507: Budget-Friendly Ecommerce Tips That Will Double Your Sales With Chris Shaffer

Podcast: Download (Duration: 59:18 — 68.1MB)

Ecommerce conversion rate optimization means editing the listing itself, not buying more traffic. My guest this episode, Chris Shaffer of Brand Creators, grew one client’s sales 247% in a single year without spending an extra dollar on ads, without launching new SKUs, and without touching keyword research. He did it by lifting the conversion rate on the listings he already had.

That is a hard shift for most sellers. Traffic feels controllable, so we throw money and keywords at it. Conversion rate is the number Amazon, Etsy, and Walmart actually rank you on, and it is the number almost nobody touches first.

Here is Chris’s full playbook, including the exact benchmarks he uses per platform, the three listing elements that move the needle, and the buyer-survey data behind it.

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Key takeaways

• Chris grew a client’s ecommerce sales 247% in one year by fixing conversion rate, without adding traffic, launching products, or changing keyword strategy.
• Target conversion rates: Amazon 10-15% (20%+ is excellent), Walmart in the middle, Etsy 5-8% (3% is the platform average).
• Amazon calls conversion rate “unit session percentage.” Find it in your Business Reports, not anywhere labeled conversion rate.
• Titles, product images, and product descriptions are the three levers that move conversion rate. Chris’s Etsy buyer survey rated images 9.23/10 for purchase influence and confirmed 68% of buyers always read the title.
• Write feature-and-benefit copy, not spec-sheet copy. “Keeps drinks cold for 24 hours” converts. “17 oz double-wall vacuum insulation” does not.
• 96.3% of Etsy buyers with 11+ purchases go to a seller’s storefront first before searching. Repeat customers are where ecommerce profit actually lives.
• Negotiating payment processing rates saved Chris roughly 1% on total revenue in one afternoon of work. On seven-figure businesses that is tens of thousands per year.

Why ecommerce conversion rate optimization beats chasing traffic

Ecommerce conversion rate optimization outperforms traffic hunting because it hits the one signal Amazon, Etsy, and Walmart actually rank you on. The platforms are search engines built to show the product most likely to sell, not the product with the most keywords stuffed in. Higher conversion tells the algorithm you are the safe bet, which then earns you more organic traffic for free.

Chris framed the mistake this way in our conversation. Most sellers feel they can control traffic (better keyword tool, more ad spend), and feel they cannot control the listing itself. The reality is the reverse: you have very little control over keyword volume estimates, and total control over the words, photos, and descriptions on your page.

His clients that focused on conversion rate saw a 247% year-over-year sales lift with no additional ad spend, no new products, and no keyword overhauls. Traffic followed the conversion rate up.

How Amazon, Etsy, and Walmart actually decide who ranks

All three marketplaces run what Chris calls a two-stage algorithm. Stage one is a yes/no relevance check: do the keywords the buyer typed appear somewhere in your title, description, or backend keywords? If yes, you qualify.

Stage two is where you win or lose. Among all qualifying listings, the platform ranks by which listing is most likely to convert that specific search into a sale. Conversion rate, average sell-through, price competitiveness, and personalization signals all feed into that ranking.

Two listings with “red t-shirt” in the title both pass stage one. The one converting 9 out of 100 clicks beats the one converting 8 out of 100. That is the entire game.

What is a good conversion rate on Amazon, Etsy, and Walmart?

Good conversion rates vary by platform, but Chris shared the benchmarks he uses when auditing client accounts. Use these as your floor before you decide whether a listing needs work.

• Amazon: 10-15% is solid. 20%+ is excellent. Chris has listings that consistently hit 20-25% and topped 30% last year.
• Walmart: Sits between Amazon and Etsy. Fewer public benchmarks because the platform is newer for most sellers.
• Etsy: Platform average is around 3%. 5-8% is above average. 8%+ is genuinely strong.

Amazon does not label the metric “conversion rate” anywhere in the seller dashboard. They call it unit session percentage and it lives in the Business Reports section. If your unit session percentage is well below the benchmarks above, that listing is where your optimization time should go.

Etsy actually labels it conversion rate in the Shop Manager stats. Walmart calls it out in the Search Insights report. In all three cases you can also just calculate it yourself: units sold divided by sessions.

Step 1: Audit whether you are getting the right traffic

Step 1 of ecommerce conversion rate optimization is checking whether the traffic you are getting is even relevant. Wrong-intent clicks drag your conversion rate down even when the listing itself is fine.

Pull your search-term report from Amazon Ads (or Etsy’s beta search analytics report, or Walmart’s Search Insights). Look at what keywords are actually driving impressions and clicks. Then ask one question of each: is that person really looking for my product?

Chris’s example: a 64-ounce stainless steel tumbler was showing for “coffee mug” because Amazon opens the funnel wide when you run ads. Someone typing “coffee mug” expects a small ceramic cup.

