Does sales funnel work with e-commerce?
A sales funnel doesn’t just work, it is essential for real success in eCommerce. It’s as important as selling a good product people actually want.
Let’s discuss more.

In the context of e-commerce sites, a sales funnel is also known as a conversion funnel. Consider a general scenario. When customers visit your e-commerce site, they probably look for the products, check out, pay, and use the products. But could more people who visit your site end up buying? And can those people be made to buy more from you, immediately and also in the future from being a lifelong fan? Here’s where sales funnels are used.
To boost sales and conversions, sales funnels grab potential customers, qualify them, upsell them, and convert them appropriately into other funnels (in the case of a truly well-designed business). In e-commerce, a sales/conversion funnel consists of stages that customers follow when they first come to know about your e-commerce website until they purchase a product, all designed by you as the marketer. You determine how you get traffic and where you send it, you determine how leads are captured, you determine how they are marketed to and warmed up to buy more products. It’s like a strict maze that moves customers down certain paths based on their qualifications as a certain type of buyer.
According to a survey, out of the total visitors on an e-commerce website, the final percentage of visitors who bought something is almost 3%. I 100% sure it’s actually lower. With a funnel, you create a more natural and welcoming journey for prospects to become customers, and consequently get far better numbers, both in sales frequency and revenue earned per customer (especially the latter).
In general, there are four stages in the sales funnel for an e-commerce website:
1) Awareness: When the customer comes to know about an e-commerce website and the products it sells. Or at least gets a vague awareness about something the business has to offer. Usually, you lead with content here. Traffic backlinking through content marketing, PPC ads, etc.
2) Interest: This is when the customer shows an interest in the business as potentially understanding their problems and needs. You generally do this by drawing the customer from the awareness content to a landing page that gets their email address. A free gift teaching something important to them is just one example. Get their interest in something you have to offer, that isn’t necessarily a product that earns you money. You’ll make more later on the back-end.
3) Desire: Here, usually via email marketing, you introduce the product you sell, smoothly transitioning from information about you and your free gift, and why this non-free product is perfect for the customer.
4) Action: The final push to get a sale, and then more. Never settle for just one purchase. Offer upsells, transition buyers into a new email list designed to market more exclusively to them, etc.
This is a brutally simplified, bare-bones explanation of the concept, so don’t take this as all the information needed to make a funnel that actually works. That is much more complicated.
If you are looking to build a sales funnel for your eCommerce website, and give it the best possible performance numbers, then I would recommend the book “Dotcom Secrets” by Russel Brunson. The book covers sales funnels, their basics, why they work so well, how one can build them in extremely specific instructions, and finally implement a SET of the right kinds of multiple funnels for your business. People call it the playbook for multiplying your online business empire, and they’re right. After implementing its ideas for my online business, the results are extremely promising.
In conclusion, a sales funnel works for an e-commerce website, provided you implement it with a specific method. I would go so far as to say that without a strong, optimized funnel, you have a very low chance of the business taking off and are relying too much on luck.
Please feel free to reply to me if you have any questions.
Good Luck!
Thanks,
Cleo