How to Build an Ecommerce Sales Funnel + Examples

Key points:

Your ecommerce store looks great, your brand is strong, and your product delivers. But sales still feel lower than expected. Why?

The truth is that having a great store and a great product just isn’t enough to win. You also need a strong sales funnel that turns strangers into loyal customers.

Ready to learn how to do it? Here, we’ll take a look at how to build an ecommerce sales funnel and provide a few examples of successful ecommerce funnels in action.

What Is an Ecommerce Sales Funnel?

An ecommerce sales funnel is a specific type of sales funnel designed to turn visitors into buyers through a smooth, product-driven journey. Unlike a B2B sales funnel, which often includes longer nurturing and focuses on building trust, an ecommerce funnel is typically shorter and more transactional.

A typical sales funnel for ecommerce includes five main stages:

1. Awareness: People discover your store through ads, social media, or search engines.
2. Interest: Shoppers browse products and explore your website.
3. Consideration: They evaluate their options, read reviews, and compare products.
4. Conversion: They add items to the cart and complete the purchase.
5. Retention: You follow up through email, SMS, or promotions to encourage repeat buys and loyalty.

By considering these five stages of the sales funnel, you can help turn shoppers into repeat buyers. Now let’s take a look at how to build one.

How to Create a Sales Funnel for Ecommerce: Step by Step

Creating a sales funnel means having a defined strategy and process in place for attracting and nurturing new customers. Here’s a step-by-step framework you can use to build your first one.

⚠️ Before You Build: Validate Product-Market Fit

Before creating landing pages, email sequences, or ads, it’s important to validate product-market fit. This means making sure you understand who you’re selling to and whether your product has real demand. A sales funnel only amplifies demand; it doesn’t create it. If customers don’t clearly understand, want, or trust your product, they’ll drop out before buying.

You may already have product-market fit if:

• Customers understand what you sell without a long explanation.
• You generate repeat purchases or returning customers.
• People recommend your products through referrals or word-of-mouth.
• Your conversion rates are healthy relative to your traffic.
• Customers leave reviews mentioning a specific problem your product solves.
• Paid ads convert without relying on heavy discounts.
• Customers actively search for products like yours.

If you’re getting traffic but seeing low conversions, frequent cart abandonment, or few repeat customers, your product-market fit may still need work.

Now, on to building your ecommerce sales funnel!

Step 1: Understand Your Ideal Customer

To truly know your customers, go beyond demographics and understand their motivations.

Ask questions like:

• What problems are they facing?
• How can your product solve those problems?
• What outcome are they looking for?
• What motivates them to make a purchase?

Start by reading reviews and support messages from your best customers. You can also analyze competitor reviews to see what buyers value or complain about.

Next, look at your own store data, such as click rates, conversion rates, and cart abandonment, to understand how customers behave once they reach your site. This will help you map your funnel around real customer behavior.

For example:

• High traffic but low click-through rates may mean your offer or messaging isn’t compelling.
• High product page visits but low conversions can signal weak trust, unclear value, or pricing concerns.
• High cart abandonment often points to friction during checkout, shipping surprises, or a lack of urgency.

These patterns help you decide where to focus your funnel, instead of guessing what customers need.

Step 2: Build Conversion Pages

Now you need to build your conversion pages. These are specific pages on your website designed to convert visitors into customers. There are two types of conversion pages you'll want to build:

• Landing Pages: Short, focused pages built to convert traffic from ads, emails, or social media through targeted messaging, clear benefits, urgency, and social proof.

• Product Pages: Detailed, evergreen pages for individual products that help customers understand the item and decide whether to buy, independent of any specific campaign.

The goal of a conversion page is to reduce buying friction and inspire visitors to make a purchase. While product pages and landing pages will differ slightly in structure and intent, they both use persuasive elements like benefit-focused copy, customer reviews, and social proof to increase conversions. They should also answer key questions about price, features, shipping, and returns.

Many people build landing pages and sales pages in ecommerce software like Shopify. This is the best option for businesses that sell multiple products, rely on browsing and collections, or want a full online storefront with inventory, shipping, and checkout built in.

