Getting a lot of traffic but not a lot of sales? 

Here's what you're missing…

Keep in mind that in ecommerce, traffic is meaningless if your visitors aren't making purchases. That's why every ecommerce company should pay attention to their conversion rate to turn traffic into profits.

In this post, you'll learn:

• What exactly is ecommerce conversion rate?
• What is a "good" conversion rate in ecommerce? 
• Factors that influence conversion rate 
• Actionable optimization steps to increase conversions

Let's get started. 

What is Ecommerce Conversion Rate? 

Ecommerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take a "conversion action" that actually contributes to your business goals. 

Some examples of conversion actions are: 

• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Adding products to cart
• Downloading a file
• Creating an account
• Making a purchase

To calculate your ecommerce conversion rate, divide your total conversions by the total number of visitors and multiply it by 100. That's the percentage of visitors to your ecommerce website that add value to your business.  

The higher your conversion rate, the more profitable your ecommerce business. 

To put things into perspective, let's say you're selling a single product for $20.

If you have 10,000 monthly visitors and your conversion rate is 5%, that means you're converting a total of 500 customers per month. That's $10,000 per month in gross profits. 

The crazy part is, increasing your conversion rate by as little as 1% could lead to enormous gains. In relation to the example above, improving conversions from 5% to 6% results in $2,000 more in your pocket.  

Without paying attention to your conversion rate, it doesn't matter how much traffic you're generating — you're leaving a lot of money on the table. 

What's Considered a Good Conversion Rate?

If you're looking to benchmark the entire ecommerce industry, the average conversion rate would be anywhere between 2% and 4%. But the actual average conversion rate in your niche is probably outside this range. 

For example, if you're in the pet care industry, the latest benchmarks show that your conversion rate should fall between 2.20% and 2.53%. Any higher would be a good target, but realistically, the minimum conversion rate you should aim for should be between those percentages. 

Below are the average ecommerce conversion rates per industry in 2024: 

• Agriculture — 0.62% to 1.41%
• Arts and Crafts — 3.84% to 4.07%
• Kids — 0.87% to 1.43%
• Automotive — 0.65% to 1.35%
• Electrical and commercial equipment — 1.31% to 2.49%
• Fashion and clothing — 1.01% to 2.20%
• Health and wellbeing — 1.87% to 4.20%
• Home accessories — 1.55% to 2.34%
• Home and kitchen appliances — 1.72% to 3.00%
• Sports and outdoors — 1.18% to 1.62%

Aside from your niche, take note that the average conversion rate in each industry also varies based on your specific business type and online traffic sources. Selling on social media, for example, has a very different conversion rate compared to when you're selling via your own ecommerce website. 

Here's a quick tip: don't chase benchmarks as if they're your ecommerce Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) targets. You can start with the industry average, but the only conversion rate you should worry about is that of your own website — track it, see what works, and optimize accordingly.  

What Impacts Ecommerce Conversion Rates?

In order to optimize your ecommerce conversion rate, you need to break down and understand the factors that affect it. Not only will this help you devise an actionable CRO strategy, you'll also identify the types of metrics you should track to improve your strategies over time. 

Here are the top five ecommerce conversion rate factors you should watch out for: 

• Website Experience: To deliver a quality experience that compels a conversion, you need a website that loads fast and responds smoothly. According to statistics, a 0.1-second improvement in loading speed can result in an 8.4% lift in conversions. 
• Product Pages: Another component of the user experience is the design of your ecommerce landing pages. Make sure your audience can quickly and easily find key information as well as important conversion elements, like call-to-action (CTA) buttons, opt-in forms, product photos, and star ratings. 
• Checkout Process: To get more conversions, the checkout process on your ecommerce store should be as frictionless as possible. Requesting too much information or bringing up unexpected costs during checkout can lead to a lot of abandoned carts. 
• Audience Quality: You can get everything right on your website but still fail to secure higher conversions if you target the wrong audience. Unfortunately, a lot of ecommerce startups overlook the importance of user intent when building pages and planning their marketing strategies. 
• Other Variables: Lastly, conversion rates may also spike or dip based on a handful of other factors like holidays, special promotions, and product seasonality. External variables like economic downturns and political turbulence can also affect your conversion performance.  

Actionable Ways to Boost Your Conversion Rate 

Here is a checklist of CRO strategies to unlock the potential of your ecommerce website: 

1. Website Optimization

There are several cost-effective ways to improve website performance and boost conversion rate: 

• Compress images or convert them into modern formats. Use tools like TinyIMG or Kraken.io to compress image files or use more efficient formats like WebP or AVIF. 
• Make mobile optimization a top priority. With more ecommerce traffic coming from mobile devices, you must adopt a mobile-first approach when it comes to website optimization.
• Build a solid, navigable site structure. See to it that your online customers have no problems finding the products or resources they need through simple menus, on-site search, and internal links. 

