Insights in this post come from our CRO team's decade of experience working with eCommerce brands. Written by Sumedha Gurav and Abhishek Talreja. Reviewed by Harsh Vardhan.
After auditing more than 500 BigCommerce stores, we've noticed something surprising: The same conversion problems keep appearing. Not because merchants are making obvious mistakes.
Because BigCommerce ships with dozens of powerful conversion features that are easy to overlook.
The result is usually the same: plenty of traffic, far fewer orders than the store should be generating.
That's why we built COMPASS. Rather than another list of disconnected CRO tips, COMPASS groups the 25 highest-impact BigCommerce optimizations into seven conversion pillars.
Start with the pillar that matches your biggest problem, fix those issues first, then move to the next. Use the table below to identify where your store is leaking revenue.
Find your pillar, start there.
Work through these in order or jump to the pillar the table flagged for you.
You have five seconds. Most stores waste three of them on a hero image that says nothing.
Page Builder is BigCommerce's drag-and-drop editor.
You can reposition your hero image, move your primary call to action button, add a trust message, or restructure your homepage layout without writing a single line of code.
Go to Storefront, then Page Builder in your BC admin. The widgets you want are the Banner, the Carousel, the Call to Action block, and the HTML block for custom content.
Ignore everything else until you need it. Revisit it at least once a quarter.
A discount that nobody knows about is not a promotion. It is just a lower price.
Marketing, then Promotions. More than 70 rule types: Buy X Get Y, volume discounts, cart-level offers, automatic if-then logic without a coupon code.
Pair the promotion with the right copy. A banner saying "Buy any three, save 15%" above the product grid can meaningfully lift add-to-cart rates. Marketing, then Banners.
Last year we audited a store that had discounted 22% of its catalogue for a weekend sale. One product page told shoppers about it.
The sale ran. The banner revenue never did.
Showing a wholesale buyer your retail price is not just a missed opportunity. It is a reason to call a competitor. Price Lists are available on Plus and above.
Go to Products, then Price Lists. You can create different pricing for different customer segments and assign those lists to Customer Groups.
Wholesale customers see wholesale prices. Loyalty tier members see their rate.
New visitors see the standard price. All of this happens automatically, on the same product page, without duplicate listings.
Fewer than a third of the BC stores that have access to Price Lists have actually set them up.
Speed problems are invisible until they are catastrophic. BigCommerce gives you the tools to catch them early.
Most merchants check their PageSpeed score once, wince slightly, and move on. What they never do is connect a slow page to a specific drop in revenue.
Admin, then Store Setup, then Performance. LCP, CLS, and INP scores for your actual store, not a generic simulation.
Three numbers matter. LCP under 2.5 seconds. CLS under 0.1. INP under 200 milliseconds. Anything red is where you start.
BigCommerce's Akamai CDN handles a lot automatically.
Images are where most stores give it back. Switch to WebP, enable lazy loading in Stencil, and for large catalogues use Cloudinary on the BC App Marketplace.
Stores losing sales to speed almost never know it. The dashboard they have never opened usually has the answer.
Product pages show the widest traffic-to-conversion gap in our audits. Most of what you need to fix them is already built into BigCommerce.
Most product pages give shoppers every reason to come back later. Stock Level Warnings give them a reason to buy now. When a shopper sees "Only 4 left in stock," waiting feels like a risk.
Five minutes to set up, no app needed. Not a scarcity trick. Accurate information at the right moment.
Three quick fixes:
1. Turn on Stock Level Warnings. Products, open a product, find the Inventory section, set a Low Stock Level threshold. Start with your top 20 by traffic.
2. Add Custom Fields for the specs shoppers want before they buy: materials, dimensions, compatibility, care instructions. Products, then the Custom Fields tab.
3. Add a product video. Products, then the Videos tab. A thirty-second demonstration outperforms a paragraph of description. 87% of shoppers say content is a primary factor in their decision.
