What is a Good Conversion Rate for an Online Retail Store?
Posted by Jon Beattie February 19th, 2008Take a look at these:
These numbers are for December 2007, so you would expect a higher than normal conversion rate in the lead up to Christmas, but even so, 29.5% of visitors to The Popcorn Factory made a purchase. That is pretty good.
Based on this I would propose the following range:
| 1 - 5% | Poor |
| 6 - 10% | Fair |
| 11 - 15% | Average |
| 16 - 20% | Good |
| 20 - 30% | Excellent |
| 31% + | Legendary |
So if you’re not in the 11-15% range, you are probably not getting the right type of traffic to the site, or you have significant conversion issues within the site itself that are preventing customers from completing the transaction.
To determine if it is the first issue you would need to look at the Bounce report in Google Analytics. This will tell you if you are getting a lot of visitors to the site who leave straight away or “bounce”. This would mean you need to look at where you are getting your traffic from and making changes to who your are targetting.
If this is not the case and you think it might the second issue, then you can look at using a tool like ClickTale to get some insight into what is happening. This is obviously a more complex issue and could involve a number of factors including price, trust, shipping policy, copy, quality of product information and content. A tool like ClickTale is going to give you some valuable information though. You could take this further by implementing live chat to start to interact with the visitors and find out what it is they are looking for as well help them through a transaction.
The numbers above are a generalisation, and there are many different types of online stores, so it might not be entirely accurate depending on what category you are in, however, it is a useful benchmark to see how you are tracking against the big boys, as the graph is only of those sites with 500,000 + visitors per month.
Technorati Tags: clicktale, googleanalytics
Categories: Analytics, Conversion, Measurable Marketing
I can’t agree with you on those ranges Mr Beattie. It’s simply not that simple, a site converting 5% who sells a high risk good is probably doing very well.
To be able to put conversion rate performance into ranges, you’d need to have different ranges for each industry. And then subcategories in these industries again.
On top of this, conversion can mean nothing in comparing one site to another. An example - lets assume Louis Vuitton and Lands end pay the same amount on marketing and have the same site traffic (of course they won’t but I need this to makle a point)
Louis Vuitton could have a 2% conversion rate compared to Lands End at 17.2%. Let’s assume LV have a margin of 95% with an average sale value of $2,000. Lands End with a 50% Margin with an average sale value of $200. Who do you want to be?
How dare you disagree with me Joel! Only joking
Yep, I see your point, but margin doesn’t come into this I don’t think. Internal profit margins are irrelevant to the customer. There is no evidence that premium brand goods convert less than cheaper brands, assuming you are getting quality traffic. One thing to note is if the site is actually all about retailing or partly about brand. All of the sites listed in the graph are very clearly focused e-Commerce sites, that is the main focus, whereas a brand like Louis Vuitton would be more interested in influencing offline purchase, so it would not be fair to do an apple with apple comparison with a site like Amazon.
As with all statistics, they are nothing more than a benchmark by which to work from. Ideally you would get conversion rates specific to your industry…but you have to take what you can get sometimes.