E-commerce benchmarks July-Sept 2016

Screen Pages has released e-commerce benchmark data regarding visitor sources and behaviour, conversions for retail e-commerce websites, for the summer period July-September 2016.

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 4.2 million website visitors, placing 145,000+ orders and spending £10 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, Really Wild Clothing, Salter, Baldwins, Spring Chicken 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 2.83%, ranging from 0.99% to about 4.5%.
• The average £ per visit was £2.48.
• Email remains the best source of revenues: email (when executed well) produces extremely well, converting at 3.7% - some retailers do not use email effectively or do not track it properly. 5 of the sample had at least 20%+ of their traffic from email, with 4 retailers enjoying conversion rates from email of over 6% (the highest being 12.7%).
• Paid search produces an average of 19% of all visits, converting at 3.03%. 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: 19% versus 47%).

Standout figures

Desktops account for less than half of all traffic but still produces two-thirds of sales, but mobiles have improved to be over one quarter of all visits at 29% but only 10% of sales.

• 26% of visits are viewed on tablets, mostly iPads, generating 24% of sales.
• 29% of visits are viewed on mobiles, mostly iPhones, generating 10.4% of sales (up from 9.7% in Q1 2016).
• 47% of visits are viewed on desktops, generating 64% of sales  - sales at the same level as Q4 2015.

The best conversion rate on a mobile was 3% - on a "responsive" website (compared to 6.9% for its desktop site).

By Roger Willcocks