I’ve had quite a few clients and prospective clients call and ask, “What is a good conversion rate?” and “What is a good shopping cart abandonment rate?”
While the Fireclick Index can give you the average conversion rate and shopping cart abandonment rate for your general industry, many web sites have intricacies that make them different from the “average” site. Additionally, many smaller web sites process e-commerce transactions through “canned” e-commerce systems (like Miva Merchant, Yahoo Merchant Services, osCommerce and others) and either can’t or don’t customize the checkout process.
My answer to the question of a “good” cart abandonment rate or conversion rate is to re-frame the question. Rather than asking what a conversion rate or cart abandonment rate should be, the question you should ask is “What can I do to my web site to improve the conversion rate and cart abandonment rate?”
I tell clients to use the Fireclick Index to get a general rule of what their e-commerce conversion rate should be, then compare it to their actual conversion rate. Is it close to “average,” or is it not in line with the average for your industry?
Once you answer that question, the real question is how you improve your conversion rate. We answer the question of how a site can improve by performing a web site assessment, which is an exhaustive analysis using qualitative and quantitative data, including testing a site with real customers. This helps uncover issues with web sites that make them easier to use, improving conversion rates.
So rather than asking “What should my conversion rate be?” or “What should my shopping cart abandonment rate be?” ask instead what you can do to improve it.
June 5th, 2008 at 6:30 am
Soeren Sprogoe says:
This is a very good question.
And I usually answer it with: “There is absolutely no value in an average conversion rate!”
CR’s are very, very different (IMHO) even within industries, as they rely very much on the type of traffic you bring in through which marketing channel.
Usually PPC traffic has a far higher CR than fx. SEO traffic. And thus a rubish site with absolutely no SEO done to it will “outperform” a good, SEO’d site if you look at conversion rate only.
But since SEO usually is far cheaper in the long run than PPC, the cost per conversion is lower for the SEO site.
So in short: You really can’t compare sites on an average conversion rate, and you shouldn’t. But divide it into CR per marketing channel, and you’re getting close to something comparable. But I bet none would publish that kind of information
June 5th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Rick Whittington says:
Soeren,
I’d respectfully disagree that there’s absolutely no value in knowing an average conversion rate. My point was that there are better questions to ask…
I agree with you that PPC and SEO efforts can get in the way of conversion, however. I had a prospective client contact me with a 0.15% conversion rate because the company optimizes their site for words that aren’t likely to cause conversion. Point well taken.
I’m also in agreement that conversion rate per marketing channel is a great measure — and this can be measured through the Ecommerce section of Google Analytics.
August 10th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Miva Merchant Developer says:
Miva Merchant is coming out with a 1-step checkout as an enhancement to version 5.5 later this year. It will have an AJAX-enabled tool to return shipping rates based on the shipping address.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Daniel says:
So how do you go about improving your CR if it’s ABOVE the average rate listed on the Fireclick Index? What’s the mindset when setting out to do this? The same as being under I would assume?
May 5th, 2010 at 6:36 am
J.D. says:
Fireclick is interesting, but doesn’t include service providers — only product eCommerce. I’m also looking into Facebook, like most people these days. Since this article was written a while ago, what’s your updated take on that?
May 5th, 2010 at 8:49 am
Rick Whittington says:
J.D.,
You’re right that the Fireclick index measures online retail conversion rates. I’m not aware of a service similar to Fireclick that measures B2B service conversion rates.
Since I wrote this article nearly two years ago, I’ve become interested in B2B conversion rates for this very reason — there are no standards per se.
In B2B sales, lead generation is the “goal” rather than a sale or transaction. You should read a more recent blog post about using contact forms for lead generation. Rather than measuring conversion rate on B2B service sites, what we do is optimize the site to capture the greatest number of leads possible.