In e-commerce, if you are generating any revenue, it all starts with a simple click. The bounce rate is one of the most important things in online shopping. If your website visitors leave just after viewing only one page, this indicates that your e-commerce business is missing revenue opportunities.
- Are you struggling with a higher e-commerce bounce rate?
- Are you losing potential customers to your competitors?
- Are all your marketing efforts going to waste because of these high bounce rates?
It’s not just about your marketing; it’s more than technical. In this article, we are going to discuss 10 effective strategies to lower your bounce rate for better engagement and increase your revenue with more sales.
What is the bounce rate on What is a Bounce Rate on an E-commerce Website and how do you calculate it?
Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website after visiting only a single page. Here are some scenarios that count as a bounce on your website:
- Someone clicks the back button after viewing a single page
- Someone exits their browser after viewing a single page
- A user clicks to another website that takes them elsewhere after viewing only a single page on your site
Anyone who wants to calculate the bounce rate can use this simple calculation. It’s the number of single-page sessions divided by the total number of sessions. The resulting percentage reflects the proportion of visitors who “bounce.”

This fundamental metric is a key indicator of user satisfaction and can guide your strategies to optimize content, design, and overall website performance.
Understanding how to interpret and leverage bounce rate is the first step toward creating a compelling online presence that keeps visitors engaged and drives conversion.
Key Statistics about E-commerce Bounce Rate
Do you know that the average bounce rate for eCommerce websites is 45.68%?
E-commerce Bounce Rate by Traffic Source

E-commerce Bounce Rate by Device

Statistics On Bounce Rate By Industry

What Is a Good Bounce Rate?
The average bounce rate is between 26% and 70%, with 26% to 40% being the optimal range. Generally, landing below 20% isn’t very likely, so if your data shows that, you should double-check your website for mistakes. For mobile devices, it generally is at 49%, with tablets and laptops close behind at 42% and 45%.
Types of Bounce Rate
Breaking down and understanding different bounce rates will help you understand your visitors’ intent and why your site’s performance didn’t meet their expectations.
Hard Bounce
A hard bounce rate is when visitors have no interest in your web page at all. Upon entering a landing page, they will leave immediately, with no time spent scrolling or clicking on any of your calls to action.
When hard bounce rates occur, we assume visitors have landed on eCommerce sites accidentally. For instance, they might search “buy bat” on Google and land on a page about flying mammals instead of a baseball bat.
Medium Bounce
This is when visitors show slightly more engagement across a single page and stay a few seconds before leaving. They have the potential to return and explore further.
For example, let’s say a user is searching for something general like “home decor,” they may browse your site and then leave if your products aren’t appealing to them.
Soft Bounce
If a visitor lands on a web page and stays for more than just a few seconds, scrolling down the page, clicking on links to other pages, and reading the information, but they don’t follow through on calls-to-action, they’re considered a soft bounce.
Is a High Bounce Rate Bad?
So let’s say you have a 50% bounce rate, or even higher. Is this cause for concern?
Generally speaking, yes, you don’t want to have a high bounce rate. But you should also consider the context.
For one, think about where the majority of your traffic comes from. As we showed, there’s a big difference between the expected bounce rate for email traffic vs social, for example.
If the majority of your traffic comes from display ads and social media, a 50% bounce rate might actually be pretty good.
There are also some situations where a bounce (i.e. the visitor leaving after viewing just one page) is not necessarily bad.
If you get the visitor to subscribe to email updates or push notifications, for example, this is a big win and allows you to build more touch points and grow the relationship with this visitor.
On the flip side, a low bounce rate is good but doesn’t bring in revenue on its own. You need to combine a low bounce rate with an average or above-average conversion rate. Don’t optimize solely for bounce rate without thinking about the ultimate goal (conversions).
Why Would a Customer Bounce Off Your E-commerce Website?
Let’s look at some of the most common reasons website visitors bounce, so you can start to understand the problem in more depth and thus understand how to fix it and improve the bounce rate in your online store.
Slow load speed
One of the most common things contributing to bounce rates is how fast the site loads.
No one wants to wait around for a slow website. According to Google, an increase in page load time increases the probability of a bounce from 32% to 123%.

Poor website design
An eCommerce website must be designed for users to find what they are looking for in as few clicks as possible. If product pages are challenging to find, you’ll likely lose many potential customers.
Including a search bar and a clear navigational structure will improve engagement, especially if your website offers a variety of products or services. eCommerce stores like IKEA is a good example.
In addition to altering menu structures, you may also need to improve the quality of graphics, copy and modify text, and font size spacing. Removing pop-up ads and other heavy data can also reduce the bounce rate.
This is particularly pertinent for mobile users, where pop-ups can block the entire screen. A/B testing to correct poor site navigation can help you determine exactly what changes to make to improve your bounce rate.

