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Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: January 2009
Here are the top 10 converting websites for January 2009*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculated by toolbar user to final conversion. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.
1. Schwan’s 52.50
2. ProFlowers 27.30
3. Quixtar 22.40
4. Blair.com 21.80
5. Office Depot 21.10
6. Vitacost.com 20.40
7. DrsFosterSmith.com 20.30
8. FTD.com 20.20
9. Amazon 17.20
10. CDW 16.90
*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts
This month big surprise came from first time on this list Schwan’s. Not sure if everyone should themselves compare to online grocery merchants.
Additional January Retail Benchmarks:
January was a month of casual browsing but limited buying across the online retail sector. The number of sessions in which consumers actually completed an order was down sharply by 21%. Specialty retailers reported a 56 percent drop in order sessions, the largest decrease of any retail category tracked by Coremetrics.
Page Views Per Session 11.83
Product Page Views Per Session 3.24
Average Time on Site (in seconds) 504.59
Average Items/Order 5.95
Average Order Value $132.57
Shopping Cart Conversion Rate 33.80%
Shopping Cart Abandonment 66.20%
New Visitor Conversion Rate 2.02%
On-site Search Session 17.94%
* 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.
About the author
Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books Call to Action, Waiting For Your Cat to Bark and Always Be Testing. Bryan is available as a professional speaker. You can friend him on Facebook or follow him on Twitter (@TheGrok).
More articles from Bryan Eisenberg
- Nobody wants to read your sh**!September 21st, 2009
- Redesign? Ask The Right Questions!September 18th, 2009
- Cross-post: How to Improve a Product Page, Part 1September 15th, 2009
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February 20th, 2009
2:47 pm
Most of the list isn’t much of a surprise (i.e. flower merchants), but its amazing that both Schwans and the Vitacost site, which seems to break most “rules” of clean landing page design with all the clutter around their antioxidant CTA, is able to convert at all, let alone make the Top 10.
February 22nd, 2009
12:52 am
Interesting schwan’s coming in first! they do have good food… ice cream is delicious that’s probably why!
It’s impulsive when you get to the site! everything looks so yummy your dancing to your wallet to get the old credit card!
February 22nd, 2009
2:57 pm
[...] spotted a post by Bryan Eisenberg at FutureNow listing the top 10 online retailers by conversion rate. First of all – I was pleased to see three SLI customers in the list – FTD, Blair.com and Drs [...]
February 22nd, 2009
5:24 pm
52,5% conversion rate is insane.
What happened to the other 47.5%
Seriously though that is truly excellent.
Here’s an idea for you – I think you should have a Grok Golden Funnel award for the best-converting online retailer each year. (must be verifiable, naturally)
February 22nd, 2009
6:35 pm
[...] zijn van invloed op mijn aankoopgedrag als het om dit soort producten gaat. Een andere bron is dit artikel, waarin de top-10 lijst van meest converterende shops in Amerika voor januari 2009 terug te vinden [...]
February 23rd, 2009
5:31 am
Fantastic PR for those sites’ affiliate programs.
BTW, do you remember Jakob Nielsen writing that he expected sites to top 10% conversion rate in a decade, in an article from 2001-2004 ish? He was talking about industry averages, and things topping out around 10%, of course, so these leaders are exceptional, but I’m amazed at how high it can get…
February 23rd, 2009
11:27 am
Wow very interesting. Always like to see who is converting and who isn’t.
February 23rd, 2009
11:44 am
Very interesting to read and a 52% conversion rate is insane, no matter how good their food is. Where would I be able to find out similar stats for the Travel sector – ideally holiday companies not flights.
February 23rd, 2009
4:36 pm
[...] the top 10 online retailers, as measured by conversion rate, are reported on FutureNow’s GrokDotCom Marketing Optimization Blog. These are some pretty impressive numbers and industry leaders like Amazon.com and OfficeDepot.com [...]
February 23rd, 2009
8:03 pm
wow! those are the kind of rates you would expect from a targeted email campaign… I wonder what is the value of the items bought, if you are getting those rates but its costing you $20 to drive a $10 sale it is not sustainable.
I would be interested to see Google Checkout or iTunes on the list, I would imagine these maybe quite high.
