Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: April 2008

Here they are, the top 10 converting retail sites for April 2008*…

1. Proflowers.com -27.5%
2. Office Depot – 25.8%
3. Lands End – 24.8%
4. QVC – 19.4%
5. CDW – 19.1%
6. HSN – 16.8%
7. Vistaprint – 16.8%
8. Oriental Trading Company – 16.5%
9. Williams-Sonoma – 15.6%
10. eBay – 14.8%

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

While Office Depot, Lands End, QVC, Vistaprint and eBay made the top 10 online retailers list last month, we have a few sites we have never seen make this list before. This is the first time Oriental Trading Company and William-Sonoma have made the list since we have been reporting it.

This month I’d like to start including some additional April e-commerce benchmarks:

Page Views Per Session – 13.50
Product Page Views Per Session – 3.70
Average Time on Site (in seconds) – 602.10 seconds
Average Items/Order – 5.77
Average Order Value – $135.98
Shopping Cart Conversion Rate – 32.96%
Shopping Cart Abandonment – 67.04%
New Visitor Conversion Rate – 2.04%
On-site Search Session – 15.20%
On-site Search Conversion Rate – 5.92%
On-site Search Average Order Value – $150.95

Marketing Summary Benchmarks:

Direct Load:
Traffic % – 47.58%
Sales % – 66.15%
Conversion Rate – 3.54%
Natural Search:
Traffic % – 13.79%
Sales % – 8.30%
Conversion Rate – 1.78%
Referrals:
Traffic % – 5.89%
Sales % – 2.02%
Referral Conversion Rate – 1.48%

* Source: Coremetrics LIVEmark Benchmarks US (PDF) – UK benchmarks PDF available.

Coremetrics LIVEmark leverages aggregate performance data across more than 300 participating brands to deliver over 35 benchmark metrics addressing performance indicators such as campaign and channel effectiveness, site stickiness and conversion rates.

Want to find out how your site benchmarks in our customer experience study?

In B2C, Conversion Rates, Research, Retail, e-commerce

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Comments (15)

Robert Gorell
May 22nd, 2008
9:08 am

ProFlowers does it again. Looks like their email campaigns got people ordering early for Mothers’ Day.
Linda Bustos
May 22nd, 2008
7:08 pm

I’m a bit surprised to see Oriental Trading there after finding a search ad for OT appearing in a search for “coffee mugs” that landed on a search page for “rugs” – I hope that’s just an anomaly and not an indication of a very sloppy paid search campaign.
Mark from Just Accountants
May 23rd, 2008
3:33 am

I know this keeps getting mentioned, but I still find these numbers hard to believe.

I’m aware that the goal of every site should be to convert 100% of qualified visitors, but it just doesn’t ring true for me that 1 in 4 unique visitors to ProFlowers actually buys something.
Alain
May 23rd, 2008
4:43 pm

Hi,

new to this blog. I have a question I’m sure was answered in the past. How do these guy calculate conversion?

tks
Byron
May 27th, 2008
12:29 am

Re: How do these guy calculate conversion?

Maybe Fuzzy Map?
Byron
May 27th, 2008
12:42 am

Sorry, Fuzzy Math
Thomas Pletsers
May 27th, 2008
10:28 am

I this based on paid advertising or is organic traffic included as well.
Thomas Pletsers
May 27th, 2008
10:51 am

8. Oriental Trading Company – 16.5%???

Did some searches to how they persuade customers on their landing pages. Their Google ad showed up this page

http://www.orientaltrading.com/application?origin=page.jsp&namespace=browse&event=link.itemDetails&categoryId=377320&sku=PT648&BP=8898&Source=Google&cm_mmc=Google-_-OTC+SendTec+Theme+Party-_-Barbie-_-barbie+party+supplies

Good example of when you pay an marketing agency in Chicago to handle your paid advertising. Other searches done showed landing pages that where simple search results done on their own site search engine using the same search terms. Not really as persuasive as I have seen on other sites that you guys shown in the past, and very different form what I have read in Waiting for your cat to bark, and Call to Action.
Ryan
May 27th, 2008
2:38 pm

While some of these metrics can be used to compare your site head to head, other metrics may be drastically different for the type of product/service- like apples to oranges it’s just not fair.
Paul Boisvert
May 27th, 2008
4:26 pm

Hi Bryan,

I am surprised to see that natural traffic drives such a seemingly low volume of traffic and sales compared to direct load. Were domain/brand queries (e.g. search for officedepot.com) reassigned to the direct load category? Also, while overall natural search site conversion may be so blended as to be meaningless, I’m still surprised to see a metric below 2% for such heavy hitters.

Paul
Isaac
May 27th, 2008
7:34 pm

Definitely does look like some fuzzy math is involved, at least with some of these sites.

Has there been an explanation as to what is included and how these companies are calculating their results (ie: does someone requesting free business cards from VistaPrint.com count as an e-commerce conversion)? Are these numbers self-reported, or tracked by an independent company?
Noel Hennessy
May 28th, 2008
9:41 am

Agree with the other general comments but also:
– volume comparisson figures? 10% of 100 vs 10% of 10000 and so on. Conversion rate doesn’t do it for me I’m afraid. At the very least a high / low / average report would be better – averaging out across all doesn’t balance.

– eBay? what kind of figures are we comparing there (the apples and oranges thing again)
Ern Langmaid
June 1st, 2008
2:13 am

Seems to me that no one knows how to gather acurate stats on the net. If I could get accurate info I could make more money.
Tools are helpful, but a lot of experience and testing seems to do the job best for me so far.
Peter Digstra
June 1st, 2008
7:47 am

I agree with Isaac.
These numbers are difficult to judge because we don’t know how they are calculated.
I work for a Dutch printing website and in our country Vistaprint is quite unsuccessful.
They do have large volume but that’s mainly because they give away very much for free.
Southampton Accountant
May 28th, 2009
12:06 pm

These are some pretty impressive numbers, but you have to question the accuracy…

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