eCommerce benchmarks Jan - March 2017

Screen Pages has released eCommerce benchmark data regarding visitor sources and behaviour on conversions for retail eCommerce websites, for the period January-March 2017.

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 of £76. 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, Donald Russell, Loake Shoes, Micro-Scooters, Van Dal Shoes, Force 4, Moss Europe, the RSPB, Really Wild Clothing, Salter 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 2.70%, ranging from 0.53% to 8.8%.
• The average £ per visit was £2.41.
• Email remains the best source of revenues: email (when executed well) produces extremely well, converting at 4.01% - some retailers do not use email effectively or do not track it properly. Six businesses included in the sample had at least 15%+ of their traffic from email, enjoying conversion rates up to 10.58%.
• Paid search produces an average of 19% of all visits, converting at 3.32%. Five 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: 19.2% versus 46.3%).

Standout figures

Bounce rates are lowest and conversions highest on desktops.  However, four businesses were seeing conversion ratios in excess of 2% on mobile with the highest being 2.9%.

By Sarah Willcocks, Director