How to sell more through my eCommerce?

To sell more through your eCommerce, define the business process first, understand your buyer personas, connect the store to a CRM, integrate every system the purchase depends on, drive qualified traffic with inbound marketing, and align marketing and sales around shared metrics. An online store is an architecture, not a website, and it grows only when those six pieces work together.

Picture a leadership meeting at a mid-sized home-improvement distributor. The online store launched eighteen months ago, the board had expected it to become the favorite sales channel, and monthly revenue is flat. The chief marketing officer points to traffic, the chief financial officer points to the cost of the platform, and the head of sales says the leads that come from the site are not worth calling. Everyone is partly right, and nobody owns the system as a whole. This scenario is illustrative, but it describes a situation we find again and again when we create a new eCommerce project or advise a client on an existing platform.

Companies have begun to move their business processes from traditional to digital channels. eCommerce has taken a lot of relevance and has become, for many, the favorite channel for selling products and services. However, adoption and results are not always as fast as marketing managers could expect. Throughout this article, we collect the main tasks that need to be executed over and over again, in the same order, whenever a company wants its online channel to produce results. We present them as six steps.

Why does an eCommerce start with the business process and not with the platform?

The first step is to define the process. It is important to define the business process you want to automate. The eCommerce will automate the process that you define, but if you do not know your own process, your platform will automate the default programming that comes in the system, which is not necessarily the one that is convenient for your business. Many stores that disappoint their owners are, in effect, running somebody else's process.

The practical remedy is to use tools such as SIPOC, As-Is and To-Be analysis, and customer journey mapping. They help you raise requirements, understand your processes and improve them before a single line of configuration is written. A distributor, for instance, may discover that its real order flow includes a quotation step, a credit check and a partial shipment, none of which exist in the default checkout of any platform. Finding that out in a workshop costs days. Finding it out after launch costs months of rework and a lot of customer patience.

Who is the buyer and what should the store sell to that person?

The second step is the buyer persona. One of the most powerful and impactful exercises for a business is to diagnose your Buyer Persona. This exercise defines the specific profiles of your buyers and helps you understand what products you should sell to each customer profile.

>>One Buyer Persona to rule them all <<

If you believe your buyer persona is 25 years old, describe every consideration about this person, such as who they work for, how much they earn, what activities they do during the week and what their metrics are at work. With that profile you can estimate their salary, expenses and interests, and you can understand whether a product will feel cheap or expensive to them and whether you should communicate through Facebook, LinkedIn or another channel. A store that serves a procurement manager at a construction company needs different content, prices and delivery promises than one that serves a first-time home renovator, even when the catalog is the same.

What does a CRM add to an online store?

The third step is to collect CRM data. Your eCommerce is at a great disadvantage if it is not integrated with a customer relationship management system. A CRM helps you extract data and gather information about your prospects and customers, such as their product needs and purchasing history. That history is what allows a company to recommend the next product, remind a buyer of a repeat purchase or identify the customers whose activity has quietly declined.

A CRM automates marketing, sales and service processes, and traditionally those three modules are sold separately. Analyze your business process and define which modules are the most convenient for your business before you buy. If your company has very complex processes, a system such as Salesforce may be your best option because of its programming and integration capabilities. If your company has standard, non-complex processes and a small technology department, or none at all, software such as HubSpot is possibly your best option. Our own work with both platforms suggests that the right answer depends more on process complexity and internal capacity than on brand.

>>What is Data Governance?<<

Collecting customer data also creates an obligation to govern it. Decide who owns each data set, how duplicates are resolved, and what customers have agreed to. Without that discipline, the CRM becomes a second place where the truth is argued about instead of found.

Which integrations does an eCommerce need to work?

The fourth step is integration, and integrations are key. Every eCommerce must integrate with inventories, databases, the CRM, invoicing, banks, shipping providers and analytics. If an eCommerce does not have a clear technological architecture and does not connect all the elements the purchase process needs to flow, its chances of success decrease considerably. A shopper who sees a product as available and then receives a cancellation email, because inventory lives in a spreadsheet that nobody synchronized, rarely returns.

>>Key integrations for your marketing in HubSpot<<

The method is simple, even if the work is not. Draw the processes, identify the integrations you must perform at each stage, and then define the systems and the integration architecture your eCommerce needs. Our process integration with systems practice follows exactly that sequence, because a diagram agreed on by finance, operations and marketing prevents most of the arguments that appear later during testing.

Integrations also determine how much the store can learn. The Baymard Institute, which compiles studies on online checkout behavior, reports in its cart abandonment research an average documented abandonment rate of about 70 percent across 50 studies. Among shoppers who left for reasons other than just browsing, 40 percent cited added costs such as shipping, tax and fees, and 17 percent cited website errors or crashes. Both causes are architecture problems. Shipping quotes depend on a carrier integration, and errors depend on how reliably the systems behind the cart talk to each other.

Why does an online store not sell on its own?

The fifth step is inbound marketing. An eCommerce platform is not going to generate sales on its own. You need a methodology that helps you increase traffic to your site and create flows that generate qualified opportunities, and then close them.

>>What is Inbound Marketing?<<

Consider the inbound marketing methodology one of the best business tools for your company. In our experience the methodology also gives your platform a kind of monthly maintenance, since it forces the team to review content, offers and results on a regular rhythm. For a store with a technical catalog, that means guides, comparisons and answers to the questions buyers ask before they purchase, published steadily and measured against revenue and not only visits. ICX describes its approach in its inbound marketing consulting page.

How do marketing and sales agree on what a good lead is?

The sixth step is to talk to your sellers. There is a methodology called SMARKETING that aligns sales and marketing requirements to achieve business objectives. Most commercial departments do not have shared metrics, and that creates a gap between marketing goals and sales goals. Marketing celebrates form submissions, sales complains about quality, and the store sits in the middle with no one accountable for revenue.

