Your e-commerce store’s conversion rate is the ratio of visitors to customers. It’s the percentage of visitors that actually complete a sale online. Simple example:
20 sales / 1000 unique visitors = 0.02 = 2% conversion rate
Your store’s conversion rate is critical to your success. The average conversion rate for retail B2B e-commerce is 2-4%. I think this metric is actual skewed however, because many of the largest e-commerce businesses have conversion rates of over 10%.
I’d estimate the average e-commerce store with revenues under $1,000,000 has a conversion rate of less than 1%. And I’d bet that most of the owners don’t even know their conversion rate is that low because they either don’t understand what a conversion rate is or they don’t check it often and do anything about it.
Knowing your conversion rate is necessary if you plan on improving it. There are website analytics tools such as Google Analytics that can be configured to show your store’s conversion rate very easily. Use a tool and monitor your store’s conversion rate at least monthly, and especially whenever you make changes to your store’s layout or design.
