6 ways ecommerce teams use Sense to turn customer behavior into revenue

Traffic is up. Campaigns are landing. But checkout conversion slipped last week, and nobody can say why. 

The frustrating part is that the answer is already in your data—it’s just scattered across analytics platforms, merchandising reports, session replays, and error logs. 

Traditional ecommerce analytics can tell you what changed, but investigating why can take days. And as time ticks by, a single broken step can lead to hundreds of abandoned carts.

Contentsquare’s AI technology Sense gets you the answers you need faster. In this chapter, you learn six ways ecommerce teams use Sense, from pinpointing where shoppers drop off to monitoring performance automatically, so you can fix what’s costing you revenue now, not after the quarter closes.

Key insights

• Start with a question, not a report. Ask a specific question about a conversion drop, page, or product, and let Contentsquare Sense run the analysis so you get answers fast.

• Checkout isn’t the only step in the funnel that matters. A conversion drop can start early in the journey, long before shoppers reach the payment step. 

• Put a revenue number on every fix. This turns a long to-do list into a prioritized one, and gives you a ranking strategy for developer time and budget. 

• Automate the routine. Scheduled analyses free your team to act on findings rather than wasting time compiling insights.

What can ecommerce teams discover with Sense? 

Most ecommerce questions sound simple. Which products deserve more visibility? What should we fix first? But answering them is tricky because the evidence is spread across too many tools and platforms. 

Here are six questions ecommerce teams often have, and how Contentsquare’s built-in AI technology Sense helps answer each one.

1. Why did conversion or checkout drop, and where are shoppers leaving?

The problem: it’s Monday morning, and conversion is down. Shoppers are still landing on your site, browsing, and adding products to their carts. Then—poof!—they vanish. Your dashboard shows the dip, but not the step or reason, and the cause could be anywhere from a product detail page (PDP) to the final payment screen. 

How Sense helps: get to the root of the problem faster. Simply ask Sense why conversion dropped and where shoppers leave the funnel. 

Sense then searches through your data across Contentsquare’s platform, drawing on tools like Funnel Analysis to pinpoint the exact step, like a specific page in the checkout flow. Then, it pinpoints what frustrates or confuses users, pulling data from Error Analysis, Session Replay, or Heatmaps.

Just click on Sense Analyst and ask questions like: 

• Why did checkout conversion fall this week? 

• Where do mobile shoppers abandon the checkout funnel?

• How do users who complete checkout differ from those who abandon their carts? 

The result: the nerve-wracking phrase ‘conversion dropped’ becomes a specific, fixable issue—like an unresponsive button on a particular page or a form field throwing errors on mobile. 

Get answers to your most pressing ecommerce questions—with visualizations and actionable next steps—with Sense Analyst

2. Which page elements keep shoppers from adding to cart?

The problem: some pages attract plenty of attention but don’t drive action. Shoppers scroll, click around, and leave without adding anything to their carts. But why? Are reviews buried? Is the size guide hard to find? Your current ecommerce analytics don’t reveal which element is to blame.

How Sense helps: in Contentsquare’s Heatmaps, click ‘Analysis summary.’ Sense Chat, our AI assistant, will open automatically to analyze your website page and provide key insights and concrete next steps. 

Then, ask Sense Chat follow-up questions like: 

• Which elements do shoppers ignore?

• Is the add-to-cart button visible and effective on mobile?

• Where do users hesitate and lose interest?

The result: instead of debating button colors or page layouts, you know which elements to fix first (and have the behavioral evidence you need to get buy-in for these changes).

Contentsquare’s AI assistant Sense Chat provides Zoning summaries with key insights and recommendations

💡Pro tip: found a weak spot on a PDP? Use our Dynamic Benchmarks tool to see how top-performing pages handle it. 

Dynamic Benchmarks compares your pages with the pages of top-industry performers built to do the same job, flags feature-level differences (like a wider add-to-cart button or a visible shipping message), and suggests experiments backed by what’s working for others.

And Sense works with Dynamic Benchmarks, too, so you have a built-in assistant to help you interpret the information.

3. Which products offer hidden revenue opportunities?

The problem: you know which pages perform well, but not which products boost or dent revenue. Without that level of visibility, merchandising decisions come down to instinct and last season’s playbook.

How Sense helps: ask Sense Analyst which products or categories create opportunities, and it pulls the answer from Contentsquare Merchandising data: views, clicks, add-to-cart rate, conversion, and revenue contribution per product and category. 

Sense flags which products get plenty of exposure but few sales, and then brings in data from other Contentsquare tools to explain why. Maybe the product sits too low on the page, or an error is blocking the add-to-cart step. 