Faceted Search is available on Pro and above, and you enable it at Storefront, then Product Filtering.
It lets shoppers filter your catalogue by size, colour, price, brand, and any Custom Field value you choose to expose. No app needed.
In our audits, stores with more than 100 products that have not enabled this show the same pattern every time. Shoppers land on a category page, scroll for a few seconds, and leave.
Not because they did not want anything. Because they could not find it fast enough. Start with the attributes your shoppers search for most. Find them in BigCommerce Analytics under Search Terms.
Selling a jacket in four colours and three sizes does not mean you have twelve products.
It means you have one product that most stores are presenting twelve times. BigCommerce Product Options and Option Sets put all your variants on one page with swatch selectors.
The shopper picks their colour, picks their size, adds to cart. No jumping between pages, no losing context, no starting over. There is an SEO benefit too.
Twelve thin product pages split your link equity twelve ways.
One page with twelve variants concentrates it. Fix it with Product Options in your BC admin.
Here’s what the final report will contain:
“The report was deep and super insightful. Can’t believe it’s free.”
Logan Christopher CEO, Empire Herbs
You would not let a customer in a physical store walk out with one item if you knew they were also interested in three others.
Your product page should not either. Related Products is in your product settings under the Related Products tab. Add them manually or let BigCommerce choose.
Place them below the main product content. Persistent Cart is the one that surprises merchants. It is a Plus feature at Settings, then Cart.
When a shopper adds items on their phone and returns on their laptop that evening, Persistent Cart makes sure those items are still there. Without it, the cart is empty. Most shoppers do not start again. They just leave.
The Add to Cart button is not a button. It is a verdict. Everything around it either supports the decision or introduces doubt.
Here is what should be visible before a shopper clicks. Original and sale price. Stock Level Warning if inventory is low. A BNPL instalment amount. Guarantee and returns information. Free shipping threshold. Star rating and review count.
A wishlist option for the not-quite-yet. All of this is configurable in BigCommerce without apps. Check your product pages against that list today. Most stores are missing at least three.
The P pillar is where we almost always start. A shopper who has reached checkout has already decided to buy.
The question is whether your checkout respects that or fights it. In our audits, 60% to 70% of shoppers who reach checkout do not complete it. The majority of those drop-offs are fixable. Here is how.
Getting a shopper to checkout is the hard part. Losing them there is the expensive part. OPC became the BigCommerce default in February 2025. If your store predates that, go to Settings, then Checkout, and confirm it is actually on. Do not assume.
White Stuff, a British clothing brand on BigCommerce, cut their checkout from three steps to one. Mobile conversion doubled.
That is the scale of change one settings toggle can produce. Guest checkout is in the same place. Turn it on. Forcing a new shopper to create an account before buying is one of the most reliable ways to lose them.
They came to buy something. Not to join. While you are in payment settings, add BNPL: Afterpay, Klarna, and Zip are all available natively. Fastlane by PayPal offers passwordless checkout for US shoppers.
Think of every abandoned cart as a letter someone started writing and never sent. The Abandoned Cart Saver asks them to finish it.
This is the feature we find sitting dormant most often. Available on Plus and above at Marketing, then Abandoned Cart Notifications. The default is one email.
That is not enough. The sequence that works: a reminder at one hour, no discount. A follow-up at 24 hours. A small incentive at 72 hours. Three emails.
Configure them once and leave them running.Recovery revenue is readable directly in BigCommerce Analytics.
Of everything we set up in an audit, this is the one that shows up most clearly in the numbers the following week. And it is free on Plus.
A shopper who has to type their card number on a mobile keyboard is a shopper who might change their mind.
BigCommerce supports more than 65 payment providers and charges zero transaction fees on any of them. Every dollar you would otherwise lose to fees stays in the business.
Digital wallets are the ones to prioritise for mobile. Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal one-touch convert around 20% better than standard card entry on mobile because they eliminate the need to type a card number on a small screen.
