages” are outdated copies of each other. More useful are relative patterns from large datasets, and your own conversion rate of the past months as a baseline.

The relative patterns from Contentsquare’s Digital Experience Benchmark 2026 (99 billion sessions across more than 6,000 sites, data from late 2024 to late 2025, so read as direction): desktop converts roughly 74% higher than mobile, returning visitors convert at 2.9% versus 1.7% for new visitors, and of the paid channels, search converted best at 2.8%. Other datasets see it differently: at Dynamic Yield, mobile (2.88%) even converts slightly better than desktop (2.37%). Definitions and customer bases differ, which is exactly why you are best compared against your own figures from last month. Calculating your conversion rate is simple: the number of orders divided by the number of sessions, times one hundred.

What is a conversion optimisation strategy?

A conversion optimisation strategy is a fixed working order: first measure where visitors drop off, then prioritise by impact, and only then change and test. That way you tackle the real problem, without trying out loose tips here and there. The strategy in four steps: measure, prioritise, test, lock in.

1. Measure: get your funnel data in order in GA4 (product page → cart → checkout → order), so you see the loss per step; our GA4 roadmap for Shopify gets you started.
2. Prioritise: fix the step with the biggest loss and the most traffic first. A checkout leak weighs heavier than a homepage detail.
3. Test: change one thing at a time and measure the effect, via an A/B test if your volume allows it (more on that below) or via a before-and-after comparison with sufficient runtime if it does not.
4. Lock in: document what works, roll it out to comparable pages and start again. Conversion optimisation is a rhythm you keep repeating.

Where do you lose the most customers? The figures on abandoned carts

On average 70.22% of online shopping carts are abandoned, the Baymard Institute calculates based on 50 studies (update September 2025). The good news: the reasons are surprisingly consistent and largely fixable. The most recent Baymard survey among American shoppers (indicative for Flanders) gives these top causes, besides the 42% who were just browsing:

Reason to abandon the checkout	Share (US, Baymard)
Extra costs too high (shipping, taxes, fees)	40%
Delivery too slow	20%
No trust to share card details	19%
Mandatory account creation	18%
Checkout too long or too complex	17%
Website errors or crashes	17%
Returns policy unsatisfactory	13%
Total price not visible upfront	12%
Card declined	10%
Too few payment methods	9%

Read that table as your priority list: transparent shipping costs and delivery times, guest checkout, a short ordering process and visible trust signals together solve the majority of the fixable reasons. Baymard estimates that an average large e-commerce site can gain 35.26% more conversion purely from better checkout design; that figure was measured at large players, and the direction also holds for smaller webshops. Abandoned carts that happen anyway you catch with cart abandonment emails: a flow you set up once that then works on every abandoned cart, as we explain in our guide on email marketing automation.

Checkout optimisation: how do you raise your checkout conversion rate?

Your checkout conversion rate is the share of started checkouts that become an order: orders divided by started checkouts, times one hundred. Checkout optimisation raises that rate by making the checkout shorter, more transparent and more trustworthy: show the total price including shipping early, offer a guest checkout, limit the form fields, put Bancontact on top and show reviews, returns info and security labels at the payment moment itself.

On those form fields, Baymard has been crystal clear for years: the average checkout still counted 11.3 fields in 2024, while 8 suffice for most sites. Every redundant field is friction. And on the total price, Baymard co-founder Christian Holst put it aptly, long before the current figures confirmed it again:

“Total cost estimate should be in the cart. During testing, most users would expect to know what would be their checkout cost.”

— Christian Holst, co-founder of the Baymard Institute

A Flemish check that many international guides miss: payment provider Mollie surveyed 2,000 Belgian online shoppers in the summer of 2024. There, 55% drop off because of high shipping costs or taxes and 41% when their favourite payment method is missing, and 73% prefer Bancontact. Keep the names current too: the Payconiq app has been called Bancontact Pay since 16 March 2026, and since 3 March 2026 customers of banks such as ING, KBC and BNP Paribas Fortis can also pay online with Wero in Belgium at webshops that offer it. Slow delivery (20% in Baymard’s US data) is partly solved with pickup points in the checkout.

Running on Shopify? Then activate Bancontact via Shopify Payments and check your measurement right away: since 26 August 2026, script tags on the thank you and order status pages no longer work for stores without a Plus plan either, and Shopify automatically moved stores that did not switch themselves to the new pages. Payments and shipping the Belgian way are covered step by step in our guide on setting up your webshop.

How do you increase your webshop conversion? The quick wins

The fastest gains for a conversion-focused webshop almost always sit in four corners: product pages (photos, stock, shipping info), trust (reviews, returns policy, contact details), speed and mobile. They are modest interventions that touch every visitor, from the first product page to the confirmation, and you need no A/B testing volume for them.

Speed comes with a caveat: the often-cited study that Deloitte carried out for Google (37 European and American brand sites, data from late 2019) found that a 0.1 second faster mobile site went hand in hand with 8.4% more retail conversions and 9.2% higher average order value. It is older research that measures a correlation, so read it as direction: slow webshops sell less, especially on mobile. And do not treat mobile as an afterthought: at Contentsquare, 69.9% of all traffic comes from mobile while desktop converts better there, so that is often where your biggest room for improvement sits; we worked that out separately in our guide on mobile optimisation for e-commerce. Finally, do not forget the average order value: conversion optimisation is about revenue per visitor, and sometimes a higher order value (bundles, free shipping above a threshold) is easier to win than a higher conversion percentage.

