E-commerce benchmarks July-Dec 2015 [e-commerce statistics]

Screen Pages has released e-commerce benchmark data regarding visitor sources and behaviour, conversions for retail e-commerce websites, for the six month period July-December 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 £71. The websites all use the e-commerce platform Magento. In aggregate, the report tracked the behaviour of just under 8 million website visitors, placing 300,000+ orders and spending £22 million.

Online retailers whose data was benchmarked include Bella di Notte, Christopher Ward, Loake, Micro-Scooters, Van Dal, Tuff Luv, Force 4, Moss Europe, the RSPB, the RNIB, Baldwins, Salter, Really Wild Clothing 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 3.28%, ranging from less than 1% to well over 8%.
• The average £ per visit was £2.83
• Email is the best source of revenues: email (when executed well) produces extremely well, converting at 4.03% - 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 (6 had over 20% & 1 had over 50%). 3 retailers enjoying conversion rates from email of 10%+ from their emails.
• Paid search produced an average of 20% of all visits, converting at 3.11%. 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: 18% versus 42%).

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).

• 26% of visits are viewed on tablets, mostly iPads, generating 25% of sales.
• 22.8% of visits are viewed on mobiles, mostly iPhones, generating 8.8% of sales (the same as in May-August 2015).
• 48% of visits are viewed on desktops, generating 65% of sales (up from 63% in May-August 2015).

The best conversion rate on a mobile was a meagre 2.8% - on a mobile-optimised website (compared to 11.9% for its desktop site).

The average difference in conversion was 3.3% (ranging from 0.5% to 10%).

By Roger Willcocks