E-commerce traffic & conversion benchmarks [statistics]: Xmas 2014

Screen Pages has released e-commerce benchmark data regarding visitor sources and behaviour, conversions for retail e-commerce websites, for the Christmas trading period (November 1st to December 31st) 2014 - with comparison data from October 2014.

The businesses indexed are limited to niche brands, generally selling online, via catalogues and stores, wose online sales range up to £10m per annum and average order values average £73. The websites all use the e-commerce platform Magento. In aggregate, the report tracked the behaviour of nearly 3m website visitors, placing ca. 130,000 orders and spending close to £10 million.

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

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

Standout out figures

• * Overall conversions average at 4.4% - up from 3.3%
• * Engagement (as measured by bounce rates) generally down - but showing a slight improvement on home pages (down 0.5 to 21.4%)
• * Email (when executed well) produces extremely well, converting at an average  of 4.72% - some retailers do not use email effectively or do not (conversions range from 1.5% to 5.5%). Compared to October, e-mail conversions were up 0.92%.
• * Paid search brought in 3% more traffic (20%), with a modest improvement in conversions at 4.02%.

Standout out figures

• * Tablet visits decreased  (down 1.67%), making 25% of all traffic, but with conversions up 1.4% to 4.3%, contributed a quarter of revenues
• * 22% of visits are viewed on mobiles (up 1.1%), mostly iPhones, generating 7.2% of sales (up 2.1% with conversions improved 0.6% to 1.5%).
• * Desktops views slipped below 50% (down 0.9%), but generated two-thirds of all sales with average conversions of 5% (up 1.5%).

Summary

The figures confirm overall increases in trading activity for the Christmas (as you would expect). Email promotions clearly had an impact, backed by paid search, where deployed. With the increase in marketing, initial bounce rates increased, but this was more than offset by increases in conversions.

Device data reinforces the increased usage of mobile phones (although tablet visits were down, oddly). Encouragingly, conversions on mobiles were higher and sales were not compromised by small screens.

By Roger Willcocks