Your customers only see 30% of the page
Most brands design for the screen they present on, not the screen their customers buy on →
Well, hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the eCommercer.
A couple of weeks ago, the guy who runs paid media for one of our ecommerce sites flagged something to our head of marketing. Desktop conversion was fine. Mobile conversion had dropped to about half that. And for a site where the majority of traffic comes from mobile, that's not a small thing.
So we sat down as a team, pulled out our phones, and did something I'm slightly embarrassed to admit we hadn't done in a while. We actually used the site the way our customers use it. On a phone. With a thumb. On a screen that shows you about a third of what you see on a laptop.
I'm supposed to be the guy who knows about ecommerce. But even in our team, we'd stopped checking. We needed the data to tell us what our customers had probably been experiencing for weeks.
So when I sat down with Adam Pearce this week, the timing couldn't have been better. Everything he said was perfectly timed because I'd just lived it.
Enjoy this one!
Have a great week, wherever you are in the world.
Until next time,
This Week's Episode of the eCommerce Podcast →
You Get Three Thumb Scrolls. That's It.
Adam Pearce has optimised hundreds of Shopify stores through his agency Blend Commerce, and the problem he sees most often isn't bad products or weak traffic. It's that the mobile experience was never really designed. It was inherited from desktop and hoped for the best.
Using heat-mapping tools, his team can see exactly how much of a mobile product page someone views before they buy or leave. The answer is somewhere between 23 and 30 percent. Three thumb scrolls. Everything below that — the cross-sells, the brand story, the detailed specs — most of it never gets seen.
One change his team makes on almost every site is exposing the search bar on mobile. Not a tiny magnifying glass tucked in a corner, but a visible bar that's there when the page loads. Conversion rate increases of 30 to 50 percent, just from that.
He also shared a car parts example I keep thinking about. The brand had a beautiful "About" page full of trust signals — quality guarantees, a one-year warranty, a 90-day returns policy. None of it appeared on the product page. When they surveyed their best customers and found out what actually mattered, they added the warranty and returns policy directly below the add-to-cart button. The result was a 34 percent increase in average order value.
The other thing Adam said that challenged me was about accordion menus. Most of us assume that adding clicks is adding friction. Adam sees it differently. Long blocks of text push the buy button further down the page. Accordions don't hide information, they signpost it. They let customers choose what matters to them and find it quickly. I'll be honest, that reframe shifted how I'm thinking about our own product pages.
Adam's Links:
Company: Blend Commerce → https://blendcommerce.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adampearce4/
eCom Collab Club → search on LinkedIn
Related Episode →
Your Customers Are Already Telling You What's Broken
Adam's conversation reminded me of something Matthew Stafford shared back in Episode 223. Matthew has analysed close to a billion dollars in ecommerce data through his company Build Grow Scale, and his approach to optimisation starts somewhere most people never look. The checkout. Then he works backwards.
His logic is hard to argue with. If your checkout is losing committed buyers, improving everything upstream just drives more people towards a leaky bucket.
One of his simplest wins connects directly to Adam's point about trust signals in the buying moment. Matthew added the words "required for order notification" beneath the email field at checkout. That tiny piece of context addressed an unspoken anxiety and lifted revenue by 17 percent.
But the insight that stuck with me most was about search data. Matthew found that people type their problems into search bars, not just product names. A kids' clothing brand noticed customers kept searching for "unicorn." They didn't sell one. So they made one, launched it on Amazon Prime Day, and did half a million dollars in 48 hours. The data was sitting there the whole time.
His golden question is worth borrowing too. Put a one-question survey on your thank-you page asking: what was the one thing that almost made you not buy? Six of his top ten optimisation wins came directly from the answers.
Be A Guest →
Got an eCommerce business with stories worth sharing?
Come be my guest on the eCommerce Podcast, where I chat with founders about the wins, the disasters, and everything in between. Your story could be the one that helps another founder grow smarter (or avoid your mistakes).