Want to know where your webshop leaves the most on the table? ClickForest carries out conversion optimisation for SME webshops in Flanders, from measurement to A/B tests. See our CRO approach or book a no-obligation video call.

How do you set up A/B testing smartly as an SME?

With modesty and discipline: change one thing at a time, measure long enough, and accept that most test ideas fail. The hard lesson from 20 years of experiments at tech companies is that even experts are bad at predicting what works. Ronny Kohavi, who led Microsoft’s experimentation programme, sums it up like this:

“Most who have run controlled experiments in customer-facing websites and applications have experienced this humbling reality: we are poor at assessing the value of ideas.”

— Ronny Kohavi, co-author of “Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments” and former Technical Fellow and Corporate VP at Microsoft

That is why you test, even when you feel sure about an idea. Kohavi’s rule of thumb for big, bold changes:

“if you go for something big, try it out, but be ready to fail 80% of the time.”

— Ronny Kohavi, in Lenny’s Podcast on A/B testing

For a Flemish SME webshop with modest volumes, two practical rules come on top. One: only test where you have enough conversions; with too little volume a reliable test takes months, and then a before-and-after measurement over a longer period is more honest than a pseudo A/B test that looks “significant” after a week. Two: statistical significance is not the same as practical relevance; a tiny difference can be statistically solid and commercially worthless. So aim your testing capacity at the big levers from your funnel data (checkout, product page, price communication), because that is where most of the money is.

How does conversion optimisation work for B2B webshops?

Conversion optimisation for B2B follows the same cycle of measuring, prioritising, testing and locking in, only the conversion looks different. In a B2B webshop it is more often a quote request, a first order in a customer portal or a repeat order than a paid shopping cart. Because there are fewer conversions and the decision takes longer, research weighs more heavily than A/B testing.

So look at the leaks that are typical for business buyers: do regular customers see their own prices right after logging in, can they find a previous order quickly, can they order by item number and pay by invoice? Conversations with your account managers, session recordings of the customer portal and an analysis of where quote forms stall yield more there than button tests. Buyers also increasingly want to handle it themselves: in a Gartner survey of 646 B2B buyers (August and September 2025), 67% preferred a buying experience without a sales rep. Collecting mainly leads? Then also read our guide on LinkedIn marketing for B2B leads or see our approach to lead generation.

What does AI mean for conversion optimisation?

Two things at once: AI becomes a visitor source and an optimisation tool. On the source side, traffic from AI assistants is growing spectacularly (Adobe Analytics measured a 693% year-on-year jump to retail sites during the 2025 US holidays). On the tool side, AI speeds up analysis and personalisation.

On the conversion of that traffic, the datasets contradict each other: in Contentsquare’s benchmark AI traffic converts at 1.3%, lower than most other channels but 55% up on a year earlier, while Adobe saw visitors from AI convert 31% better than visitors from other sources during that holiday period. So measure it in your own GA4. For your priorities this means: treat AI traffic as a growing upper-funnel channel (make sure product data and pages are citable), and use AI tooling to speed up your research; you still make the choices yourself. Salesforce estimates that AI tools influenced over 20% of global online retail sales in that holiday period; a vendor estimate with a stretchy “influenced”, but the direction is clear. How to concretely use personalisation and AI for conversion we worked out in CRO with AI personalisation, and the broader e-commerce picture is in our e-commerce trends for Belgium.

What research do you need for conversion optimisation?

Less than you think. Research for conversion optimisation rests on three layers: a correct measurement (GA4 with a closed funnel), one qualitative research layer (session recordings or heatmaps to see where visitors get stuck) and a test method. More expensive suites only add value once the basics pay off. The order matters more than the brand of the tool.

“Measure everything that needs to be measured. How else do you know you’re improving?”

— Peep Laja, founder of CXL

A practical research menu for an SME webshop: funnel analysis in GA4 (where is the loss the biggest), session recordings of the checkout (what really happens there), a handful of customer interviews or an exit poll (why did you not buy), and a monthly review of your search terms and site searches (what are visitors looking for that you do not offer or do not make findable). In our experience, that already finds the big conversion problems, without extra tooling budget.

Want a more thorough approach? Then follow a research model such as CXL’s ResearchXL, which gathers and analyses data in six steps, from technical analysis and web analytics to surveys and user testing. According to CXL, that process works exactly the same for B2B lead generation, SaaS and e-commerce. No time to do it yourself? Then you can outsource conversion optimisation.

What should you remember about conversion optimisation for your webshop?

Conversion optimisation means earning more revenue from the visitors you already have, through a fixed cycle: measure, prioritise, test, lock in. The figures point the way: 70.22% of shopping carts are abandoned and the top reasons (surprise costs, slow delivery, distrust, mandatory accounts) are all fixable. Compare against your own baseline and test big where your volume allows it.

ClickForest helps SMEs in Flanders with conversion optimisation for their webshop: from funnel measurement and research to A/B tests and structural improvement, always linked to your broader e-commerce approach. Curious where your biggest conversion leak sits? Book a no-obligation video call and we will walk through your funnel together.