In a monthly e-commerce “conversion olympics“, the winning team achieved a 24% conversion rate. Not bad: in fact its 10 times the average of 2.4%.
The figure of 2.4% comes from shop.org. According to their survey, if you are converting at better than 10%, you are in the elite top 7% of e-commerce websites.
That’s at the top of the table. At the bottom end of the food chain, plenty of sites are chugging along at below 1%. And an interesting 9% of websites do not even know their conversion rate.
Possible reasons behind this are:
- Don’t know what conversion rate means.
- Don’t know their own conversion rate.
- Do really know - but it’s a secret.
In fact for a lot of e-commerce firms, their conversion rate is their big competitive advantage. If you have similar gross margins as your rivals, similar costs, then the only thing left is your conversion rate. A better rate means you can bid more for Google AdWords, run more banners, send more e-shots. This means it’s a good idea to keep it secret.
So the measure of a good conversion rate is: better than your competitors, and trending up. Maybe think of a bricks-and-mortar supermarket: what’s their conversion rate. 99% ? 99.9% ?