It is important that marketing and sales define metrics together, such as what counts as a qualified lead and what does not, the average closing rate by lead, the effectiveness of sales and the average sales per category. A useful way to begin is with a short set of questions, answered jointly by both teams. What service or product line are we selling? When we sell, how much is it worth in year one? How long does a deal take to close? For every ten qualified leads we work, how many do we close? If marketing delivers ten leads to sales, how many are actually qualified, meaning able to do business with us? How much new income are we trying to generate through this business unit? Based on the average deal size and the new revenue target, how many deals do we need to close, and therefore how many potential clients do we need to generate? When those numbers are written down and agreed, the budget conversation changes from opinions to arithmetic. Our lead management work uses this same structure.

How should I measure progress once the six steps are in place?

Measurement closes the loop between the steps. Track a small set of indicators that connect the store to revenue, such as conversion rate by traffic source, cart abandonment, average order value, repeat purchase rate, lead-to-customer rate and the time it takes a qualified lead to become an order. Review them monthly with marketing, sales and operations in the same room, because each indicator reveals a different part of the chain. A falling conversion rate with stable traffic points to the buyer experience or the offer. A rising abandonment rate points to costs, delivery promises or errors in the checkout. A weak lead-to-customer rate points to the definition of a qualified lead agreed in step six.

The discipline matters more than the tool. Companies that review the same five or six numbers every month find problems while they are still small, and they can show the board a clear line between each investment and its result.

What do industries teach us about selling more online?

In business-to-business distribution, the winning stores are those that expose customer-specific prices, reorder lists and credit terms, which depends on ERP and CRM integration more than on design. In retail, the differentiator is inventory visibility across channels, so that the promise on the product page matches what the warehouse and the stores can deliver. In manufacturing, the store often becomes a configuration and quoting tool, where the process definition from step one carries most of the value. In services and subscription businesses, the CRM history and the inbound content engine matter most, because the sale is a relationship and not a single transaction.

The pattern is the same across sectors. The platform is a necessary condition, and the process, data, integration and commercial alignment around it are what turn it into a sales channel.

What do these conclusions mean for the C-level?

Our first conclusion is that eCommerce systems are complex and must be part of an architecture. They are not a simple website. In our experience, if a provider offers you a website with payment functionality and calls it an eCommerce, you should discard that provider. They do not know how complex an eCommerce is, and they should not be your advisor. This is a firm view based on ICX project experience and it reflects how often such sites fail once they must connect to inventory, invoicing and fulfillment.

The second conclusion is not to forget to lift the business process, since the process defines how the eCommerce will be developed. The third is that your platform has a lot to do with the success of your eCommerce. Analyst research can help you shortlist. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, published in November 2025, assesses 19 vendors on ability to execute and completeness of vision, and it includes platforms such as Adobe, Salesforce, SAP, Shopify and VTEX. Use it as an input, together with your own requirements, and not as a substitute for them.

The fourth conclusion is that an eCommerce should not be expensive to begin with. Even Magento, rated by many as one of the best eCommerce platforms in the world, has a free version, now called Magento Open Source, and a paid business edition, Adobe Commerce, as described in Adobe's overview of both editions. Free software still carries costs for hosting, development and maintenance, so budget for the whole life of the store and not only for the license.

For the chief executive, the message is to treat the store as a business unit with an owner, a target and a roadmap. For the chief financial officer, the question is the total cost of ownership and the revenue per visit, not the launch cost. For the chief marketing officer and the chief sales officer, the priority is a single definition of a qualified lead and a shared dashboard. For the chief technology officer, the priority is the integration architecture.

What can I do on Monday morning?

Before starting an eCommerce project, or before revisiting an existing one, gather the data on your company's inventory, information about the systems you have and, if possible, the business processes you already have documented. Those three inputs shorten every later conversation with providers.

Then call a ninety-minute meeting with marketing, sales, finance and operations around one question. Where does an order stop moving in our process? Map the answer on a whiteboard, mark the systems involved and note which integrations are manual. Ask for the current abandonment rate at your cart and the top three reasons customers give, and agree on a definition of a qualified lead before the meeting ends. Finally, set a monthly review. An eCommerce must be updated every month, according to our experience, and it is not an investment to be made if you are not willing to provide the same or more maintenance than a physical office or store.

If you want a structured way to start, the ICX Customer Journey Toolkit helps your team map the steps a buyer follows from first search to repeat purchase, which is the foundation for the process definition in step one.

How does ICX help?

ICX supports eCommerce initiatives from process design to operation. Our B2C eCommerce consulting and B2B eCommerce consulting define the strategy and the architecture. Our SIPOC work clarifies the process, our buyer persona service defines the profiles, and our CRM consulting connects the store to customer data. On the platform side, we implement Adobe Commerce, and on the marketing side we deploy HubSpot.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to see results from an eCommerce? It depends on how well the process, integrations and marketing are prepared before launch. Stores that define their process and metrics first tend to reach a stable rhythm sooner than those that fix problems afterward.

Do I need a CRM from the first day? It is strongly advisable. Without it, purchase history and prospect needs stay scattered, and the store cannot support follow-up or personalization.

Is a free platform enough? It can be, for the right size and complexity, but hosting, development, security and maintenance still need a budget.

Who should own the eCommerce? A business owner with authority across marketing, sales and operations, supported by technology.

What if my traffic is high but sales are low? Check the abandonment reasons first, then review integrations, shipping costs and the quality of the leads that reach your sales team.

A store grows when its process, data, integrations and commercial teams are aligned. If you would like to review where your own eCommerce stands, our team will be glad to talk with you through our contact page.