E-commerce benchmarks & statistics [Q1 2016]

Stand-out out figures

• * Overall conversions average at 2.8%, ranging from less than 0.5% to over 6.5%.
• * The average £ per visit was £2.30.
• * Email remains the best source of revenues: email (when executed well) produces extremely well, converting at 4.20% - some retailers do not use email effectively or do not track it properly. 7 of the sample had roughly 20%+ of their traffic from email, with 3 retailers enjoying conversion rates from email of over 7% (the highest being 9.8%).
• * Paid search produces an average of 19% of all visits, converting at 2.82%. 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 44%).

Standout figures

Desktops account for less thab half of all traffic but still produce two-thirds of sales, but mobiles have improved to be just over one quarter of all visits (but less than 10% of sales).

• * 21% of visits are viewed on tablets, mostly iPads, generating 31% of sales.
• * 28% of visits are viewed on mobiles, mostly iPhones, generating 9.7% of sales (up from 8% in Q4 2015).
• * 47% of visits are viewed on desktops, generating 65% of sales  - sales at the same level as Q4 2015.

The best conversion rate on a mobile was 3% - on a responsive "responsive" website (compared to 4.% for its desktop site).

By Roger Willcocks