Make sure at least one of these is enabled. Stored Credit Cards (Plus+) lets returning shoppers check out in two taps. All native BC integrations are PCI DSS Level 1 compliant automatically.
Sending paid traffic to your homepage is like inviting someone to a dinner party and making them find the dining room themselves. Storefront, then Web Pages, create a new page, hide it from navigation.
If your Stencil theme supports custom templates, strip the header and footer. One page, one message, one action. Suppress these pages from your BC sitemap. You want Google ignoring them and shoppers converting on them.
We audited a health supplements store on BigCommerce doing around $4M in annual revenue. Traffic was healthy.
The product was well-reviewed. The category page conversion rate was reasonable. But the checkout completion rate was 31%. The industry average for their category is closer to 55%.
They were still running the old multi-step checkout. Guest checkout was off. There were no digital wallets enabled.
And the Abandoned Cart Saver had never been configured beyond the factory default. Four things. All fixable in an afternoon. Within six weeks of making those changes, their checkout completion rate had moved to 49%.
This is the P pillar. Not complicated. Just consistently overlooked.
Shoppers do not just buy products. They buy confidence. Assurance is everything you do to create it.
Before a stranger buys from you, they want to know what another stranger thought. BigCommerce includes a built-in product review system. Storefront, then Product Reviews.
Enable it. This is your zero-cost starting point.
A product page with 47 reviews at 4.3 stars converts better than one with no reviews, even if the product itself is identical. The placement matters as much as the presence.
Most stores put reviews at the bottom of the product page, below the fold, where most shoppers never reach them. Move your star rating summary near the price and the Add to Cart button.
If you want photo reviews, Q&A sections, homepage review widgets, or review request automation, Yotpo, Judge.me, and Okendo are on the BC App Marketplace for photo reviews and automation.
The native system costs nothing and is the right place to start.
Shoppers do not read security certificates. They read signals. And the signal they look for is right next to the button they are about to click.
BigCommerce provides a dedicated SSL certificate on every plan. Sitewide HTTPS is automatic, and shoppers stay on your custom domain through checkout.
No redirects. No URL changes mid-purchase. Most shoppers never look at the padlock. They look near the button they are about to click.
Place a TrustedSite or McAfee SECURE badge there. Both are on the BC App Marketplace. If you are on Pro, Google Customer Reviews is available natively.
It collects post-purchase ratings and displays a Google-backed badge on your site.
For many shoppers, that Google association is the most credible trust signal you can show them. Adding a badge near Add to Cart takes an hour.
Your store has about thirty seconds to answer four questions most shoppers will never actually ask out loud.Price. Delivery time. Returns.
Trust. They will not ask. They will just leave if the answers are not already on the page. BigCommerce lets you create site-wide or page-specific banners without code.
Go to Marketing, then Banners. Use them to surface your free shipping threshold ('Spend $10 more for free delivery'), your return policy ('Free returns within 30 days'), and your delivery time ('Ships within 24 hours'). Put a countdown banner on sale pages when a promotion is about to end.
Shoppers who use site search are your highest-intent visitors. The question is whether your store can meet that intent with a useful result.
A zero-results page is your store telling a ready-to-buy shopper: we have nothing for you. Even when you do. Analytics, then Search Terms, filter for no results.
Those are queries from shoppers who wanted to buy and your store sent them nowhere.Storefront, then Search and Merchandising.
Synonym mapping: tell BigCommerce that "sofa" and "couch" are the same thing. Search redirects: "sale" goes to your promotions page. Featured Results: pin your best products for high-value terms.
No developer needed. Zero-results pages show up in almost every store we open.
It is not the checkout. Everyone assumes it is the checkout. And yes, the P pillar is where we find the most immediate revenue.
But the thing that consistently surprises us is how many stores have Customer Groups configured and Price Lists completely disconnected from them
The groups exist. The segmentation does nothing. It is like building a road and not putting any signs on it.
We have started asking merchants directly: do you have Customer Groups set up? Almost all of them say yes. Do you have Price Lists linked to them?
