How to Increase Online Sales: A Practical Plan for 2026

Increase online sales by finding where visitors drop off, fixing product pages and checkout, and guiding shoppers with a quiz. A step-by-step plan.

Isometric path from browsing toward purchase

To increase online sales, stop adding tactics and find the step where visitors leave. Then personalize that step so each shopper sees the product that fits them. Traffic, product pages, checkout and repeat purchases all matter, but the biggest gains usually come from helping an undecided visitor reach the right product faster. A short quiz that recommends products and sends buyers to the cart does exactly that, and with Funelyze you can build one from your website URL in under ten minutes.

This guide is for marketers and e-commerce brands who want more engagement and a more personal customer experience. It walks through the sequence we would follow: measure, fix friction, guide the shopper, bring traffic back, and protect your margin.

TL;DR

Online sales come from four levers: visitors, conversion rate, order value and repeat purchases. Fix the weakest one first, and check that your tracking is correct before you decide which one that is.
Trust and cost surprises at checkout lose real sales. 19% of US shoppers abandoned a checkout because they did not trust the site with their card details.
Visitors who cannot decide leave. A product-finder quiz gives each one a personal answer and a direct route to the cart.
Email, search, paid and social bring people in, but profit depends on unit economics, so measure margin and not only revenue.
Start free: Funelyze has a Free plan at $0 per month, then Pro at $29 per month and Business at $79 per month.

Start with the sales equation, not a list of tactics
Why your store is not getting sales
Fix the product page and checkout friction
Help shoppers choose: personalization that sells
Bring more of the right visitors
Turn buyers into repeat buyers
Plan around when people shop
Protect your margin while you grow
A four-week plan
Build the quiz with Funelyze
Our view
FAQ
Sources

Start with the sales equation, not a list of tactics

Most "ways to increase online sales" lists hand you 20 to 25 tips. Few tell you which one your store needs. Revenue is the product of four things:

Visitors: how many people reach your site.
Conversion rate: the share of them who buy.
Average order value: what each buyer spends.
Repeat purchases: how often they come back.

A store with plenty of traffic and few orders has a conversion problem, so buying more ads makes it worse. A store with a high conversion rate and little traffic has the opposite problem. Choose one lever, change one thing, and measure the result before you move on.

Why your store is not getting sales

Before you change anything, find out what is actually happening. Shopify's guide to traffic without sales suggests breaking conversion into milestones such as add to cart and reached checkout, so you can see exactly where people stop. The same guide points to usability, pricing and shipping costs as the first places to look.

A simple diagnostic:

Count correctly first. One agency's checklist notes that "not selling" is often "not measuring": check that GA4 counts orders and that the totals match your store backend. If the thank-you page event does not fire, ad platforms end up optimizing for the wrong people.
Check the traffic. Visitors who were never going to buy will not convert however good the page is. Compare conversion by source.
Look at mobile. A broken or slow mobile experience, an unclear offer, a weak call to action and late surprises are among the most common reasons a site does not convert.
Find the biggest drop. If most visitors leave the product page, the problem is there. If they add to cart and vanish, look at checkout.

Our guide on how to optimize a sales funnel goes deeper on reading each stage.

Fix the product page and checkout friction

The cheapest sales are the ones you are already losing. Three problems come up again and again.

Hidden costs and forced accounts

Cart abandonment is often driven by unexpected shipping, taxes and fees, and forced account creation. Show the full cost early, offer guest checkout and cut form fields. Stripe's conversion guide also recommends one-page or one-click checkout, free-shipping thresholds and mobile-first design. Our practical guide to checkout conversion lays out the order in which to make these changes.

Trust at the moment of doubt

Baymard's survey, cited by one commerce consultancy, found that 19% of US shoppers abandoned a checkout over card-security worries and 13% over an unsatisfactory returns policy. So state your returns policy plainly and show payment-security signals near the buy button.

Placement matters. A UX study of product pages says purchase anxiety peaks when the shopper looks at the price, reads the description and reaches the buy button, and that one or two specific trust signals near those points beat a row of generic badges. Put a star rating by the title and a guarantee near the price.

Reviews

Stripe reports that research from Northwestern University's Spiegel Research Center and PowerReviews found the first five reviews carry the largest conversion impact. If you have few reviews, collect the first five before you invest in anything fancier.

Help shoppers choose: personalization that sells

The fixes above remove obstacles. Personalization gives the shopper a reason to buy this product now. Most stores show the same catalog to everyone, which leaves a first-time visitor with 80 products and no idea which one suits them. Many leave rather than work it out.

A quiz changes that. The visitor answers a handful of questions about their needs, skin type, budget or goal, and gets a short list of matched products. This works well for a few reasons:

It replaces a sales assistant, which an online store does not have.
The visitor tells you what they want, so you learn about them without cookies or guesswork.
The result page can lead straight to the cart, shortening the path from curiosity to checkout.
The answers show you how customers describe their problems, which improves your copy, ads and product mix.

The Nielsen Norman Group's ecommerce research advises against bullying or tricking shoppers and says long-term positive relationships matter for earning repeat business. A quiz fits that advice: it earns the sale by being useful, with no pressure tactics. For more on the approach, read our guides on ecommerce personalization and how a product finder quiz works.

What a good store quiz looks like

One clear goal. "Find your routine" or "Find the right size" beats "Take our quiz."
Four to seven questions. Ask only what changes the recommendation.
Questions in your own voice. They should sound like your brand, not a form.
Specific results. Show products, the reason each fits and an add-to-cart button.
Lead capture at the right moment. Ask for an email alongside the result, with consent text.
Analytics. See which questions people abandon and which results convert, then refine.

