Comments on: Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: August 2008

By: Canadian Bodybuilding

Canadian Bodybuilding — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:30:40 +0000

It’s too bad it’s impossible to compete against these retailers. The little guy will never win.

By: Landlord

Landlord — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:31:14 +0000

Wow, what happened to office depot. Last report they were right up there at the top. Just because we’re entering a depression people stop buying office supplies?

By: canadian bodybuilding

canadian bodybuilding — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:17:00 +0000

i should start selling flowers lol

By: Shruti

Shruti — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 11:06:16 +0000

This is interesting data. On our E-comm site we get decent traffic but traffic is relatively low. However I have observed that increase in traffic does not impact the conversion. Thus I am confused whether it will be worth increasing traffic on my site as am not even able to sustain the conversion forget increasing it. Any idea what would be an avg conversion ratio of E-comm site of a publishing house? Also would it make sense to buy traffic to increase conversion or should I just go listing on other E-commerce portals?

By: Bobby Missry

Bobby Missry — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:25:01 +0000

Are these benchmarks data that the top 10 online retailers reached?

By: sameer

sameer — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:07:53 +0000

this is a great benchmark list. It would be great if someone could provide similar benchmarks for lead gen/content site.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:40:59 +0000

Bryan,

Let’s think rationally about this. One out of every 2.5 people who VISIT Proflowers.Com buys something??!

I’m sorry, that is impossible. Even if they were giving out their flowers for FREE I wouldn’t believe these numbers. If you examine ProFlowers’ architecture, you’ll see they do a lot of odd things with their URLs and their cookies, not to mention a little black hat SEO.

All of us in the business are very quick to accept and defend the Neilsen NetRatings and ComScores of the world, because there isn’t anything better to look at. But until they open up their methodologies for all of us to scrutinize, it is amazingly open to abuse, deliberately or not. Remember “Dewey Defeats Truman”.

By: Adam

Adam — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:08:09 +0000

Hi Brian,

I own an e-commerce website with terrible conversion ratios. In my opinion (and I’m sure you’ve heard this before) the website looks great. I mean that in all humility, we spent a lot of time optimizing every aspect of the website. With that being said, the website also gets a fair amount of traffic. I assume this would be the perfect scenario to figure out what’s wrong with it, because in my opinion there has to be something. If you’d be interested in further discussing this, please get in touch with me.

Adam.

By: mariano

mariano — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:01:51 +0000

Hi Bryan !, great data, can you share with us conversion rates for the online travel industry? ( visit to book ratios?), I always have the doubt if we understand a conversion as the act of purshasing and paying for something, instead of filling a form, downloading something, lead generation, etc, acording with your data, 4 over 10 visits purchase flowers? , just can’t believe it!,

By: Bryan Eisenberg

Bryan Eisenberg — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:25:42 +0000

Dr. Pete,

I was pretty shocked when I saw that number too. Realize that this is for the particular segment of people who use Nielsen Online and allow them to collect their activity. So it is an apple to apple comparison. In theory you could benchmark your site if you access to the rest of their panel data.

Thanks,
Bryan

By: Dr. Pete

Dr. Pete — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:52:49 +0000

I know we’ve argued about this before (and you usually win ), but seriously, 41.5%?! I’ve got to ask: do you believe it, and do you think we’re comparing apples to apples? To me, that means 41.5% of unique visitors make a purchase. Now, I know that ProFlowers is a perfect storm for conversion: a strong brand, an easily understood product, a short-timeframe purchase (especially we married men 2 days before a holiday), a relatively low price point, and to be fair, a very well-built site. Still, the empiricist in me just can’t accept 41.5% without seeing the data, especially in this weak economy.

By: Gary

Gary — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:40:56 +0000

I assume that the conversion rate data for ebay includes where people have placed a bid (rather than actually purchased a product). If this is the case then the ebay conversion rates above will result in very low actual purchase rates (in the form of winning an auction and payment being excahnged for a physical product or tangible service).

By: Edward

Edward — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:48:45 +0000

Interesting. Very interesting. I wonder why online flower delivery converts so well? Any ideas?

By: Rossella Spoto

Rossella Spoto — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:12:36 +0000

Hi there, thannks for publishing these benchmarka – I have tried to download the UK benchmark report but it seems to have been removed, can you help?
Best wishes!
Rossella