The room goes quiet. This is fixable in under an hour. Products, then Price Lists, then assign to your Customer Group. That is it.
Not all entry points are equal. Some pages convert at twice the rate of others, and most merchants have no idea which ones.
BigCommerce Ecommerce Insights is at Analytics, then Ecommerce Insights (Plus+). It shows revenue and conversion rate broken down by landing page. First-party data, no setup lag, immediately useful.
Take the categories that convert best and make them easy to find. Put them in your navigation. Label them as bestsellers. Your highest-converting pages should not require three clicks to reach.
Connect GA4 via BigCommerce's native Data Solutions integration for attribution data alongside BC's first-party reports.
Cold traffic is the hardest traffic to convert. The fix is to make sure fewer of your visitors are meeting you for the first time.
BigCommerce's Channels Manager connects your store to Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok Shop, all from your BC admin via Feedonomics, which BigCommerce owns.
Not primarily about selling on Amazon. Shoppers who have seen your brand on other surfaces before landing on your store convert at two to three times the rate of cold traffic.
They already know you. BigCommerce Analytics under Marketing shows which channels drive the traffic that actually buys. Focus there.
The final pillar covers personalisation, live chat, testing, and mobile everything that determines whether a first visit becomes a second purchase.
A wholesale buyer and a first-time retail customer are not the same person. Showing them the same store is a choice, not a default. Customer Groups are built into BigCommerce on Plus and above and they are free. Customers, then Customer Groups.
Create groups for wholesale buyers, loyalty members, VIP shoppers, trade customers. Assign each group a Price List, restrict catalogue access, create promotions that apply only to them.
You do not need a machine learning platform for this. An afternoon in your BC admin is enough. Fewer than a third of Plus and Pro stores we audit have Customer Groups properly configured.
A manually curated "You might also like" list is a guess. BigAI makes it a calculation. BigAI Product Recommendations (Google Retail AI) is native to BigCommerce. Storefront, then BigAI, then Recommendations.
Widgets on your homepage, product pages, cart, and thank-you page — updating in real time based on what each shopper is actually doing. BigAI Copywriter (Gemini 1.5 Pro) generates product descriptions at scale — useful if your catalogue has thin or inconsistent copy.
We assumed, going into our first few hundred audits, that the biggest conversion problems would be technical. Slow pages. Broken forms. Checkout errors nobody had noticed. The kind of thing that requires a developer to fix.
Instead, the most common problems are toggles. Settings that ship in the off position and never get switched on. Features that require ten minutes of configuration and are then left at their factory default for years.
BigCommerce is a remarkably capable platform. Most of the stores we audit are using it at about 40% of its capacity. That is actually good news. It means the gap between where your store is and where it could be is mostly a configuration problem, not a rebuild.
Live chat at the wrong moment is an interruption. At the right moment, it is a sale.
An Intercom study found that a single live chat message increases conversion likelihood by 50%. The key word is triggered. Random chat invites hurt conversion.
Targeted ones help it enormously. Tidio and Gorgias, both on the BC App Marketplace, support behaviour-triggered chat. A shopper who moves from cart to shipping policy and back to cart has a question about delivery.
That is your trigger. Send them an invite that addresses it before they leave. Gorgias has a particular advantage for BigCommerce merchants because it reads your BC order data directly inside the chat window.
Your support team can see what a shopper has ordered, what is in their current cart, and their order history without switching screens.
One store trying to speak to everyone usually ends up speaking clearly to no one.
Multi-Storefront lets you run multiple branded storefronts from a single BigCommerce admin with shared inventory and order management. Up to three on Pro, more on Enterprise.
Force a single storefront to serve wholesale buyers and retail customers, or US shoppers and European ones, and you end up serving none of them well.
Content that works for one group confuses another. Pricing that makes sense for one segment puts off another.
A separate storefront per audience converts better, and you manage all of them from the same BC admin.
