E-commerce benchmarks May-August 2015 [statistics]

Screen Pages has released e-commerce benchmark data regarding visitor sources and behaviour, conversions for retail e-commerce websites, for the summer period May-August 2015.

The businesses indexed are limited to niche brands, generally selling online, via catalogues and stores, whose online sales range up to £15m per annum and average order values average £72. The websites all use the e-commerce platform Magento. In aggregate, the report tracked the behaviour of 3.8 million website visitors, placing 135,000+ orders and spending £9.7 million.

Online retailers whose data was benchmarked include Bella di Notte, Christopher Ward, Loake, Micro-Scooters, Van Dal, Rio Beauty, Force 4, Moss Europe, the RSPB, Baldwins, and This Works.

The data includes statistics regarding traffic sources and mobile usage, website engagement & conversion rates.

Stand-out out figures

• * Overall conversions average at 2.93%, ranging from less than 1% to well over 8%.
• * The average £ per visit was £2.52
• * Email is the best source of revenues: email (when executed well) produces extremely well, converting at 3.93% - some retailers do not use email effectively or do not track it properly. 8 of the sample had roughly 10%+ of their traffic from email (5 had over 20%), with 2 retailers enjoying conversion rates from email of over 11% from their emails.
• * Paid search produced an average of 19% of all visits, converting at 2.8%. Four businesses enjoyed conversion rates on paid traffic of over 5%.
• * Engagement (as measured by bounce rates) shows a large gap between home pages (which get a lot of marketing attention) and all other pages: 22% versus 43%).

Standout figures

Desktops still account for slightly less than half of all traffic and just under two-thirds of sales, but mobiles have improved to be nearly one quarter of all visits (but still under 9% of sales).

• * 25.2% of visits are viewed on tablets, mostly iPads, generating 24% of sales.
• * 22.8% of visits are viewed on mobiles, mostly iPhones, generating 8.7% of sales (up 11% from 7.8% in Q1 2015).
• * 46.4% of visits are viewed on desktops, generating 62.8% of sales  - sales down 5 percentage points from Q1 2015.

The best conversion rate on a mobile was a meagre 2.3% - on a mobile-optimised website (compared to 6.9% for its desktop site).

By Roger Willcocks