The ultimate guide to optimizing digital experience on retail sites

With customer acquisition costs on the rise and attention spans shrinking, the stakes are exceptionally high for retail sites. Winning and keeping customer attention is a continuous challenge.

Your digital experience isn't just a convenience; it's often the primary differentiator in a crowded market. While many businesses strive for exceptional customer experience, traffic on retail sites dropped by 5% from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024, and conversions by -6.2%. 

Earlier this year, we released our 2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks. Our Retail dataset covered:

• 64 countries

• 238 billion page views

• 49 billion sessions

• 2,400 websites

• 11 verticals

The insights we drew from our report will provide you with a comprehensive overview of the behavioral trends and challenges impacting the digital customer experience on retail sites.

This guide is your instruction manual for tackling these challenges. It's built on insights from leading brands and leverages Contentsquare's comprehensive platform to help you decode user behavior, build better experiences, and drive tangible business outcomes. 

Whether you're an ecommerce manager, a UX lead, a growth marketer, or a product manager, this guide offers insights to empower your team.

🥵 Top challenges facing retail teams in 2025

Understanding the landscape is the first step to conquering it. Here are the key hurdles retail teams are facing, along with crucial data to put them in perspective:

Traffic is dropping

SEO is more competitive than ever, and paid is more expensive. You need better intent signals and smarter targeting.

• Traffic to retail sites dropped by 5% in 2024. Some industries saw even steeper declines, with home goods and furnishings traffic down by 14.4% and consumer electronics by 11.8%.

• Organic traffic fell by 8.6% in 2024, leading to increased reliance on paid channels. Paid traffic accounted for 47.9% of overall retail site traffic last year, up from 45% in 2023.

• This shift meant higher costs: the cost per visit climbed by 12% in 2024 and 26% over the past two years, largely due to a 13.2% increase in ad spend.

• Despite this investment, paid social traffic, which rose by 12%, often proved inefficient for brands heavily increasing its share (+21%), resulting in 9.2% higher bounce rates, 8.7% fewer page views, and 10.6% lower conversion rates.

• The majority of retail site traffic (75.9%) came from mobile devices in 2023, with desktop accounting for 24.1%.

Potential buyers don’t engage with content and bounce faster

Engagement and content consumption are critical in getting users to convert and come back. Identify what your top buyers engage with and eliminate what they ignore.

• Over 60% of visitors drop off without exploring more than one page.

• Overall content consumption, measured by session depth, time spent on site, and scroll rate, fell by 5% in 2024.

• New visitors consistently consume less content and exit faster compared to returning visitors; in 2024, new visitors spent almost a minute less and viewed almost a page less.

• Product Detail Pages (PDPs) had the highest bounce rate at 60.7% and exit rate at 41.7% among all landing pages.

Friction is neglected because it’s not easily uncovered

Users rarely report issues. Tools like Session Replay and frustration signals can help surface blockers.

• While overall frustration in retail experiences decreased by 1.7% in 2024, it still impacts 41% (more than 1 in 3) of visits.

• Specifically, JavaScript errors caused frustration in 20.5% of retail sessions, and load time frustration impacted 15.6%.

• Rage clicks – rapid, frustrated clicking – were observed in 5.4% of retail sessions.

• Core Web Vitals performance is also a concern: only 31.5% of retail sites have a good Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and 30.6% a good Interaction to Next Paint (INP). More than a quarter (25.7%) need improvement or are poor (4.3%) regarding Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).

Conversions are dropping even faster than traffic

Fewer users visit retail sites, and among those, fewer still actually buy. Understand what’s preventing them from making a purchase and give them a reason to.

• An average of 70% of online carts are abandoned.

• Overall conversion rates dropped by 6.1% in 2024. New customer conversion fell by 7.4%, and returning customer conversion fell by 6.4%.

• Paid social traffic notably converts poorly, with its conversion rate dropping by 11.9% to 0.52%.

• Session depth is strongly tied to conversion; websites that increased their session depth by 10% or more in 2024 saw 5.4% higher conversion rates.

Retention is one the low, with most customers being one-time buyers 

Retention relies heavily on emotional connection and post-purchase UX. Both are often neglected.

• The 30-day retention rate for retail in Q4 2024 was 5.7% for both desktop and mobile.

• When measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) on retail sites, 12.8% of customers were detractors, while 68% were promoters.

• Sites with the highest retention rates show 18% more page views per visit and experience 17% fewer rage clicks per page view, underscoring the link between engaging, frustration-free experiences and repeat visits.

