5 Best Practices to Optimize E-Commerce Sales

5. Avoid the trap of linear funnels. A linear funnel is best understood as a logical progression of a visitor's path on a website. The idea behind looking at a linear funnel is so that you can easily tell what percentage of visitors end up making a purchase. The problem with a linear funnel analysis is that web visitor patterns are anything but linear. Visitor A can come to the homepage first, directly enter a product page and exit via the "Contact Us" page, whereas visitor B can come directly to the Contact Us page and then back to the homepage. In other words, applying a linear funnel to this scenario is likely to result in false metrics.