Ask Sense questions like: 

• Which products have high exposure but low add-to-cart rates? 

• Which products are out of stock but still occupy high-visibility spaces? 

• How did category performance change compared to the previous period? 

The results: see which products deserve a more eye-catching position, which products need a PDP fix, and which categories drive growth. That gives your team the confidence to make strong decisions about product ranking, category layout, and seasonal merchandising. 

With analytical help from Sense, Contentsquare’s Merchandising capability helps you recognize which content drives engagement so you can  optimize your site accordingly

4. Which fixes are worth the most revenue?

The problem: spotting an issue is one thing. Getting it fixed is another. Your team has a long list of possible fixes and a limited number of developer hours—and stakeholders who want proof before they approve more budget. 

How Sense helps: ask Sense Analyst which issues matter most. Not only will it find problems on your site, but it will use Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification to put a number on them. 

Impact Quantification compares situations—such as users who ran into an issue, say a payment error, with users who didn’t. Then, it estimates the missed conversions and revenue tied to that gap, and you can test scenarios, like ‘What happens if affected shoppers convert 25% more often?’ Sense Analyst brings it all together so you can see which fix has the biggest potential payoff. 

Prioritize fixes by revenue impact with Impact Quantification

Ask questions like: 

• Which checkout issues are costing us the most revenue? 

• Which mobile product pages have the most opportunity to improve?

• What is the revenue impact of improving our mobile add-to-cart rate? 

The result: you walk into the conference room with a ranked list instead of a hunch. Your team knows which fix to tackle first, and the C-suite sees the revenue at stake, making it easier to secure the time and budget to fix it. 

5. What do your most valuable shoppers do differently?

The problem: some shoppers check out with a single item, while others fill their carts with add-ons and bundles. But you can’t tell what sets the two groups apart, so you build product bundles and category layouts on guesswork. 

How Sense helps: ask Sense to compare shoppers with high average order values (AOVs) and low AOVs in our Journeys tool, and map how each group moves through your site before checkout. 

Sense looks for differences in how people discover products, browse between categories, and engage with recommendations, then highlights the behaviors tied to bigger baskets. 

Ask Sense questions like: 

• Do my most valuable shoppers browse multiple categories before checkout? 

• Which cross-sell opportunities do high-value shoppers interact with the most? 

The result: learn which behaviors lead to bigger orders, and build bundles, placements, and layouts based on what your best shoppers already do. Instead of guessing what might lift AOV, you have a pattern to test.

💡Pro tip: dig even deeper into the behavior of a group of shoppers by running AI-powered Session Replay Summaries. Filter session replays based on a behavior or journey, and then generate a group summary for up to 100 replays. You’ll get qualitative insights based on real user behavior—without having to watch a single session.

Analyze dozens of session recordings at a time—with key insights and potential issues—with Sense

6. How can you monitor ecommerce performance without building reports manually?

The problem: at the start of each week, someone on your team pulls the numbers, rebuilds the same charts, and pastes them into a deck. It takes hours. And by the time the report lands, the data is a week old. 

How Sense helps: save a prompt in Sense Analyst for the questions you ask every week, and then decide how often it runs. The tool does the digging and emails the results to whoever needs them. 

Then, there’s Newsroom—a selection of curated trends on individual cards—which answers the questions you didn’t think to ask. It scans your data and flags changes, labeling each insight as Critical, Risk, Win, Opportunity, or Info. Spot something worth a closer look? Click on it, and keep digging with Sense Analyst. 

Ask Sense Analyst questions, and get curated insights with Newsroom

Schedule prompts like: 

• Every Monday, analyze our top category pages and identify the biggest opportunities to increase retail conversions

• Compare this week’s checkout performance with last week’s, and prioritize any new issues by the amount of lost revenue

• Which product pages are showing the biggest drop-offs?

The results: when Sense Analyst builds reports for you, your team can spend time fixing problems instead of formatting columns. And Newsroom helps you catch meaningful risks and opportunities early, before they turn into major revenue problems.

Get quick wins with Sense

You don’t need to overhaul your retail data analytics tool stack to see results. Pick one question that’s nagging your team right now. Maybe it’s why mobile checkout conversion slipped, or why your products get plenty of views but few people add them to carts. Ask Sense, see what turns up, and fix the biggest issue first. 

From there, set up a scheduled Sense Analyst prompt so the answer keeps coming to you, and let the Newsroom flag what you didn’t think to ask. Over time, your team moves from chasing explanations to acting on them, and from reporting on revenue to recovering it.

FAQs about using Sense for ecommerce teams