Every opinion about what converts better on your store is just a guess until you test it. BigCommerce does not have a built-in A/B testing tool. Worth knowing.
VWO and Optimizely both have BC connectors. GA4 Experiments works via BigCommerce's Data Solutions integration. What should you test first?
In our experience, the highest-value tests on a BigCommerce store are CTA button text and placement, hero image on the homepage, product image order on the product page, pricing display format (original price struck through versus percentage off versus cash savings), and checkout button copy.
Run tests until you have statistical significance. Three days and 200 visitors is not enough.
Your mobile conversion rate is not a separate problem. It is a mirror showing you exactly how much friction is left in your store.
Cornerstone is mobile-first, which is a better starting point than most platforms offer. But the gap between desktop and mobile conversion on most stores we audit is not a design problem. It is a configuration one.
Storefront, then Themes, then Customize, then Mobile. Check touch target sizes — 44 by 44 pixels minimum. Swipe gestures on product galleries. Mobile menu that collapses without covering content.
These are the three things most Cornerstone stores get wrong. Use Page Builder's mobile preview before publishing. Thirty seconds now prevents a broken mobile experience later.
Run the Accessibility Checker in Page Builder regularly. Accessibility improvements are usability improvements.
Here’s what the final report will contain:
“The report was deep and super insightful. Can’t believe it’s free.”
Logan Christopher CEO, Empire Herbs
Three things drive most of the variation in BigCommerce conversion rates.
Your plan tier
BigCommerce gates its most powerful conversion features behind Plus and Pro. Abandoned Cart Saver, Customer Groups, Persistent Cart, Faceted Search, Ecommerce Insights, Price Lists — all of them.
On Standard and wondering why your rate is stuck? That may be part of the answer.
On Standard and wondering why your rate is stuck? That may be part of the answer.Your theme and page speed. Akamai's CDN is a genuine advantage.
But every app you add, every oversized image, every unoptimised script chips away at it. A one-second delay in load time cuts conversion by 7%. Cornerstone is fast out of the box. Keep it that way.
Your feature utilisation
The single biggest factor we see. The platform gives you a lot. Most stores use about half of it.
After 500 audits, we can predict most of these before we open the store.
The Optimized One-Page Checkout became the BC default in February 2025, but stores set up before that date may still be running the older multi-step flow. Check your settings.
Turn on guest checkout while you are there. These two changes alone can recover a meaningful percentage of the 60 to 70% of shoppers who currently abandon at checkout.
The default is a single email sent a few hours after abandonment. It works. But a three-email sequence works considerably better.
Add a 24-hour follow-up and a 72-hour email with a small incentive. This is not a marketing innovation. It is a settings change.
Shoppers on large catalogues need to filter. Without Faceted Search they scroll for a few seconds and leave.
Enable it in Storefront, then Product Filtering. It is a Pro feature, but the conversion return justifies the plan cost many times over.
This is a half-finished personalisation stack. You have created the groups but the pricing is not segmented. The groups exist in your admin.
The shoppers assigned to them see the same prices as everyone else. Go to Products, then Price Lists, and connect them.
It is in Admin, then Store Setup, then Performance. It shows you exactly how your Core Web Vitals are performing on your actual store.
Speed problems compound over time as you add apps and content. Check this dashboard at least once a month.
Both platforms produce comparable conversion rates when used well. The differences are in what comes built in.
Our view: the platform matters less than whether you are using its native features effectively.
A BigCommerce store running COMPASS properly will outperform a Shopify store that does not, and vice versa.
The answer depends on what you are fixing. Quick wins show up in one to two weeks.
Enabling OPC, turning on guest checkout, activating Abandoned Cart Saver, adding trust badges near Add to Cart, and switching on Persistent Cart are all changes that affect conversion immediately.
They reduce friction for traffic that is already coming to your store. The results are visible quickly.
Mid-term improvements take 30 to 60 days to measure reliably.
Faceted Search, BigAI recommendations, Customer Group segmentation, and behaviour-triggered live chat all need time to gather enough data to show their impact clearly.
Make the changes and then leave them alone for a month before drawing conclusions.
Structural changes need 60 to 90 days. A/B testing programmes, Multi-Storefront setups, and Channels Manager expansion all require sustained traffic and time to reach statistical validity. Do not rush these measurements.
Start with P and A. They fix conversion loss that is already happening on traffic you are already paying for.
Here is where to look. Your primary BigCommerce conversion rate report is at Analytics, then Store Overview.
It updates every 60 seconds and shows your conversion rate, revenue, orders, and average order value for any date range you choose. This is the number to watch.
For deeper funnel analysis, go to Analytics and look for the Purchase Funnel report.
It shows you exactly where shoppers are dropping off between landing on your store and completing a purchase.
If you see a large drop-off between the cart stage and the checkout stage, that points to the P pillar.
A drop-off between product page and cart points to the M pillar. Connect Google Analytics 4 via BigCommerce's Data Solutions integration for attribution data.
GA4 shows you which traffic sources and campaigns are producing shoppers who actually convert, not just shoppers who arrive. Check these five metrics every week:
If your rate drops without an obvious cause, open Performance Insights first. Speed is the most common silent culprit.
The stores that get the most out of COMPASS are not the ones that implement everything in a week. They are the ones that treat each pillar as a quarterly audit point.
Review your first fold. Check Performance Insights. Pull your zero-results search queries. Run a new A/B test. Conversion optimisation does not have an end date. BigCommerce gives you the tools. You mostly need to use them.
The BigCommerce platform average in 2025 is around 2.5%. Desktop shoppers convert at around 3.9%. Mobile shoppers convert at around 2.2%.
Your baseline will also vary by industry: health and wellness stores typically see 2.5% to 3.5%, while fashion and apparel stores run closer to 1.5% to 2.5%. If you are above 2.5% overall, you are performing better than most of the platform.
Analytics, then Store Overview. Conversion rate, revenue, orders, AOV — all there, filterable by date. For where shoppers are dropping off, look at the Purchase Funnel report in the same section.
Settings, then Checkout. Turn on the option to allow checkout without an account. One of the highest-impact toggles in your entire admin, especially on mobile.
No, BigCommerce does not include a native A/B testing tool. The two options we recommend for BigCommerce stores are VWO and Optimizely, both of which have BigCommerce connectors.
You can also run A/B tests through GA4 Experiments if you have BigCommerce's Data Solutions integration set up.
BigCommerce supports more than 65 payment providers including Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Afterpay, Klarna, Zip, Stripe, Square, and Amazon Pay, among many others.
All native integrations are PCI DSS Level 1 compliant automatically. BigCommerce charges zero transaction fees on all plans, regardless of which payment provider you use.
Directly and measurably. A page that loads in 2.6 seconds converts at around 1.9%. At 3.3 seconds, that drops to 1.5%.
At 5.7 seconds or more, it falls to 0.6% or below. Check your Performance Insights dashboard at Admin, then Store Setup, then Performance.
BigCommerce runs on Akamai's CDN on every plan, but image size and app overhead can still drag your scores down significantly.
The Optimized One-Page Checkout, or OPC, is BigCommerce's default checkout experience as of February 2025.
It consolidates the entire purchase process onto a single page, reducing the number of steps a shopper has to complete. You can confirm it is enabled at Settings, then Checkout.
Stores that switch to OPC from older multi-step checkouts typically see measurable improvement in checkout completion rates, particularly on mobile.
Quick wins such as enabling OPC, guest checkout, Abandoned Cart Saver, and trust badges produce measurable results within one to two weeks.
They reduce friction for your existing traffic immediately. Mid-term changes such as Faceted Search and Customer Group segmentation take 30 to 60 days to measure reliably.
Structural changes such as A/B testing programmes and Multi-Storefront setups need 60 to 90 days for statistically valid results.
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