E-commerce conversion rate: the 2021 trends

For all websites, and especially for e-commerce sites, the conversion rate is THE KPI to watch. This indicator lets you measure the performance of a business. Broadly speaking, the conversion rate tells you what proportion of your traffic turns into customers through a purchase over a given period. After putting together the ultimate e-commerce SEO guide for you, this article revisits the fundamentals (definition, calculation and comparison) with a focus on e-commerce conversion rates by industry. On top of that, we share our tips for optimizing your conversion rate!

E-commerce conversion rate: definition

What is an e-commerce conversion rate?

In the broad sense, the conversion rate corresponds to the share of users who complete a desired action: signing up for a newsletter, downloading a white paper, visiting a landing page, creating an account, sending an information request… The number of new visitors or page views can also be good performance indicators, for example for a site that lives off its advertising revenue. But for e-commerce sites, and especially for pure players, the conversion rate is the best way to measure your success. When you run an e-commerce site, your conversion rate is the key to the success of your business. Here, your goal is not only to drive traffic to your site, but really to get visitors to complete their purchases so as to turn these mere visitors into customers. Just like the conversion rate, it’s important not to lose sight of the average transformation rate.

Source: Smart Insights

For sales, marketing and SEO teams, this rate is an excellent way to know how much the e-commerce site contributes to achieving the company’s business goals. And by extension to check whether the company is meeting its sales targets.

How do you calculate a conversion rate?

According to the definition given above, the conversion rate equals the number of times a goal is reached divided by the number of people who had the opportunity to reach that goal. For an e-commerce site, the conversion rate reflects the number of visitors who purchased a product or service relative to total traffic.

Conversion rate = Total number of sessions that completed a purchase / Total number of sessions

Let’s take an example: Your e-commerce site attracts 200,000 unique visitors every month. Of these, 3,500 make a purchase. Your conversion rate is (3,500 / 200,000)*100 = 1.75% To find out your conversion rate, the simplest, fastest and most effective way is to rely on the reports generated in Google Analytics.

Otherwise, other statistical analysis tools such as Piwik, AT Internet or Adobe Analytics can also provide answers. Using other tools alongside Analytics lets you cross-reference the data to smooth out any errors. To make sure you get a conversion rate that’s representative of your business, there’s no secret: you need to properly set up your trackin g and precisely define your business objectives.

Semji tip

The Semji platform integrates the conversion rate from Google Analytics so you can cross-reference this data with other KPIs: click-through rate, impression rate, number of sessions, etc. A great way to simplify tracking the performance of your content.

Ask us for a demo to discover how to track the performance of your content with Semji.

What is a good conversion rate?

Every industry has its own specifics and, by extension, its own average conversion rate. So the answer needs some nuance. According to recent studies, the average conversion rate on an e-commerce site is said to be 3% (across all industries). The best-performing merchant sites, with a perfectly honed strategy, get close to 20% conversion: hats off! While it’s possible to grow a site’s traffic by +50% in a few months by putting an SEO strategy in place, raising your e-commerce conversion rate by +50% over a few years already looks like a very ambitious challenge. Why? Over the past few years, we’ve seen a fairly natural shift from physical sales to the online channel. The internet is taking on growing importance in people’s lives and is now part of their daily routine. A study by FEVAD reports that in 2018, France had 37.5 million online shoppers for a market estimated at 81.7 billion euros in total.

To measure the real performance of your conversion rate, the best approach is to compare yourself with the top players in your industry. But here again, be careful not to compare the incomparable. For example, some sites offer multi-product retail, while others run on a subscription model with a single product and a very attractive price. It’s impossible to compare them, then, even though you should always think about optimizing the SEO of your product pages. You need to take several factors into account that directly impact the conversion rate. These include, among others:

• the nature of the products and services offered,
• their price,
• the B2B or B2C positioning,
• the different traffic sources your site benefits from,
• your site’s compatibility with devices and browsers,
• the traffic source,
• the geographic location…

How do you compare two conversion rates?

First of all, to be able to compare several conversion rates with each other, it’s essential to always follow the same method when doing your calculations. So you need to define how you count users. For example, if visitor A visited your site 5 times and visitor B visits it 2 times, did you have 7 visits or 2 visits? It doesn’t matter; the idea is to always use the same reference framework. It’s very easy to directly compare several conversion rates across different periods in Analytics.

When a conversion rate comparison is carried out by a marketing department, it’s important to go beyond overall conversion rates and to segment conversion by different types of visitors.

E-commerce conversion rates: some figures

Between mobile, tablet and desktop, which device records the best e-commerce conversion rate? Every industry works according to mechanisms of its own. Customer profile, buying habits, purchase frequency, basket amount, lead nurturing duration and the presence of competition: every market deserves to be studied. The same goes for countries. To try to get a clearer picture of the different conversion rates by device, industry and country, let’s take a closer look at what happens on the ground.