You can also use funnel-building tools like ClickFunnels, GoHighLevel, and Systeme.io. These platforms are best when your goal is to drive conversions through a focused, step-by-step funnel rather than a traditional storefront.

Step 3: Drive Traffic

You can begin driving traffic to your website once you have your conversion pages set up. You’ll want to use a variety of different traffic sources, such as:

• Paid Ads: You can use a variety of different ad types like Google Search Ads, Facebook & Instagram Ads, TikTok Ads, YouTube Ads, and Display Ads to drive traffic to campaign-specific landing pages (read our piece on how to scale successful ad campaigns for some tips).
• User-Generated Content (UGC): UGC traffic comes from content created by real users instead of your brand. It includes things like TikTok or Instagram videos, reviews and testimonials, unboxings, product demos, Reddit posts, or other forum discussions.
• Influencers: Influencer content is content created by someone with a built-in audience, usually a social media persona with lots of followers. The content is often created as part of a paid partnership or sponsorship.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): People often search for products on search engines like Google and Bing. Make sure your website pages, especially product pages and collection pages, are optimized to show up in these search results.

More traffic generally means more sales opportunities if you do it right. Just make sure you're sending relevant traffic to these pages. You can do this by targeting the right keywords and working with the right creators.

Step 4: Optimize Your Conversion Pages

As you send more traffic to your conversion pages, watch your conversion metrics and make tweaks to the page to improve the conversion rate.

Make sure your page follows best practices like:

• Match the page to the traffic source: Someone clicking a Facebook ad, email, or Google search result should land on a page that continues the same message, offer, and promise.
• Make the value proposition clear immediately: Within seconds, visitors should understand what the product is, who it’s for, and why it’s worth buying.
• Use benefit-driven headlines: Focus on the outcome customers want, not just product features.
• Use high-quality visuals or video: Show the product in use, highlight details, and reduce uncertainty around what customers are buying.
• Add social proof: Reviews, ratings, testimonials, user-generated content, or media mentions help build trust.
• Make the CTA obvious: Use clear buttons like “Buy Now,” “Start Free Trial,” or “Get Yours Today” that stand out visually.
• Reduce friction around pricing: Be transparent about total cost, shipping, discounts, subscriptions, or return policies.
• Simplify the checkout experience: Reduce unnecessary fields, distractions, or extra steps that slow customers down.

You can also explore tactics like creating urgency (when real) and offering free shipping or returns if you need to boost your conversion rates.

Tools like Microsoft Clarity can help you assess how potential customers behave on the page and what you can do to improve their experience.

Step 5: Optimize Add-to-Cart Checkout Flow

Customers can drop off during the checkout process. You need to make the checkout flow as frictionless as possible to avoid that. Here are some ways to improve this part of your ecommerce sales funnel:

1. Make the “add to cart” button large and visible.
2. Use a slide-out cart to avoid page reloads.
3. Show the total price with shipping estimate early.
4. Make it easy to add upsells without redirecting to another product page.
5. Add a “Guest Checkout” option so customers don’t have to create an account.
6. Make sure the checkout process has as few steps as possible.
7. Don’t ask for more information than you need.
8. Avoid hidden charges.
9. Add trust signals like security badges and return policies.

Step 6: Set up Abandoned Cart Recovery

Cart abandonment statistics show that stores can recover up to 15% of “lost” sales with the proper workflows. These are high-intent leads that just need a slight nudge.

If you capture customers’ contact info (email and/or phone number) right away, you can send them a friendly reminder shortly after they disappear. If that doesn’t work, try offering a small discount, like 10% off, to keep them engaged. Keep in mind that a multichannel approach works best, so try a combination of SMS, email, and retargeting ads for the best results.

Step 7: Create Post-Purchase Upsells

Give your customers the option of adding additional items to their cart during checkout. But keep in mind that upsells should feel like a natural next step, not a random sales pitch.

Try creating bundles or gift sets that pair the item with other complementary items. For example, somebody who buys an iPhone case may also want a screen protector or a mobile battery pack. You can try to upsell by adding an extended warranty or shipping insurance as an option.

ClickFunnels makes this super easy. It’s built around checkout optimization, so you can add one-click upsells, downsells, and order bumps directly after purchase.

