Amazon puts two buttons on every product page, and neither is an accident. ‘Add to Cart’ catches the browser still weighing options; ‘Buy Now’ grabs the visitor who’s already decided. That split is what good ecommerce CTA examples look like in practice, because each button removes a different type of hesitation rather than just sitting there looking clickable.
Reviewing heatmap and scroll-depth data across more than a hundred Shopify product pages taught me that the gap between where shops place their primary button and where visitors actually click is wider than most owners realise. Fixing that gap is the single fastest route to better conversion rates I’ve found in over a decade of ecommerce CRO. This guide covers what separates buttons that convert from the ones visitors scroll past, page-by-page examples you can nick for your own shop, and why A/B testing your prompts is worth making a habit of.
Why Every Page Needs a Clear Prompt
A call-to-action tells visitors what to do next. That sounds obvious, but most shops assume customers instinctively know where to click. They don’t. Scroll through your own site on a mobile and count the moments where the next step is genuinely unclear. For most Shopify shops I’ve looked at, the number is higher than the owner expects.
The principle goes well beyond product pages. Your Instagram ad needs a CTA pulling people toward a landing page, and that landing page needs its own prompt moving visitors into product discovery. The chain continues through abandoned cart emails in Klaviyo or Omnisend, where recovery buttons tied to the exact items left behind outperform generic ‘come back’ messages by a country mile. Even your about page and size guides benefit from clear next steps pointing toward the products they reference.
Your buy button should be visible at all times.
Most shops are too timid about asking for the sale. They tuck the add-to-basket button halfway down the page or hide it behind a tab, then wonder why visitors leave without buying. The brands that convert well do the opposite: a sticky buy bar follows the shopper on mobile, and the primary CTA reappears after every key selling point so there’s never a moment where purchasing feels like effort. Pages with one visually dominant action per screen convert at 266% higher rates, which doesn’t mean showing fewer buttons across the page. It means making the buy button the loudest thing in every view.
Spotting the CTAs That Let You Down
Generic labels are the worst offenders. ‘Submit’, ‘Click Here’, and ‘Learn More’ tell the visitor precisely nothing about what happens after they click. Run any Shopify shop through Hotjar’s click map and you’ll see exactly how many visitors hover near these labels and then leave.
| Weak CTA | Why It Fails | Stronger Alternative |
|---|---|---|
| Submit | No value communicated | Get My Free Guide |
| Click Here | Destination unclear | Shop the Collection |
| Learn More | Passive, no pull | See How It Fits |
| Buy | Too abrupt | Add to My Basket |
Competing buttons create a different headache. When a product page shows ‘Add to Basket’, ‘Buy Now’, ‘Save for Later’, ‘Share’, and ‘Compare’ at the same visual weight, the brain stalls and shoppers often click none of them, which is enough to lose the sale entirely.
Mismatched expectations do just as much damage. A button promising ‘Get 50% Off’ that lands on a page of full-price products destroys trust in a heartbeat, and mobile visitors are particularly exposed because they can’t hover to preview a destination before tapping. Placement compounds the problem: buttons positioned above the fold convert at 79% higher rates, which means a brilliant CTA buried below three image carousels might as well not exist on a phone screen.
What High-Converting CTAs Have in Common
Copy That Earns the Click
I’d test button copy before touching anything else on the page. Imperative verbs like ‘Get’, ‘Claim’, and ‘Shop’ outperform passive phrasing by 121% in studies on action-word usage, and the reason is straightforward: they tell the visitor exactly what’s about to happen. ‘Shop the Collection’ pulls a browser forward because the verb carries intent that a static label like ‘Our Collection’ never could.
First-person wording sharpens this further. ContentVerve tested ‘Start my free trial’ against ‘Start your free trial’ and found the first-person version converted 90% better. Small change. Big shift in the visitor’s head: ‘my’ creates a sense of ownership before the click even registers. Worth testing ‘Add to my basket’ against the standard ‘Add to basket’ on your product pages, especially for higher-ticket items where commitment anxiety is real. Copywriting formulas built for ecommerce give you a proper framework for writing these variations rather than guessing.
Visual Weight and Breathing Room
A cracking CTA buried in visual noise is a wasted CTA. Buttons shaped as obvious clickable elements pull 45% more clicks than styled text links, and wrapping generous white space around your primary button lifts conversions by 232% in VWO’s research. On product pages where buy buttons sit next to review stars, size selectors, and trust badges, that breathing room is the difference between a confident tap and a confused scroll.
Colour contrast matters more than colour itself. The red-versus-green debate is a red herring. What counts is whether the button stands out from the background it sits on. A teal button on a white page pops; that same teal on a dark green layout vanishes. Test against your specific design, not against generic advice.
Urgency That Isn’t a Bodge Job
Real deadlines and real stock levels are the only forms of urgency and scarcity worth using. ‘Only available until midnight’ or ‘Last 4 in stock’ both create honest pressure, and the conversion lift from genuine cues can hit 332% when the offer is credible. The problems start with fake countdown timers that reset on every page refresh and ‘limited stock’ warnings on items with infinite supply. Shoppers cotton on fast, and once trust goes, it doesn’t come back easily.