E-commerce site conversion rate by device: Desktop vs Mobile

To study the conversion differences between the devices used to browse e-commerce sites, we drew on 2 revealing foreign studies. Even though this data doesn’t concern France, it gives us a faithful picture of the reality of e-commerce today. The first comes from Invesp. The data presented comes from the analysis of more than 300 websites as well as publicly available data from several analytics and personalization software companies. These measurements give an overview of how the e-commerce conversion rate evolved in 2017 and 2018.

Source: Inves

With one exception (the second quarter of 2018), we can see that desktop is the device with the best conversion rate, followed by tablet (since 2017) and finally mobile. Monetate e-commerce Quarterly, a specialist in e-commerce benchmarks and studies, ran a study between late 2017 and late 2018. And from this data, we can draw the same conclusion:The two studies point in the same direction and the results are clear-cut: the big winner remains Desktop, ahead of tablet and mobile. These conversion rate differences between the various devices can be explained by:

• how these devices are used: the smartphone is often used on the go and mainly serves to look up information ahead of a purchase. It’s much easier to make a purchase comfortably settled at home in peace and quiet than while walking down the street or in the hubbub of public transport… The tablet is also, by definition, a living-room device, which is why it too records a good conversion rate.
• ergonomics and responsiveness: while brands have for a few years been focusing their efforts on responsive design, notably with the growing importance of the Mobile First Index, the smartphone wasn’t the most ergonomic device for making purchases.
• the quality of the conversion funnel: often very sophisticated on PC, the quality of the conversion funnel isn’t always there on other devices… For now!

E-commerce conversion rate by industry

The best way to compare your conversion rate is still to look at what the other companies in your industry are doing. Every market is different, and conversion rates can vary twofold. This study by IRP Commerce shows that not all industries are equal when it comes to conversion rate. While some come close to 4% conversion (art and craft items), others struggle to reach 1% (the baby and child sector). This chart shows the average conversion rates for each industry.

To round out the previous data, let’s take a look at the recent data gathered by Compass:

The industry with the best conversion rate is “food”. This is explained in particular by the fact that this sector meets a vital need common to all living beings. It’s closely followed by “beauty and health”. Here again, this industry is about well-being and simply meets physical needs. As for those with the lowest conversion rates, “Furniture” and “Electronics”, this is explained in particular by the average basket amount for this type of purchase. Furniture, sofas, tables and household appliances: these are all high-involvement purchases. The consumer probably prefers to go to a store to get advice, see, test and reassure themselves. We can already imagine that these rates will rise as VR becomes commonplace. Here is the same data, this time with conversion rates compared across the different traffic acquisition channels:

Source: Compass

The medians of the various industries range between 0.20% and 11.11%: the gap is considerable! The acquisition channel and the type of product greatly influence conversion rates. Overall, email stands out as the channel that delivers the most conversions, followed by referring sites, direct traffic and organic traffic from SEO. However, having a good ranking on search engines is the most relevant strategy over the long term.

E-commerce conversion rate by country

A recent, very nicely presented study by Wolfgang Digital shows us the different conversion rates across the various countries internationally. This report on e-commerce KPIs in 2019 is based on data from international clients: European and American. It relies on the analysis of more than 250 million website sessions and more than 500 million euros in online revenue over 12 months, from July 2017 to June 2018.

Source: Wolfgang Digital

We can see that conversion rates in European countries (1.51%) are higher than in the United States (1.37%). Once again, the United Kingdom stands out and is still ahead of everyone. This comparative study between the USA and the United Kingdom (from 2014 to 2018) highlights e ven more these conversion rate differences and their fluctuations:

Source: Monetate

These conversion rate differences can stem from several factors:

• the maturity of the market,
• the level of household equipment ownership,
• the brand’s awareness in the country where it wants to distribute its products.

For an international e-commerce site, it’s important to align your conversion goals with the opportunities offered by the different national markets, depending on their characteristics. Just because your e-commerce site has an excellent conversion rate in France doesn’t mean it will be equally capable abroad… Marketing strategies are different, and so are consumer expectations: adapt!

How to optimize your e-commerce conversion rate

Thanks to Analytics, you have a precise view of the user’s journey on your e-commerce site. This data is valuable; it shows you exactly the different steps your visitor goes through before completing their purchase. And sometimes you can be surprised. If you notice large fluctuations in your conversion rate or your sales are struggling to take off, it’s important to review your conversion funnel! Here are our tips for optimizing your e-commerce conversion rate (Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO).

