When prospective customers arrive at a website, they come with a specific intention or motivation. They may have come simply to browse or out of curiosity or by mistake. However, many come with the intention of making a purchase. For those prospects, it is the efficacy of the website’s purchase funnel--the pages that make up the buying process--that determine whether the visitor becomes a customer or merely a statistic.

Among the factors that influence the probability of conversion, an element we have called "friction" is key for us as marketers. The reason is that, unlike Motivation or the product factors of Value Proposition, Friction is something that we can significantly influence with comparatively little energy or cost; and the conversion gains we receive can be disproportionately high compared with the level of investment.