Step 8: Set up Email Flows

Your ecommerce sales funnel doesn’t end with the purchase. You can set up post-purchase email flows to keep the relationship strong and get even more value from your customers.

After sending the order confirmation and tracking number, you can ask the customer for feedback. A few days later, ask them to leave a product review and offer some store credit in exchange. You can also set up additional flows for loyalty programs or offer discounts for customers who haven’t returned in a while.

Funnel-building software like GoHighLevel makes creating behavior-based email journeys tied to funnel actions easy. You can trigger emails based on form submissions, purchases, pipeline stages, inactivity, tags, appointments, or abandoned actions. You can also use Systeme.io to trigger surprisingly good email sequences (and you get up to 2,000 contacts and three funnels on their free plan).

Step 9: Track and Improve Your Funnels

The best-performing funnels are usually built through ongoing iteration rather than a single setup. So, once your funnel is live, the work shifts from building to improving. The goal is to monitor how customers move through each step, identify where they drop off, and make small changes that improve performance over time.

Start by tracking how users move from one stage of the funnel to the next. Instead of only measuring sales, look at the performance of each page and action along the journey. This helps you pinpoint where friction exists.

Pay attention to metrics like:

• Click-through rates on landing pages.
• Product page conversion rates.
• Add-to-cart rates.
• Checkout completion rates.
• Cart abandonment.
• Upsell acceptance rates.
• Email open and click-through rates.

Once you know where people are dropping off, look for patterns in customer behavior. Behavior tracking tools like Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, or Mouseflow can help you understand how visitors interact with your pages. Heatmaps, scroll depth, session recordings, and click tracking often reveal issues that traditional analytics miss.

As you optimize, test one change at a time so you can clearly see what impacts performance. Small adjustments often produce meaningful improvements.

Common funnel elements to test include:

• Headlines and messaging.
• Call-to-action (CTA) placement or wording.
• Product images or videos.
• Pricing presentation.
• Social proof placement.
• Checkout design and number of steps.
• Upsell offers.
• Shipping or return messaging.

Over time, funnel optimization becomes a cycle: identify drop-off points, test improvements, measure results, and repeat.

How to Measure Ecommerce Sales Funnel Success

If you want your ecommerce funnel to succeed, you need to define and measure success. Keeping track of important metrics helps you identify specific problems and make targeted improvements. Here are some key metrics to keep an eye on:

• Conversion Rate: How well your pages turn visitors into customers or leads. It matters most when you measure it consistently (using the right visitors) and compare it to your past performance, not just industry averages.
• Add-to-Cart Rate: How many people are adding products to their cart. A high percentage compared to benchmark ranges means that your product pages are effective.
• Cart Abandonment Rate: How many people are dropping off after adding items to their cart. A high cart abandonment rate usually means there's friction during checkout. Again, look at this as a benchmark you want to improve against.
• Average Order Value (AOV): How much customers spend per order on average. An AOV of 1.5-2 times your average product price suggests you have strong bundling and upsell performance. It’s also good to see AOV growing over time.
• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): How much customers tend to spend across multiple orders. Overall, you’re looking to optimize how quickly and how often your customers come back.

Shopify and Google Analytics come with built-in tracking tools that work well for tracking website performance. But if you want full funnel tracking and CRM integration, a tool like GoHighLevel can give you the kind of visibility you need to optimize your entire ecommerce sales funnel.

3 Ecommerce Sales Funnel Examples

Different brands use different tactics, styles, and offers to attract customers. Here are three examples of highly successful ecommerce sales funnels from some of the biggest brands on the internet.

Ridge Wallets

The Ridge Wallet sales funnel drives high-volume, profitable growth through targeted ads and simple landing pages. This has helped Ridge Wallets sell hundreds of millions in product each year. Here’s how it works:

Top of Funnel (Awareness)

• Creator Partnerships: Aggressive influencer marketing on TikTok and Instagram, paired with YouTube sponsorships, helps get their message in front of the right audience. Ridge has reportedly partnered with more than 5,000 creators since 2016. For example, the company has a long-running partnership with Marques Brownlee, a tech creator and YouTuber who covers consumer technology.

