By Lucy Alexander

Ecommerce conversion rates are the ultimate top-line metric for online store owners. With this data, you can see if the changes you make to your site positively or negatively impact how many visitors become customers.

Download Now: Ecommerce Conversion Rate Calculator

Although crucial, there’s often confusion around what’s considered a reasonable conversion rate. Before you evaluate if your ecommerce conversion rate is good or bad, you must evaluate how your performance measures against your industry’s standard.

In this article, you’ll learn the ins and outs of ecommerce conversion rates, conversion rate benchmarks across industries, and how you can improve your results. Let’s dig in.

For example, suppose 30 out of 1,000 visitors to your online shop made purchases.

To calculate your ecommerce CVR, take the total number of people who completed checkout (30) and divide that by the total number of site visitors in the same time frame (1,000). In this case, your ecommerce CVR would be 30/1000 = 0.03 = 3%.

Today, many ecommerce retailers sell across multiple platforms. You’ll need to aggregate your site visits and conversions in one place.

You can leverage a tracking spreadsheet or find a technology solution to keep a pulse on your performance across platforms.

We’ve put together a free ecommerce conversion rate tracker that you can download here, along with an ecommerce marketing and sales plan template in our Ecommerce Planning Kit.

Featured Resource: Ecommerce Conversion Rate Tracker

Why is your ecommerce conversion rate important?

Your ecommerce conversion rate is crucial to the success of your online shop.

For example, you could bring in 50,000 views per month to your website through ads. If the user experience on your website is poor or your product descriptions aren’t effectively communicating value, you might only end up with a small percentage of that traffic converting into customers.

Ecommerce CVR is also a valuable metric to track over time to see how the improvements you’re making to your website, product categorizations, product descriptions, checkout process, or any other aspects of your online store are actually impacting your business’s bottom line.

What’s a good ecommerce conversion rate?

Don’t compare your ecommerce CVR to an overall benchmark that aggregates CVRs across industries. CVRs vary wildly across ecommerce sectors. Try to find conversion rates for your category or industry to use as a benchmark.

Looking at numbers isn’t all you need to do. Conduct a cost-benefit analysis and ensure that you make more money than you spend by selling your products online. From there, focus your time on optimizing your site beyond where it currently stands.

If you have one category of items with an excellent conversion rate, you can also aim to bring all categories up to that standard. With that approach, you can …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog