Sometimes, shoppers already know what they want to buy — and when they want it.

A prime example is buying flowers for Valentine’s Day, says Katie Hudson, content director at online flower retailer UrbanStems.

UrbanStems sells about five times its typical volume in the week leading up to Feb. 14, Hudson says. During this week, a large share of UrbanStems.com browsers are looking to buy and will convert on any page on UrbanStems.com, even the pages without the conversion-driving features the retailer added to help with year-round sales, like a countdown timer.

“The week of Valentine’s Day, the intent to purchase is so high that we’ve seen — and we’ve tested this a few times — we’ve seen people convert better on our normal shopping experience for that week because they don’t even need to know our story,” Hudson says.

But when online shoppers aren’t converting as well as retailers would like, merchants must determine what data they can use to guide shoppers to the right products. They also must identify improvements they can make to their site experience to lead shoppers to convert. Improving conversion rates is an ongoing process. Four retailers share how they’ve improved their web experience and marketing tactics to boost their conversion rates, such as by creating a faster checkout page and surfacing more engaging on-site search results.

64% of retailers said they improved their conversion rates in 2022 compared with 2021, according to a Digital Commerce 360 retailers survey of 73 online merchants in February 2023. Additionally, 22% maintained their conversion rates year over year, and just 14% had declining conversion rates. Most retailers surveyed had conversion rates of 1.51% or better.

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This is part of Digital Commerce 360’s March 2023 Strategy Insights edition. Our members have access to all the articles in this month’s issue, Data-Driven Retail.