Bad Website Optimization
There’s too much to mention when it comes to website optimization. If you’re new to eCommerce, it’s probably best to familiarize yourself with the basics.
It’s common practice for companies to hire digital marketing companies to help optimize their websites and ensure they’re following best practices, as the process can be intricate.
When a website is poorly optimized, it may have slow-loading pages that directly impact the bounce rate. According to Google, two seconds is the “threshold for eCommerce website acceptability.”
As soon as a page load time surpasses three seconds, the bounce rapidly increases to 38%. Slow site speed also negatively affects a page’s rank on Google search engine results. Therefore, addressing this issue can resolve two marketing challenges at once and create a positive customer experience.

Poor, confusing, or unclear UX
It’s also important to guide website visitors toward the actions you want them to take, such as adding a product to their cart or shopping around for more products on your site.
If visitors are unclear or confused about where to go next, they’re not going to stick around for a while to figure it out. They’re going to bounce and find a site with better UX.

Lack of trust
For eCommerce in particular, trust is a big deal. When you’re looking to buy something, you need to have a good feeling that the site you’re on is legitimate and isn’t going to scam you.
Your site needs to convey a feeling of trust and safety to the visit right away. At this stage, it’s not so much about positive trust signals (like reviews and testimonials), but avoiding negative trust signals like spammy popups and intrusive banner ads.
Irrelevant content
If a user lands on your site and feels like it’s irrelevant to them, they’ll probably close the tab or hit the back button. Think of someone who’s looking for men’s shoes, and when the site opens all the products showing are women’s dresses.
With an eCommerce website, you may have a brief opportunity to direct people to find the content or products relevant to their desires but don’t expect them to dig around to find it.
Distractions
Another very common reason people bounce today is not so much a conscious decision to leave your site but from the user’s attention being pulled away somewhere else.
Most people have multiple tabs open when they’re browsing the web. One study of Firefox users found that one-half of users averaged 2.38 tabs open at one time, and one-quarter had an average of 3.59 tabs open.
On top of this, one-quarter of users in the study had more than 11 tabs open at one time during the week in which data was collected.
All these tabs are other websites competing for your potential customer’s attention. If you’re not able to capture the user’s attention and hold on, you’re going to lose them.

Bad traffic or misleading directions
The quality of your traffic is a common factor that affects bounce rate. If you’re sending a lot of cheap, spammy traffic to your site, you can expect low bounce rates as a result. An example would be a paid traffic campaign with an incredibly broad audience that includes a lot of people who aren’t your target customers.
The same thing goes if you try to cut corners or mislead people in getting them to click on your site, such as promising one thing in an email, social media post, or display ad, and serving a page that gives them something else.
Unsuccessful Call to Action
When new visitors arrive at a website, they should be encouraged to do something, whether it’s to learn more about a company’s offerings or to shop the discounted section. Well-designed CTAs don’t just reduce bounce rates; they also increase conversions.
Once visitors have gone through the page they landed on; you should be guiding them to actions you think are optimal to nudge them further down their customer journey.
A good call to action is seamless; it leads a visitor toward doing something without having to think too much about it.
For example, if a potential customer stumbles upon your site via a Google search, that’s great because it increases your traffic. But, it’s even better if they make an unplanned purchase. This is the power of a good call to action.