They click, see a giant metal tumbler, and bounce. Your conversion rate takes the hit.

Chris’s rule for cutting a bad keyword

If a keyword’s conversion rate is significantly below your listing average, cut it. Pull it out of your title, description, and backend search terms. Turn off the ad targeting it.

There is one exception. If that single “wrong” keyword drives 80% of your sales, do not touch it. Instead, rebuild the listing around what those buyers actually want.

That situation is rare.

The subtle version of this trap: words that mean different things in different markets. Chris pointed out that “thongs” in Australia means flip-flops.

If a US flip-flop seller is paying for “thongs” clicks that expect underwear, the conversion rate on that keyword will be terrible. Cut it.

Step 2: Fix your title so a human can read it

Step 2 is rewriting your title in plain English instead of keyword salad. Chris’s buyer survey found 68% of shoppers always read the title before clicking, and if the title reads like a robot wrote it, they scroll past.

The old-school SEO title (Insulated Water Bottle Water Bottle Tumbler Thermos 32oz Double Wall Vacuum Stainless Steel Wide Mouth) worked in 2015. In 2024 it hurts you three ways: humans do not click it, the platform does not need the repetition to understand plurals and synonyms, and even if it ranks, it converts worse because expectations are unclear.

Amazon, Etsy, and Walmart all handle plurals, misspellings, synonyms, and word order internally. Etsy documents this explicitly in their seller handbook. Amazon does not document it, but every large-scale test has confirmed the same behavior.

The one-sentence test for a good ecommerce title

Read your title out loud as a sentence. If it parses as English, you are 90% of the way to a good title. If it sounds like keyword-stuffing gibberish, rewrite it.

Etsy’s documentation adds one nuance: keywords near the beginning of the title carry slightly more weight than keywords near the end. Put your most important term first, then write the rest as a readable phrase.

You do not lose SEO by dropping repetition. You gain click-through rate and conversion rate, which are the signals that actually rank you.

Step 3: Rebuild your images to answer buyer questions

Step 3 is treating your product images as your primary answer to the question “what does buying online lose vs. shopping in a store?” In Chris’s Etsy buyer survey, images scored 9.23 out of 10 for purchase influence, higher than price, higher than shipping cost, higher than anything else.

The point of an ecommerce image is to let the buyer do the thing they would do in a physical store: pick it up, look inside, check the material, compare the size, hold it against their body. Your job is to answer all of those questions in a photograph.

If your listing has one hero shot and four staged lifestyle photos of models jogging, you are wasting seven of the ten slots Amazon gives you.

What to actually put in your product image slots

Chris’s checklist for image slots that move conversion rate:

• Hero shot on white, showing the whole product clearly.
• Size and scale: product next to something recognizable (a hand, a phone, a wine bottle). One popular water bottle went viral because it stated “fits a full bottle of wine” and showed the photo.
• Material and construction: show the inside if the material matters. A plastic-averse buyer will look for the plastic liner. Show them there is not one.
• Benefit demonstration: not “stain-proof fabric” as text, but a split-screen photo of red wine poured on the fabric and the same fabric coming out of the washing machine spotless.
• Feature callouts with short labels: 24-hour cold retention, dishwasher-safe lid, leak-proof seal.
• Comparison chart against your other SKUs so buyers pick the right size or version.
• Lifestyle shot at the end, not the middle. Emotional payoff after you have earned the click.

Step 4: Rewrite product descriptions in benefits, not features

Step 4 is rewriting your bullet points and description so every feature has a benefit attached. This is the single most common mistake Chris sees when he audits a listing.

Feature-only copy reads like a spec sheet. “16 oz. Double-wall vacuum insulation. Powder-coated 18/8 stainless steel.”

That tells a metallurgist something. It tells a shopper nothing.

Benefit-attached copy translates the feature into the outcome the buyer cares about. “Keeps drinks cold for 24 hours or hot for 12, thanks to double-wall vacuum insulation.” Same feature, but now the buyer knows why it matters.

The fabric-weight test

Chris’s litmus test: can you, the seller, explain your own spec to a friend at dinner? “This shirt is 240 GSM cotton.” What does 240 GSM mean to someone who is not in textiles? Nothing.

“You can machine-wash this shirt 100 times and it will still feel like the first day you put it on.” That is the same information the buyer actually wanted.

Rewrite every bullet in your listing using this template: [Feature] so that [benefit the buyer feels]. If you cannot finish the sentence, the feature does not belong in the bullet.

How storefronts and repeat buyers change the math

Storefronts matter far more than most Amazon and Etsy sellers realize, because repeat buyers overwhelmingly start their next purchase there instead of at search. Chris’s survey found that among buyers with 11+ purchases in the last year, 96.3% start at a shop they have bought from before.