📈 Retail Trends in 2025 and Beyond

Here's a look at what's shaping the future of retail:

The rise of AI-powered personalization

AI is not just a buzzword; it's a value-driving investment that's reshaping the marketing technology (MarTech) industry. 

AI analyzes user behavior in real-time and dynamically adjusts content and offers, significantly boosting conversion rate optimization (CRO) and average order value (AOV). It enables marketers to personalize and optimize experiences at scale, tailoring content, recommendations, and customer journeys to be relevant for every user at every touchpoint.

Zero-party data strategies

Brands are increasingly relying on voluntary user input and onsite behavior rather than just cookies. 

The shift towards understanding what users want and their true intent is becoming critical, especially as search behaviors are disrupted by AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, making organic traffic harder to earn and track.

Mobile-first, but not mobile-only

Mobile devices dominated retail traffic in 2024, accounting for 77% of traffic share and generating 56.3% of revenue for retailers. 

However, mobile visitors tend to engage in shorter "micro visits" that are less likely to convert compared to desktop. Desktop conversion remains strong, especially for higher-ticket items, highlighting the need for optimization across all devices.

Frictionless checkout as a differentiator

Customers now expect features like ‘buy now, pay later’, wallet integrations, and one-click checkout. 

Addressing friction points in the checkout process can lead to significant gains, as seen with Orvis, which increased cart conversion by 5% by fixing issues in its checkout journey, and Space NK, which saw a 30% increase in checkout conversion.

Unified CX across touchpoints

Today's shopper journeys are rarely linear, spanning multiple devices and sessions. Retailers are integrating digital data with in-store insights to create seamless hybrid experiences. A well-integrated system is crucial for efficiency and data quality. 

Contentsquare provides a single source of truth, combining quantitative and qualitative data to help teams gain a comprehensive view of the customer journey.

⚒️ Top Tools to Optimize Your Retail Experience

These essential tools help retail teams understand, improve, and scale digital experiences that convert and retain customers.

Contentsquare

Contentsquare (hi there 👋) is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform designed to provide easily digestible insights for anyone focused on digital journeys. It captures entire user journeys without manual tagging, helping you get a deep understanding of customer behavior and identify friction points. 

AI-powered insights deliver those "aha!" moments needed to provide the right experiences, allowing you to work faster and smarter.

Contentsquare helps you reduce time to insights and action, improve content efficiency and ROI, understand and quantify the business impact of issues, and democratize insights across teams. The platform offers a robust suite of tools including:

• Session Replay: Allows you to watch exact user interactions on your site or app, perfect for fixing bugs and understanding user frustration.

• Heatmaps: Provide visual insights into user interactions, showing where users click, move, and scroll, and how different page elements perform against various metrics.

• Journey Analysis: Helps you understand the typical paths users take, segment high-value actions, and identify effective journeys to replicate.

• Funnel Analysis: Allows you to identify where users abandon high-intent journeys and optimize to remove blockers preventing conversion.

• Error Analysis and Speed Analysis: Helps detect errors, slowdowns, and frustrations in real-time, allowing you to find and fix issues proactively before they impact customers.

• Product Analytics: Powered by Heap, this capability helps you understand user behavior from acquisition to retention across multiple sessions, channels, and devices, offering a broad view of user behavior over time.

• Voice of Customer: Collects direct feedback from your customers through user interviews, user tests, and AI-powered surveys and analyzes responses for sentiment, topic, and keywords, linking feedback to actual user behavior through session replays.

• Sense AI: Contentsquare’s AI agent that helps you get instant insights by asking questions in natural language, surfacing key issues, opportunities, and trends.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

This tool is essential for traffic and conversion tracking, offering robust audience segmentation and event-based insights. Contentsquare integrates with GA4, allowing you to seamlessly bring your GA4 audiences into Contentsquare for enhanced analysis.

Optimizely

A powerful platform for A/B testing and experimentation, Optimizely helps you fine-tune site elements and boost performance with data-backed decisions. Contentsquare complements tools like Optimizely by providing rich behavioral data to inform test hypotheses, understand why tests win or lose, and transform losing tests into winning experiences.

Klaviyo

An email and SMS automation platform that helps reduce cart abandonment, re-engage shoppers, and increase retention.

Gorgias

An ecommerce-focused customer service platform designed to centralize support across chat, email, and social to improve the post-purchase experience.

💡 Tip: Combining tools like Contentsquare, GA4, and platforms for marketing automation and customer service provides retail teams with a clear, holistic picture of the full user journey—before, during, and after conversion. This unified approach, facilitated by solutions like Contentsquare's Data Connect, allows you to blend behavioral, performance, and error data with other business data sources for deeper, more actionable insights.