February 23rd, 2009
9:18 pm
A conversion rate of 52.5% begs the question, is this really a valuable metric? I shop for groceries online, but I only ever go to the website if I want to buy something, never to browse or price compare – they should have a 100% conversion rate.
As david said above, it would be more interesting to see their marketing ROI.
February 24th, 2009
5:27 am
I’m being completely pessimistic in saying I’d question the volume of visitors and market reach… I could start a niche website, market it to a small group of highly targetted consumers and aim for at least 50% conversion… however (and I’m from the UK so excuse the ignorance) I only recognise Amazon and Office Depot as brands. I expect they attract bigger volumes of traffic. However, there is also an art in actually making a website work and convert so for those hitting 15% and upwards on the list are still performing above average!
February 24th, 2009
3:25 pm
I’d love to have some conversion rates like that someday…I will say this though, as the economy is getting tougher the websites that really understand their online strategy are doing even better today than ever before. From what I’m guessing their competitors who don’t really get it, have cut back on their overall budgets, including the area’s that were working previously, but are unaware.
February 25th, 2009
4:51 pm
Wow. This is very interesting to see. I’ll have to look all these sites over and see if I can find things they’re doing right. I’m guessing some of these have to do with branding. I imagine most people going to Schwans may already be in buying mode. On the other hand I’m surprised that Amazon is so good because personally I use the site for research frequently.
February 26th, 2009
6:37 am
[...] stuitte op de 10 beste webwinkels op basis van conversie. Natuurlijk is de nr 1. met een conversiepercentage van over de 50% meer als indrukwekkend. Kun je [...]
February 26th, 2009
7:11 pm
Depesh: They are all pretty large brands. Schwans holds a lot of smaller brands, Proflowers has been topping conversion charts for years, Quixar is, of course, Amway, and so on. Also the methodology demanded 500,000 (five hundred thousand, for the European readers) or more unique visitorsa month, and the conversion was calculated as unique visitors to unique customers.
March 11th, 2009
4:19 pm
These figures are real??
March 16th, 2009
6:46 am
[...] rate?” People love to benchmark themselves against others. Every month we publish the top 10 converting retail web sites and additional benchmarks here on [...]
March 16th, 2009
6:48 am
[...] rate?” People love to benchmark themselves against others. Every month we publish the top 10 converting retail web sites and additional benchmarks here on [...]
June 16th, 2009
4:09 pm
[...] reading an article by Future Now Inc. (leaders in conversion optimization) that mentioned the top 10 converting online retailers for Jan 2009. Pro Flowers was on that list — and given that flowers are a great product for [...]
July 14th, 2009
3:35 am
I have never seen conversion rate that high like that.
July 27th, 2009
11:13 am
Can’t quite believe that Schwan’s website has a conversion rate that high, that’s incredible. As mentioned above though, some of the pictures of their food does have you reaching for your wallet almost straight away!
James
August 16th, 2009
12:18 pm
Wow, where did Schwan’s come from?! Are impulse decisions for ice cream that great during this market crash?
August 21st, 2009
11:45 pm
Where is it possible to find the most recent information? Would be very interesting to see how the trends are flowing now with the last 7 months behind us.
September 17th, 2009
7:33 am
The interesting review. Did not expect such to see.
October 13th, 2009
9:34 am
Seriously, how do you get a conversion rate of 54%, you must either have the best known brand in the world or have an amazingly unique market. I would be interested though!
October 14th, 2009
11:27 am
I believe most of the converted visitors were returning visitors. They come to the site with a goal in mind, to buy.
October 15th, 2009
12:48 pm
OK I am going to be the dark horse here…
1. First off these are top 10 Retail sites of fairly major companies with marketing budgets and brand awareness.
2. Schwans, Quixtar, Office Depot would be good examples of a returning customer base buying out of habit. I know we ALL want to hook a customer for life (like these guys do)… but you want some harder to reach conversion eyeballs.
3. I like the CDW and Amazon numbers the best. Why so? Because for software/hardware – there’s A LOT of websites out there. The same with Amazon (which pretty much sells everything). So the market has alternate choices and chooses to go with you.
Unlike say groceries online, you could shop around but the price difference isn’t that significant, groceries are part of a habit activity versus say buying digital cameras or software…