Everyone is obsessed with the 2% who convert. But the real opportunity? The 98% who don’t.
Most eCommerce teams are still debating attribution — which ad drove the sale, first click, last click, last non-direct click. Meanwhile, approximately 70% of carts get abandoned every day. Quietly. Without brands even noticing.
What if we reverse engineered it instead? Rather than chasing buyers, study the ones who almost bought but didn’t — those 98% who got close and then walked away.
“Stop chasing the 2% who already said yes. The 98% are your biggest untapped growth lever.”
A Real Example
I had the opportunity to work with and run multiple tests on an online Home and Lifestyle brand. They were getting solid traffic and strong add-to-cart numbers — but conversions were consistently low. Three things stood out immediately:
- Users were hitting checkout, seeing the shipping cost revealed only at the final step, and dropping off at that exact moment.
- There was repeated back-and-forth behaviour between the product page and the cart — a classic sign of hesitation and unresolved doubt.
- No clear returns policy or trust signals anywhere near the payment step — the moment where buyers need reassurance most.
What We Changed
- Displayed shipping costs upfront on product pages — no surprises at checkout.
- Added “Free returns” and a delivery timeline directly next to the Buy Now button.
- Simplified checkout to a single page, similar to Express Checkout.
That is reverse attribution in practice. Not buyer personas — anti-personas. Built from real abandonment behaviour, not assumptions.
How to Reverse Engineer Your Drop-Offs
Track the non-buyers
- Segment users who added to cart but did not purchase.
- Analyse exit pages, time on page and repeat visit patterns.
Watch behaviour, not just data
- Session recordings reveal hesitation, rage clicks and genuine confusion.
- Heatmaps show exactly where attention drops or gets stuck.
Identify the exact friction point
- Pricing shock — shipping costs or taxes revealed too late in the process.
- Trust gaps — no reviews, unclear returns policy, weak guarantees.
- UX issues — slow load times, messy checkout flows, too many steps.
Build anti-personas
- Why did they not buy?
- What objections surfaced at the last moment before leaving?
Fix one leak at a time
- Test changes weekly, not quarterly.
- A/B test specific friction points — not entire redesigns.
Retarget with context
- Show reviews, guarantees and urgency signals in retargeting ads.
- Address the exact objection they had before leaving — not a generic ad.
That 98% is not bad traffic. It is almost-customers hitting a “not yet” moment. Sneaky shipping costs, pricing shock, clunky checkout and missing trust signals are the most common culprits — and every single one is fixable.
The Bottom Line
Most brands optimise for the buyers they already have. The smartest brands study the buyers they almost had. Your conversion rate improvement is not hiding in your ad account — it is hiding in your abandonment data.
Start there.
We diagnose and fix exactly this. Free 30-min audit.
Dilly writes the Playbook Series — practical growth frameworks built from real campaigns, real data and real results across multiple Brands.