Here is the full ladder from Chris’s survey data:

• Buyers with 1-5 lifetime purchases: 80.2% likely to return to a shop they have bought from.
• Buyers with 6-10 purchases: 89% likely.
• Buyers with 11+ purchases: 96.3% likely.

Two takeaways. First, if you sell one SKU and never build a storefront, you leave money on the table. Repeat buyers want to buy from you again, and they cannot if there is nothing else to buy.

Second, capture the customer even when Amazon owns the transaction. The Amazon buyer who becomes an off-Amazon subscriber on your own site is worth 10x the one-off. Which brings us to Buy with Prime.

Should you add Buy with Prime to your own website?

Chris is testing Buy with Prime on one of his brands specifically to see if it lifts the conversion rate on his own website. His reasoning: on your own site you pay the fulfillment fee but skip Amazon’s 15% referral fee, so it comes close to break-even on cost.

The old Pay with Amazon button barely moved the needle because Amazon shoppers shop on Amazon and website shoppers shop on the website. Buy with Prime is a different pitch: two-day shipping and Amazon’s return safety net on your store.

The one real risk is inventory cannibalization. If Buy with Prime pulls from the same Amazon FBA pool that fulfills your Amazon orders, a website surge can starve your Amazon listing. That is the reason to test before rolling it out across a portfolio.

How to negotiate down your payment processing fees

You can negotiate payment processing fees down to under 1% all-in if you have the volume, and it takes about an hour of work. Chris did this across two of three brands he consults with this year and cut roughly 1% off total revenue in fees, which on any decent ecommerce business is tens of thousands of dollars.

The move: get on interchange-plus pricing instead of a flat rate. Interchange-plus means you pay the actual card-network cost plus a small markup, instead of a blended flat like 2.9% + 30 cents. On volume, interchange-plus wins nearly every time.

Chris’s business moved to Wells Fargo for card processing (already had a business banking relationship, so setup was 30 minutes) and now pays under 1% blended. They also negotiated down failed-payment fees, which on a subscription business can add up to thousands per year on their own.

If you take a lot of PayPal, use Braintree

PayPal charges 3.49% + fixed fee on standard commercial transactions, and most sellers do not know this is negotiable. If PayPal is a meaningful share of your sales (Chris and I both estimate a third), the fee difference matters.

Braintree is owned by PayPal and lets you negotiate both credit card rates and PayPal rates in one contract. It also offers interchange-plus pricing. If you are on Stripe today and PayPal is a big chunk of revenue, Braintree is worth a serious look.

The three-line action item: pull your last three months of merchant statements, calculate your blended effective rate, and call your processor. If they will not budge, quote another processor’s offer and try again.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good conversion rate on Amazon?

A good Amazon conversion rate is 10-15%, and an excellent one is 20% or higher. Amazon labels this metric “unit session percentage” in the Business Reports section, not “conversion rate.” If yours is below 10%, focus on titles, images, and descriptions before adding more ad spend.

How do I find my conversion rate on Amazon?

Log into Seller Central, open Reports, then Business Reports, and look for “Unit Session Percentage” in the Detail Page Sales and Traffic report. That column is Amazon’s name for conversion rate. You can also calculate it manually as units ordered divided by sessions.

How does the Amazon search algorithm actually rank listings?

Amazon uses a two-stage algorithm. Stage one is a relevance check: do the buyer’s search terms appear somewhere in your listing? Stage two ranks the qualifying listings by which one is most likely to convert that specific query into a sale, using conversion rate, sales velocity, price, and personalization signals.

Does keyword order in a listing title matter on Etsy or Amazon?

Yes, but less than most sellers think. Etsy’s documentation confirms keywords near the beginning of the title are weighted slightly more, and Amazon appears to work similarly. Both platforms handle plurals, synonyms, and word rearrangement internally, so you do not need to repeat every variation.

How much do product images actually influence ecommerce conversion rate?

Chris Shaffer’s survey of a couple hundred Etsy buyers rated product images 9.23 out of 10 for purchase-decision influence, the highest of any listing element they tested. Images beat title, price, shipping cost, and reviews. Treat your image slots as the answer to every question a buyer would ask in a physical store.

Should I write product descriptions as features or benefits?

Write benefits first, then attach the supporting feature. “Keeps drinks cold for 24 hours” is a benefit. “Double-wall vacuum insulation” is the feature that produces it.

Buyers care about the outcome and use the feature as proof, not the other way around.

How do I negotiate lower credit card processing fees for my ecommerce store?

Ask your current processor to move you from flat-rate pricing to interchange-plus pricing, which passes through the actual card-network cost and adds a smaller markup. Get quotes from at least two competitors (Braintree if you take PayPal, Stripe or a bank-owned processor otherwise) and use them as leverage. On any six-figure or seven-figure business, an afternoon of negotiation is worth thousands per year.

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