10 Effective Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate E-commerce
Now onto the important part: how eCommerce stores can improve (i.e. decrease) bounce rates.
Once you understand the reasons people bounce (as outlined above), it’s pretty easy to reverse-engineer and figure out ways to solve these issues and decrease the bounce rate. That’s what we’ll give you below.
Optimize Page Load Speed
Do your pages load in 2-3 seconds max? If your answer is “no,” or “I’m not sure,” this could be one of the reasons you’re experiencing a high bounce rate.
In e-commerce, site speed is the name of the game. The faster your pages load, the better. The faster prospects can do the checkout, the better. See where this is going?
Check out these statistics on consumer behavior to better understand just how important speed is when it comes to increasing conversions.
To boost your page load time, try some of these techniques:
- Evaluate current page speed by using the Pingdom Speed test tool
- Removing query strings from static pages to improve performance
- Optimize images with WordPress plugins
- Tweak the .htaccess file
Mobile Optimization
Your prospects are likely viewing your content from many different devices. Are you optimizing your content for all screens?
If the answer is no, then you have your work cut out for you. Here are some stats to show you just how mobile the internet has become:
- Consumers spend between 5-6 hours a day on their mobile devices
- In 2020, mobile accounted for 55.7% of all website traffic worldwide
- 80% of Internet users own a smartphone
To make your site more mobile-friendly, you can:
- Install a responsive theme
- Simplify your menus
- Keep forms as short as possible
- Clearly display your calls to action
- Make customer service easily accessible
- Include a search function
Simplify search and navigation
A search bar with autocomplete, faceted search, a large footer, and colorful animation are just a few of the many proven navigation techniques that can help keep your bounce rate low.
Have a Strong Site-Search Solution
Having an ideal-length search box will not be enough if it doesn’t show up the right results. If you’ve never really considered how site search might be affecting your site experience, then now is the time to do it.
Use clear and obvious CTAs
We could go in-depth into building the perfect UX, but the 80/20 of it is to optimize your call to action.
Generally speaking, every page should have a CTA. It might be to opt in to an email list, add a product to a cart or sign up for a demo call – whatever the next step is you want users to take.
Make these CTAs clear and obvious (users should know exactly what’s going to happen when they click the button), and ensure they stand out, so there’s no confusion that may lead to users bouncing.
Build in personalization
Personalization is key for modern eCommerce sites. Give users a personalized experience and serve content that’s tailored to them.
With email, segment your users and send them to pages geared towards their interests. If you’re running display ads or social media ads, create a personalized landing page for each ad and/or each audience, and ensure when someone lands on your site they feel like the site is speaking directly to them.
Drive high-quality traffic
Don’t get caught in the trap of blindly chasing traffic, without considering the quality of the traffic you send.
It’s easy to trick someone into coming to your site via an ad, or to rank on Google for low-competition keywords that aren’t relevant to your brand, but these visitors do nothing but make you feel good when your traffic numbers look good in Google Analytics.
By focusing only on high-quality traffic, your overall numbers may be lower, but the metrics that actually make a difference will be higher.
Use relevant keywords
If you’re not attracting relevant, high-quality traffic to your website, you’ll almost certainly see a high bounce rate.
Keywords play a crucial role in content marketing and lead generation, so you have to make sure you’re targeting the right ones.
Look at it this way: Google makes over 95% of its revenue from advertising. This means that the lion’s share of their revenue comes from companies targeting expensive keywords.
High-value keywords improve your traffic, boost your conversion and engagement rates, and also bolster your online reputation and authority.
Optimize Product Pages
Product Media: Images are the first thing users are going to look at when landing on the page, so investing in compelling, visually striking product shots can really boost engagement rate.
Adding videos also helps captivate users when they land on product pages, especially when set to autoplay and positioned in the first slot in the gallery. Videos are a great way to demonstrate how products work, move, and look.
Sections: Sections are a great way to keep customers engaged after they’ve scrolled past images and videos. Layering highly stylized sections can form a product page that showcases the craftsmanship of your products, informs the user about the features and keeps them interested.
Copy: Copy is important, it let’s customers know everything they need before making a purchase; if it’s an accessory, then the products it’s compatible with and its battery life will be key, for fashion brands, it’s sizing, fit, materials, and available colours.
Ensure that key information is obvious and visible on your product pages and that customers don’t need to scroll too far or dig around to find it.
User testing is really useful here; asking new users to find a key piece of information or whether the page contains all the information they’d need to purchase can provide invaluable insights.
Check out your competitors too and see what kind of information they display high up on their product pages.
Publish the right content regularly
High-quality content can also help to reduce your bounce rate.
Use websites like Buzzsumo and Ahrefs to discover trending terms and the type of content that’s doing well in your industry.
Take stock of the content you publish and the results you get. Those will serve as reference points for your content optimization experiments.
Target abandoning visitors with exit-intent popups
Popups are very effective for the conversion optimization process.
However, they need to be used strategically, and never in a pushy way.
Well-timed, tailored exit-intent popups can not only curb your bounce rate but also help you build your email list!
Offer a Live Chat Help
While enhanced product findability and an exhaustive help section will resolve a lot of customer queries, having a 24-hour live chat feature is an even bigger boost. Visitors might get stuck at places you didn’t take into account or they might have questions you never thought existed.
Installing a live chat widget can go a long way in taking care of bounce. A well-trained customer executive not only resolves the query of the prospect but engages them till they get convinced about making the purchase.
There are a few smart chat widgets that intuitively pop open when they figure out that a customer might be lost — depending on how they are behaving on a page.
Eliminate Distractions
Too many choices often confuse people and impair action. Let there be no bombardment of information on your homepage. Simplify your design and work towards reducing distractions. Inside Buzz, a VWO customer used A/B testing to create a homepage with reduced options. The simplified version increased site engagement by 17.8%.
Display the Top Deals/Discounts/Limited Time Offers
Your homepage is prime real estate for capturing attention, and showcasing top deals, discounts, or limited-time offers here can be a game-changer.
These promotions create a sense of urgency, encouraging immediate engagement and reducing the likelihood of visitors bouncing without exploring further. Design visually appealing banners or sections that clearly communicate the value and time-sensitive nature of these offers.
Consistently updating and promoting these promotions not only keeps your site dynamic but also encourages repeat visits, contributing to a sustained reduction in bounce rates over time.

Conclusion
A low bounce rate is definitely something you want to aim for, regardless of your industry. You want to keep site visitors on your web page for as long as possible because the longer they stick around, the more likely it is that they’ll come back and ultimately become customers.
But remember, you shouldn’t obsess over a high bounce rate, since it doesn’t tell the whole story. The ecommerce bounce rate is just a small piece of the puzzle that is conversion rate optimization.