Quick tip: Use PageSpeed Insights to analyze your ecommerce website and diagnose performance-related issues. 

2. Improve Product Pages

Using original, high-resolution product photos is a bare minimum when it comes to creating product pages. Write sharper descriptions that underline the benefits you offer or create informative visual content that emphasizes your selling points.

Ribbon it up with star ratings and/or customer reviews that can build up buyer confidence and improve your conversions. 

3. Simplify the Checkout Process

Avoid injecting unnecessary hurdles like requiring signups, showing too many popups, or obscuring the viewport with ads and other needless distractions. 

A popular strategy is to create a single-page checkout process where customers can complete their purchases in one place. Also, try to support as many payment channels as possible for your customers' convenience. 

If you need to acquire email addresses for remarketing, don't make it mandatory. Instead, offer value in return in the form of special discounts, welcome gifts, freebies, and the like. 

4. Leverage Customer Data

If you have an email list, create customer segments based on their previous purchases and website activity. Use customer data to plan and launch personalized campaigns that hit them with the right messages at the right time.

Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp have drag-and-drop tools and templates for these campaigns. You can send follow-ups to cart abandoners, send special birthday offers, welcome new subscribers, and more.

5. Run A/B Tests

Split testing or just "A/B" testing lets you experiment with multiple variations of your pages, compare the results side by side, and implement data-driven adjustments. 

Use tools like Hotjar and Google Analytics 4 to run A/B tests. If you're running Shopify, a more convenient option is to use third-party integrations like Intelligems.

6. Use Social Proof

Aside from customer reviews and star ratings, consider publishing case studies to reinforce your value propositions with real and verifiable results. You can also leverage user-submitted social media content, interviews, or other "outside-the-box" strategies to generate social proof. 

A great example would be Everyday Dose and their free mushroom coffee giveaway video, which is embedded into their product page.

Case Studies: Real-World Wins

Seeing CRO at work in the real world will give you much-needed insights and ideas to execute yours successfully. 

That said, here are a couple of case studies covering ecommerce CRO that generated real wins: 

Flos USA Streamlined the Checkout Experience to Improve Conversions by 125%

Flos is a well-known designer lighting brand that had issues with a low checkout conversion rate. 

Their CRO strategy involved three pivotal steps:

• Improve navigation
• Enhance product discovery
• Cleaned up and streamlined the checkout process

As a result, Flos created a focused and frictionless checkout experience — improving conversions by 125%.  

How Crown & Paw Used A/B Testing to Get 16% More Conversions

Crown & Paw is an ecommerce brand offering pet portraits to fur-parents. 

The company's CRO journey is multi-faceted — including strategies like coupon codes, popup opt-in forms, and sticky menus. The most interesting component of their campaign, however, is changing their homepage's headline to increase orders by 16%. 

With A/B testing, Crown & Paw was able to run multiple variations of their homepage within the same period. This enabled them to collect performance data and grow their homepage conversion rates faster. 

Glamnetic Supercharges Conversions by 120% with a Turnkey Solution

Website performance is one of the biggest factors that can influence your ecommerce conversion rate. In fact, 70% of customers actually consider loading speed as a "make or break" factor in their online purchase decisions. 

Beauty brand Glamnetic put this theory to the test by optimizing their page load speed. 

With the help of Nostra AI's Edge Delivery Engine, the company was able to reduce its Time to First Byte (TTFB) metric from 550ms to 85ms. This substantially improved their website's responsiveness despite utilizing a lot of high-quality images and videos on their product pages. 

Not only did this enhance the user experience, the performance boost also increased their conversion rate by a whopping 120%. 

All these case studies show that even small changes, be it to a headline or loading speed, can result in huge gains in your bottom line. 

Conclusion

In ecommerce, getting visitors is just the beginning of your growth journey. 

You also need CRO to cash in on your site traffic. Otherwise, you're simply chasing a vanity metric while your company goes to zero. 

Remember that your niche, target audience, and product type all affect what a "good" ecommerce conversion rate looks like. Use industry benchmarks as a baseline, but remember that it's all about growing past your baseline through consistent improvement. 

We recommend starting with an analysis of your own data to identify potential bottlenecks to your conversions. This will help you pick the strategies you sorely need from the list above. 

Here are some of the tools that can help with your initial analysis: 

• Google Analytics 4 
• Hotjar
• Crazy Egg
• Optimizely
• VWO

If you're looking for a straightforward solution that can quickly lead to measurable results, Nostra AI's Edge Delivery Engine can give you the unique advantage you need to exceed industry benchmarks. 

Our precisely-tuned edge delivery network keeps you within 50ms of 95% of the world's internet users. With the help of our smart caching technology and crawler optimization service, unlock the true conversion potential of your ecommerce website without the heavy lifting. 

Book a demo here!