What’s a Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate?
By Anna Johnson on February 20th, 2009As reported by FutureNow, research by Nielsen indicates that the top online retailers are getting conversion rates of 19 to 30 percent and higher.
Here’s the list of the top 10 converting websites for December 2008:
- ProFlowers: 31.1 percent
- LL Bean: 25.7 percent
- Amazon: 23.7 percent
- VitaCost: 23.0 percent
- Coldwater Creek: 22.4 percent
- QVC: 21.1 percent
- Roamans: 20.4 percent
- Office Depot: 20.2 percent
- LandsEnd: 19.3 percent
- Victoria’s Secret 19.2 percent
If you run an ecommerce store and are not achieving similar conversion rates to these, you owe it to yourself to carefully study these companies to see how you can emulate their success.
The good news is that the ability to deconstruct the websites of these 10 companies is at your fingertips.
If you’re an information marketer you may be looking at these figures in shock and awe. Isn’t 2-3 percent meant to be the gold standard?
Relax! You’re comparing apples to oranges.
The mindset of someone visiting one of these stores is substantially different to that of someone who likely happens on your info-product site.
Chances are that most people going to ProFlowers are looking to buy flowers. Someone who finds your information product site, on the other hand, is more likely to be looking for information and reluctant to pay for it if they can get it for free.
So you have a big task to persuade them otherwise!
I’m generalizing, of course, and there are certainly exceptions to this. But the kinds of conversion rates you typically see achieved by retail sites compared with those of info-product sites (and we’re talking the sites of the best information marketers in the business) reflect this generalization.
Having said that, we can all learn from seeing what other businesses do, and these figures are valuable food for thought no matter what part of Internet marketing you operate in.
May 14th, 2010 at 4:43 am
Thanks for the information. I really don’t understand how I could ever get my store, that sells environmentally friendly products to the kind of conversion rates shown above, any tips?
May 14th, 2010 at 8:40 am
This blog is FULL of tips – look around
More importantly though, take a look at the online stores in the article. Study them, analyze them, compare what they’re doing to what you’re doing on your site, and model them. The closer you can get your site looking and working to the way the best in the business do it, the higher your conversions are likely to be.