• Paid Social: Static Facebook and Instagram ads with low acquisition costs help drive further awareness and bring traffic to targeted landing pages.

Middle of Funnel (Interest + Consideration)

• High-Converting Landing Pages: Instead of sending users to a generic homepage, Ridge often pushes traffic straight to a targeted landing page with tons of social proof.

• Educational Product Pages: Product pages convert interest into desire through visual demos, comparisons with bulky wallets, and clear pricing.

Bottom of Funnel (Conversion + Retention)

• Discounts and promotions: Regular discounts and promotions (like cashback rewards) help push the purchase.

• Fast checkout: Simple checkout with multiple payment options and a clear refund policy helps remove hesitation.

• Upsells: After adding a wallet, customers are offered complementary products to increase AOV.

• Email/SMS Flows: After purchase, email and SMS flows reinforce the brand and turn buyers into repeat customers and brand advocates.

Bombas

Sock and underwear retailer Bombas uses a conversion-focused system built on emotional branding and high average orders. Here’s a look at how it works:

Top of Funnel (Awareness)

• Brand Storytelling: Bombas frequently highlights their "one purchased = one donated" model and partnerships with giving partners, such as charities and nonprofits. This helps attract mission-driven customers.

• Creator & Influencer Partnerships: Partnerships with creators on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok help attract high-intent leads.

For example, Bombas has worked with creators who post “day in life” content. These creators often integrate Bombas socks into casual, relatable moments rather than making the content feel like a traditional ad.

• Paid Social: Paid ads on popular social platforms also help to attract new leads.

Middle of Funnel (Interest + Consideration)

• Landing Pages and Product Pages: Leads are pushed to high-converting product and landing pages that emphasize product innovation, brand mission, and heavy social proof.

• PPC Advertising: Pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google and other shopping platforms help Bombas target high-intent leads searching for specific product features.

Bottom of Funnel (Conversion + Retention)

• Discounts and Promotions: Regular discounts and promotions, such as 20% for first-time customers, help turn leads into customers.

• Frictionless Checkout: The option for express checkout is paired with satisfaction guarantees and clear refund policies to reduce friction and remove buyer hesitation.

• Product Bundles: Bombas offers product bundles and tiered discounts that allow customers to save more on bulk orders. Free shipping thresholds also help increase their average order value.

• Email and SMS Flows: Post-purchase communications generate return customers by reminding them to stock up and cross-selling related products.

PrettyLittleThing

Fashion retailer PrettyLittleThing uses a "faster-than-fast-fashion" sales funnel. It’s designed to convert high-volume social media engagement into rapid purchases through influencer partnerships, organic social media, and heavy sales messaging. Here’s how it works:

Top of Funnel (Awareness)

• Influencer Marketing: PrettyLittleThing relies heavily on the “it-girl” aesthetic and partners with trending celebrities and influencers to showcase their products. The brand has partnered with a number of models and influencers, like Cindy Kimberly, below.

• Organic Social Media: An active presence on Instagram and TikTok helps the brand stay top-of-mind and engage with its audience.

Middle of Funnel (Interest + Consideration)

• Constant Sales Messaging: PrettyLittleThing constantly advertises price drops, limited stock, and fast-selling items to drive more conversions.

• Google Shopping Optimization: Optimizing their search presence for specific keywords helps PrettyLittleThing increase their visibility on both generic and competitor-related searches.

• Endless Browsing: Unlike single-product funnels, PrettyLittleThing’s website is built to mimic social media scrolling. Pages often have multiple sections for “What’s New” or “Trending Now,” along with different filters and categories to help sort products.

• Product Pages: Product pages encourage fast decision-making by including low prices and a “complete the look” section.

Bottom of Funnel (Conversion + Retention)

• Fast Checkout and Delivery: A “guest checkout” option and fast delivery options help incentivize the final purchase.

• Upsells: Customers are frequently shown add-ons like bags, shoes, and accessories that “complete the outfit.” By encouraging customers to purchase entire outfits instead of single items, PrettyLittleThing also boosts the average value of every order.

• Retargeting Ads: Customers are retargeted with items they have already engaged with, which helps bring them back to complete the purchase.