⚡ 5 quick wins you can implement today

You can take action right now with these small changes that drive big results, all powered by Contentsquare's behavioral insights:

1. Simplify your homepage CTAs (one clear goal per page): Ambiguous or multiple calls to action can confuse users. Use Contentsquare’s Zoning Analysis to pinpoint which CTAs genuinely attract clicks and engagement. This feature lets you break down your page into sections and analyze their performance across various metrics, helping you optimize for maximum impact.

2. Highlight product benefits in the first scroll: Users often don't scroll far. Leverage scroll maps (part of Contentsquare Heatmaps) to identify where users drop off and what content is seen versus ignored. Ensure essential information, like product images and average review scores, is visible above the fold to capture attention immediately.

3. Add back-in-stock or urgency messaging to Product Listing Pages (PLPs): When a product is popular, you can leverage that interest even if it's out of stock. Analyze product listing behavior using Contentsquare's Merchandising module to prioritize high-interest SKUs. This add-on product helps you monitor and analyze product, category, and brand performance, informing your promotional strategies.

4. Run a friction audit on mobile checkout: Mobile visitors are prone to frustration. Use Session Replays and frustration score to surface taps, errors, and rage clicks. Session Replay allows you to see exactly what went wrong from the user's perspective, while the Frustration Score highlights the level of difficulty users encounter, helping you prioritize fixes that will make the biggest difference. Contentsquare’s Experience Monitoring capabilities can also help surface technical issues impacting mobile user experience, such as API errors or crashes.

5. Use scroll depth and rage click data to revise PDP layout: Product Detail Pages are crucial for conversion but often have high bounce and exit rates. Combine Journey Analysis with Heatmaps to understand how users interact with your PDPs and optimize their structure. If users are repeatedly clicking on non-clickable elements (rage clicks) or dropping off prematurely, these tools will reveal those pain points, guiding you to create more engaging and intuitive layouts.

📈 How top retail brands are winning

Top retailers are already using these strategies to achieve impressive results:

• Space NK notably increased checkout conversion by 30%. They discovered that users who clicked product reviews had a much higher add-to-bag rate, so they increased interactions with the 'Review Stars' by altering their color and updating call-to-action copy, which led to significant conversion gains.

• DFS saw a 9% reduction in site-wide bounce rate and a 20% reduction in site load time by implementing Contentsquare's Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) on their front-end replatform. This highlights how fixing technical issues directly improves user experience and business metrics.

• INKEY successfully optimized its interactive skincare analysis tool, "Breakout Analyzer Pro," using Contentsquare's Zone-based heatmaps. This allowed them to implement UX optimizations, such as rearranging high-attractiveness elements and identifying bugs in calls-to-action, to drive engagement. 

• CAMILLA, a luxury fashion brand, significantly increased their mobile average order value (up to +15% in the EU) and "Add to Cart" rates by leveraging Contentsquare's Experience Monitoring. They identified user friction related to the 'Add to Cart' button and JavaScript errors causing issues with removing items from carts, addressing these problems quickly.

• Cotton On Group refined their acquisition strategies by building Contentsquare dashboards to analyze website performance across acquisition channels. This helped them identify channels attracting customers with a higher propensity for loyalty and repeat purchases, improving their retention and satisfaction rates.

• ASOS drives customer loyalty through personalization, using Contentsquare data to understand individual tastes and predict wants. They send tailored emails spotlighting brands users are likely to enjoy, moving beyond traditional loyalty programs to boost returning customer numbers.

• Wolverine Worldwide utilized Contentsquare's AI analytics to optimize a high-exit 404 error page, resulting in a 32% reduction in exit rates and a 22% decrease in bounce rates, saving £10,000 in projected lost revenue annually. This demonstrates the power of AI to identify and resolve subtle friction points.

🤝 Contentsquare: your ally in digital experience optimization

Contentsquare empowers you to improve digital experiences on retail site, helping you achieve your goals. In the next chapters of this guide, you’ll learn how to: 

• 🔍 attract the right potential buyers: increase traffic and its quality quality

• ✨ engage your site visitors: boost engagement & interaction with your page

• ⚠️ unblock visitors willing to buy: reduce friction and drop-off

• 🛒 convert browsers into buyers: turn purchase intent into purchases

• 💌 retain your customers: keep customers coming back and increase CLV

Improving your retail site's digital experience is like fine-tuning a symphony orchestra. Each section—traffic, engagement, frustration, conversion, and retention—must play in harmony. Contentsquare provides the conductor's score, allowing you to see every instrument's performance, identify dissonant notes, and bring them into perfect alignment, creating a beautiful and profitable customer experience.