Conversion rate is an important key performance indicator (KPI) to pay attention to as a business that is building a website for e-commerce or has an existing site.
*Updated 8/2/2024
It’s the metric that tells you how effective your strategies in web design, search engine optimization (SEO), and sales and marketing (like abandoned cart emails or a remarketing pop-up for websites) have been in attracting site visitors and converting them into customers.
On average, e-commerce websites see between 1.5% to 6% conversion. While it’s good to be in this range, you’ll want to exceed them to stand out as a brand.
How to Calculate Conversion Rate
Conversion rate refers to the ratio of transactions to sessions on your website expressed as a percentage.
To calculate it, simply divide the number of customers who completed a transaction by the total number of site visitors during that same period.
A benefit of B2B e-commerce nowadays is that you can easily pull up this data from your own website’s insight tools, then crunch the numbers yourself. For example, if you have 50,000 total sessions for a month with 5,000 successful transactions, then your conversion rate would be 10%.
What’s a Good E-commerce Website Conversion Rate?
You’d think that a good e-commerce website conversion rate is anything in the average range.
But this won’t do—for context, the top sites per industry see as much as 30% conversion. You want to be above-average to beat the vast amount of competition out there.
To know what conversion rate to aim for, you must compare your numbers against the general conversion rate of all e-commerce sites, either locally or internationally, as well as the average conversion rate of the industry you’re in.
How to Improve Your E-commerce Website’s Conversion Rate
If your conversion rate isn’t quite up there yet, don’t fret. There are several tricks that you can incorporate into your strategy to improve your numbers. Here are some to get you started.
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Focus On Top-Converting Channels
Check your analytics and see where your site visitors are coming from, then focus on doubling down on your efforts in that channel.
If they’re being redirected from your social media channels, then improve your social media marketing; if they’re coming from organic search, then work on SEO; if they’re coming from ads, then up your budget.
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Promote High-Converting Products
Some products do better than others. Keep promoting these high-converting products to attract customers and raise sales. For example, if your t-shirts sell better than your hoodies, then use the former in your marketing materials.
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Use Remarketing
Not everyone buys on their first visit to a website. But this doesn’t mean you’ve completely lost a potential customer when they leave. Apply remarketing to bring them back to your site and push them towards check-out. This is especially effective when you apply it to recapturing abandoned carts.
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Do A/B Testing
A/B testing (or split testing) is an experiment where two variants of a page, post, etc. are shown to users at random to see which will perform deeper.
This strategy is great to determine the best ways you can market your site and products. A/B testing tools that help anyone wishing to optimize their websites’ design to increase leads.
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Display Social Proof
More than 50% of consumers rely on online reviews to inform their purchasing decisions. Display social proof such as testimonials, comments, and reviews on your website to show the positive experiences of others.
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Personalize Pop-ups
Personalized exit pop-ups can recover potential sales and turn them into conversions. Use POWR.io to create customized ones with discounts and offers that are triggered when a user idles or tries to exit the site.
An Average Conversion Rate Is Not Good Enough
To be a successful e-commerce website, you have to exceed the average conversion rate in your industry.
You can do this by applying several effective sales, marketing, and web strategies, like customizing pop-ups—which you can do with POWR.io’s free pop-up plug-in without coding—that come out at crucial moments in a customer’s journey.
Higher conversions translate to higher visibility, higher sales, and higher performance. When put together these are key to scaling your business.