Ecommerce CTA Examples by Page Type
Product Pages
The dual-button logic from the intro applies at every price point, but smaller Shopify shops can adapt it to their own scale. Native Union places the add-to-cart button at two scroll positions on the same page. Once tapped, the checkout loads as a single clean screen, cutting the steps between basket and payment. That kind of friction reduction is worth more than any colour change. Most Shopify themes let you replicate this with a sticky add-to-basket bar in the theme editor.
Subscription brands take the concept further. Truvani bakes the discounted price directly into the button label itself: ‘Subscribe & Save’ with the monthly cost printed right on it. The shopper sees the saving and the action in one glance, which collapses two decisions into one tap. For any shop running subscription options through Recharge or Loop, I’d put testing this format near the top of the list.
| Page Type | Primary CTA | Secondary CTA |
|---|---|---|
| Product page | Add to Basket / Buy Now | Save to Wishlist |
| Category page | Quick View | Filter / Sort |
| Homepage | Shop Now / Shop Sale | Browse Categories |
| Basket | Proceed to Checkout | Continue Shopping |
Email Campaigns
Most promotional emails are a mess of competing links: five buttons, three banners, a social media strip, and a footer full of navigation. The reader’s eye has nowhere to land, so it bounces. Stripping all of that back to a single CTA is where the real gains sit, with one study reporting sales increases of 1617% compared to multi-link layouts. That figure sounds daft until you see it play out in your own Klaviyo reports.
Abandoned cart recovery is where personalisation pays off most. Naming the exact product left behind inside the button text itself, like ‘Get 15% Off Your Skincare Set’, creates a sharper pull than a generic ‘Return to Cart’ ever could. I’ve seen Shopify shops double their recovery rate within a fortnight of switching to dynamic button copy in Klaviyo.
Post-purchase emails are criminally underused. Customers who’ve just bought are 16 times more likely to share news of their purchase on social media when a sharing CTA sits on the confirmation page. Costs nothing to set up, generates referrals on autopilot.
Confirmation pages deserve more attention than most shops give them.
Homepage and Exit-Intent Popups
Chewy pairs percentage-discount banners with ‘Shop Now’ buttons positioned directly beneath the offer, keeping the value and the action in a single visual unit. PlayStation’s homepage takes a layered approach: ‘Play free this weekend’, ‘Sign in to PSN’, and ‘Open Beta’ all appear on the same screen, but clear visual hierarchy means each speaks to a different visitor intent rather than competing for the same click.
Exit-intent popups are a last roll of the dice before someone leaves. The ones that recoup genuine revenue tend to offer proper value: a discount, free delivery, or a members-only bundle. Restating the same pitch the visitor already ignored is par for the course on most shops, and it rarely shifts anything. Well-placed welcome gates can pull click-through rates between 10% and 25%, but the ecommerce UX around these popups matters just as much as the copy inside them.
Blog Content and Guides
Blog posts play a bigger role in conversion paths than most marketing teams give them credit for. Sidebars get ignored on mobile. Inline text links woven into the narrative outperform standalone buttons on editorial pages because they feel native to the reading experience. A sentence linking to a relevant collection mid-paragraph moves readers deeper into product discovery whilst keeping the educational tone intact.
Save the isolated button-style CTA for the end of the piece, where the reader has finished absorbing the content and is ready for a next step. One well-placed closing prompt beats three scattered banners every time.
Testing Buttons That Actually Move Revenue
Assumptions about what converts are almost always wrong. I reckon half the button choices on most Shopify shops were made by a developer during the initial build and never questioned afterwards. Frozen in place for years. It’s the same pattern we see across Manchester ecommerce brands and shops further afield. HubSpot’s data shows marketers who consistently test CTAs see around 28% improvement in conversion over time, and those gains compound across every page on the site.
Start with copy. It is the lowest-effort change with the highest potential payoff, and GoCardless proved it by changing a single word on their primary button and watching conversions climb by 139% overnight. Colour and contrast come next: test what stands out against your specific page design rather than relying on generic advice. Placement is worth investigating for higher-priced products, where positioning the CTA after detailed specifications sometimes outperforms above-the-fold placement because the buyer needs to build confidence first.
Single-variable A/B testing is the only way to isolate which change drove the result. Altering button colour and text in a single test while also moving the CTA’s position tells you nothing useful. Run one variable at a time, wait for statistical significance (most tools flag this for you), and implement the winner before moving on. Declaring a result after fifty clicks is a mug’s game: you need thousands of impressions before the numbers mean anything reliable. Our ecommerce CRO framework covers how to prioritise and sequence these tests properly.
Putting This Into Practice
Pull up your Shopify analytics and sort pages by traffic. Your homepage, top-selling product pages, and basket flow are where the biggest gains sit, so audit those first.
Quick audit questions for each page:
- Is there one visually dominant CTA, or are multiple buttons fighting for the same tap?
- Can a mobile visitor see the main button straight after the page loads?
- Does the button text describe the benefit, or just the action?
- Do abandoned cart emails reference the specific products left behind?
Swapping ‘Submit’ for ‘Get My Free Guide’ on a single landing page can shift results noticeably within a week.
The shops that treat CTA optimisation as ongoing graft rather than a one-off setup are the ones that keep pulling ahead. Buttons age. Audiences shift. What converted last quarter might not convert next month, and the only way to know is to keep testing.
If running conversion audits alongside the day-to-day of your shop feels like a proper faff, our ecommerce SEO consulting service includes CTA analysis as part of monthly retainers. We spot the quick wins and build a testing order so the changes that shift the most revenue come first.