If you run a Shopify store, our Shopify conversion playbook shows where a quiz sits among the other changes.

Bring more of the right visitors

Only after the store converts decently does more traffic make sense. The main channels each do a different job:

Channel	What it does best	Evidence
Email	Brings past visitors back at low cost	61% of retailers call email their most profitable channel
Search and paid search	Reaches people already looking	Adobe's holiday data says paid search and email stayed reliable drivers of traffic and sales
Social	Discovery and impulse	4.6% of US retail revenue in the 2025 holiday season, up 40.3% year over year
Abandoned-cart email and SMS	Recovers near-sales	Stripe says 5 to 15% of abandoned carts can be recovered

The link between channels and quizzes is direct. Send paid or social traffic to a quiz instead of a generic collection page, and the visitor lands on something about them. Quiz leads also feed your email list with the answers attached, which makes follow-up messages specific. If you are deciding what to automate first, see our guide to ecommerce marketing automation.

Turn buyers into repeat buyers

A first order is expensive to win, and a second one is much cheaper. The Nielsen Norman Group points to free shipping and flexible return policies as part of earning repeat business. Beyond policies, a quiz helps in two ways. It tells you what each customer bought for, so a replenishment or add-on email can reference their stated goal. It also lets you invite existing customers to retake the quiz when their needs change, such as a new season, a new routine or a gift.

Plan around when people shop

Timing is a smaller lever, but it tells you when to publish a campaign. AdScale's analysis of US orders from January to May 2026 found that Friday had the highest order volume, with Thursday and Saturday close behind and Tuesday lowest. The busiest single hour was Saturday at 2 PM Eastern. Treat this as a pattern from one sample, and check your own analytics, because your audience may differ.

Seasonality is much bigger than weekday. Adobe reports the 2025 US holiday season drove a record $257.8 billion in online spending, with Cyber Monday the biggest day at $14.25 billion. Have your quiz, offers and email flows ready before the season starts, not during it.

Protect your margin while you grow

Is online selling still profitable? It can be, but revenue growth alone does not guarantee it. Eightx Research found that public DTC brands had a median operating margin of -2.4% in FY2025 despite a gross margin near 47%, with acquisition costs, operating costs and tariffs among the factors. Shipping adds pressure: UPS and FedEx applied average rate increases of 5.9% for 2026.

The practical response is to know your numbers per product:

Calculate contribution margin on every SKU after product cost, shipping and ad spend.
Recommend your best-margin products first in the quiz results where they genuinely fit the shopper's answers.
Raise average order value with bundles and free-shipping thresholds tied to a realistic basket size.
Master one profitable channel before adding another. One analysis argues multi-channel selling multiplies inventory and operating costs.

A quiz helps on the cost side, because it converts traffic you already paid for. A higher conversion rate lowers your effective acquisition cost per order.

A four-week plan

Week 1: measure. Confirm that order tracking matches your store backend. Record conversion at each stage: product view, add to cart, checkout, purchase.

Week 2: remove friction. Show total costs early, enable guest checkout, state your returns policy and place one or two trust signals near the price and buy button.

Week 3: add guidance. Publish a product-finder quiz on your highest-traffic page and in your ad landing flow. Our product finder template for Shopify is a starting point.

Week 4: follow up and refine. Send quiz leads an email based on their answers, read the quiz analytics and rewrite the weakest question.

Change one thing at a time so you can tell what worked.

Build the quiz with Funelyze

Funelyze is a no-code quiz funnel builder for small businesses and Shopify stores. You paste your website URL and choose a goal, such as product recommendations or lead generation, and it drafts a branded quiz with questions phrased in your style and matching result pages. For Shopify stores, it connects to your product catalog so results show real products with add-to-cart built in. It also installs without code on WordPress and WooCommerce, Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, Framer or any HTML site, and it includes analytics, lead collection, scoring and export. It uses no cookies and includes built-in consent text.

You can begin on the Free plan at $0 per month. Pro costs $29 per month and Business $79 per month; see the pricing page for what each includes.

Funelyze

Not selling products? There are also templates for lead qualification and bookings, and you can browse all quiz templates.

Our view

Most stores we talk about with owners do not have a traffic problem. They have a decision problem: a visitor arrives, sees a wall of products, and leaves without knowing which one is theirs.

That is why we built Funelyze around the quiz. A good quiz does what a good shop assistant does: asks a few questions, listens, and points to the right product. Doing it from your website URL means a small team can have that conversation on its own site in minutes, in its own voice, without a developer.

The numbers back a patient approach. Margins are thin, shipping keeps rising and ad costs are not falling, so every visitor you already paid for deserves a real chance of buying. We would rather see you convert more of your current traffic with a clear recommendation than chase a new channel.

Start small: one quiz, one goal, one page. Read the analytics, fix the weakest question, and build from there.

Matas

FAQ

How do I increase online sales quickly?

Fix what is already losing sales: confirm tracking, show total costs early, offer guest checkout and put trust signals near the buy button. Then add a quiz that guides visitors to a product. These changes work on traffic you already have, so they pay back faster than new advertising.

Why am I not getting sales online?

The cause is usually one of three: too few of the right visitors, a site or offer that fails to convince, or tracking that hides the real picture. Break your funnel into stages and see where people drop. Our funnel optimization guide shows how.

Is online selling still profitable?

It can be, but margins vary widely by category, ad costs and shipping. Eightx Research found a median -2.4% operating margin among public DTC brands in FY2025, so track margin per product, not only revenue.

What is the busiest day for online sales?

In one analysis of US orders from January to May 2026, Friday led and Tuesday was lowest. Seasonal peaks such as Cyber Monday matter more, so check your own analytics for your audience.