Run A/B testing campaigns

Often, a fairly low conversion rate is due to a UX that doesn’t meet the visitor’s expectations. What’s more discouraging than an endless purchasing process or a slow e-commerce site? A/B testing consists of showing two different versions of your e-commerce site to two samples of visitors. You split your traffic source in 2 and test one version on each. To optimize your conversion funnel, run plenty of tests using the A/B testing technique:

• color,
• text,
• button format,
• button position,
• menu design,
• popups…

Be imaginative and, above all, continuously analyze your data to refine your strategy. As soon as you run a test, compare the results at the end of the given period and keep the version that works best. Pit it against a new version… And so on! Your two versions can have one or several differences. To set up A/B testing, several tools are available to you:

• Optimizely,
• Google Analytics Experiments,
• Kameleeon…

It’s also possible to test more than two versions of a site at once, but that’s called “multivariate testing”.

Understanding cart abandonment

Cart abandonment is a real scourge for online retailers… In fact, ⅔ of users who add a product to their cart won’t complete the purchase. But why do the majority of your users give up on their purchases along the way? The main reasons given by the users surveyed are as follows:

• The payment methods offered are unsuitable or don’t seem secure enough,
• the shipping costs are too high,
• Extra fees were added to the basket amount (handling fees, processing fees…),
• A lack of information,
• Mandatory creation of a customer account to complete the purchase,
• An insufficient level of site security,
• An unclear personal data usage policy,
• An ordering process that’s too tedious or long,
• A lack of transparency about how to contact the seller.

To better understand the reasons that lead your visitors to leave without buying anything, you can ask them about the reasons for their departure:

By putting transparency and reassurance at the heart of your conversion funnel, you have every chance of increasing your sales!

Simplify the ordering process

Are your visitors leaving your site without making a purchase? It might be wise to reduce the steps in the conversion funnel to improve your conversion rate. The goal is to ask the visitor to take as few actions as possible to complete their purchase. Transparency and simplification are the watchwords here. To optimize your ordering process, the technique consists of breaking down the different steps your visitor has to go through before completing their purchase. For example, if your current ordering process has 5 steps, which are:

You can think about which of them can be grouped together so as to limit the actions required from the user:

Source: MD Web

Here, simplification and transparency are the watchwords for optimizing the ordering process, a key step in the conversion funnel.

Optimize your e-commerce site for mobile

Currently, mobile is the 2nd most-used medium for browsing the web, just behind desktop. This device shows the strongest growth compared with the previous year. It therefore makes sense to focus your efforts on mobile optimization of your e-commerce site.

Source: Le Journal du CM

As mentioned earlier, this device has the lowest conversion rate, which suggests it holds great untapped potential. Offering your users a satisfying responsive version is not an option, it’s a must! To improve your site’s conversion on mobile, you can:

• Increase the font size and the size of CTA buttons and make sure to keep good overall readability across the site, particularly in the menu,
• Design the mobile navigation with a genuine UX design mindset, especially when it comes to search and getting in touch,
• Give an overview of the user’s progress throughout the purchase funnel,
• Make sure your mobile site’s loading time is as short as possible,
• Highlight your site’s benefits: free shipping, discounts on a selection of products…

Following up on abandoned carts

A real scourge in e-commerce, cart abandonment is a common practice among 50 to 75% of users… To try to regain the attention of your potential customers, don’t hesitate to use retargeting techniques. The most common and easiest technique to set up consists of following up on abandoned carts through automated emails. It’s all a matter of timing. A study by SaleCycle presents some figures on the effectiveness of follow-ups depending on when they are sent:

• Emails sent 20 minutes after cart abandonment achieve a conversion rate of 5.2%,
• Emails sent one hour after cart abandonment achieve a conversion rate of 4.5%,
• Emails sent more than 24 hours after a cart is abandoned achieve a conversion rate of 2.6%.

The longer you wait, the smaller your chances of converting become…

In your abandoned-cart follow-up emails, you can try offering a time-limited promo code to encourage the purchase, encourage referrals, or highlight the product’s scarcity. Above all, don’t forget to personalize the email based on the information you’ve already gathered about your users! As you’ve understood, every e-commerce sector works according to its own mechanics, which stem from the users’ profile. Whatever happens, the user journey on an e-commerce site includes 4 major steps that you need to master:

• Attract qualified visitors by giving them concrete answers and solutions,
• Turn these visitors into leads by encouraging them to leave contact details and personal information that will make direct contact easier,
• Convert these leads into customers thanks to a user experience that lives up to their expectations,
• Build customer loyalty, and even turn customers into ambassadors for your brand so they become influential advocates and, in turn, generate conversions.

The width of the conversion funnel should be adapted to the type of product but also to the size of the site. When you have a large number of pages and a very dense e-commerce site, opt for a wider conversion funnel. Conversely, a site with few pages should rather have a narrower conversion funnel.

Offering your visitors relevant content is also an excellent way to convert your audience. Tools exist to help you quickly write content that truly answers the questions your audience is asking. A platform like Semji, for example, lets you create such content, track all your KPIs in one single place (including the conversion rate), and also see at a glance which content on your site has the greatest conversion potential!

To find out how to improve your conversion rates and make the most of your content’s potential, don’t hesitate to ask us for a demo!