What’s a good conversion rate on Shopify? It’s a good question and the answer can flow into a single line, a tangential roller-coaster of information, or maybe even an entire book (or a course).
TL;DR: There’s an average conversion rate of anything between 1% to 5.2%. Ideally, you’ll want to use those averages as a benchmark and strive to achieve much more than that. While you are at it, there are several never-ending ways to achieve a continuously improving conversion rate for your Shopify store.
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BigCommerce states that the global average conversion rate for an eCommerce website is anywhere from 1% to 2%.
According to the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report 2021, the average conversion rate for eCommerce is 5.2% -- that’s assuming you are doing much more than “doing things right”.
Mehdi Boufous, at GrowthReview, writes that while these are the averages, the top 25% of businesses boast of conversions that start from 5.35% and higher.
Those are all just numbers though.
Things change drastically when you take your own digital marketing workflows, product or service price points, the resultant revenue or profits, locations your customers are from, and more.
Since it’s eCommerce and your Shopify store conversions that we are primarily interested in, let’s dig a little deeper and arrive at the thorny subject of “add to cart” rates.
Monetate’s eCommerce report reveals that the average eCommerce add-to-cart conversion rate is 9.03%.
Typically now, an eCommerce site converts at 2%. The average add-to-cart rate is at 9%.
Can these average eCommerce conversions improve? Yes.
Can you improve your Shopify conversion rate? Yes
Is conversion rate the holy grail? The only thing you need to focus on? Not exactly.
Let’s address that first.
Not all conversions are built equal. Your Shopify store’s conversion rate also depends on what you call a “conversion”.
More importantly, there are cases when you’ll need to think beyond typical average conversion rates for your Shopify store.
Lead quality (Sales Qualified Leads & Marketing Qualified Leads): Some businesses don’t do well with high-conversion rates when customer target persona, demographics, and other aspects don’t match.
In some cases, instead of an umbrella term like “conversion rate” used for leads and sales, each Shopify store must know who their target audience is, the demographics, and several other details to qualify those leads as SQL (Sales Qualified Leads) and/ Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL).
Selling Cannabis products in Ontario, Canada? It won’t make sense if 10000 leads sign up from Afghanistan (for a total traffic of 100,000) for your discount coupon (at a whopping 10% conversion rate).
RPV (Revenue Per Visitor): If you sold a product for exactly $0 and you have a 70% conversion rate on a landing page or your product page, what good is this 70% conversion rate for you?
In another interesting example by Aaron Orendorff, when the average order value (AOV) is low, like $10 as he illustrates, even a 10% conversion rate sitewide doesn’t help whereas another business with an AOV of $99 (works out to be $800 per year, per customer) with just a 1.25% turns out to be much more profitable.
That’s why you need to keep your AOV in mind before you go spending an arm and a leg on conversion rate optimization.
In the case of businesses with a high AOV or LTV (Lifetime Value), conversion rate can still be low while revenues and profits could be high.
LTV (Lifetime Value Of a Customer): For any business with a freemium model or even businesses that track free trial, free lead magnet downloads, free online course enrollments, or free-tier memberships, it might make more sense to think about the lifetime value of a customer than worry about Conversion rates.
Shopify stores that are generous with their discount coupons (resulting in a healthy lead generation rate) are also looking at half the picture. For most brands, eCommerce stores, and several businesses, conversion rates are only the start of the story.
Monitor your actual sales (as a ratio to leads generated, reorder rate, and then measure your LTV (Lifetime Value).
Any business following the “freemium model” or one that delivers a free giveaway (includes eCommerce coupons) converts like nothing else on the planet.
If these businesses just go by the conversion rate of their free offers (on ads, landing pages, sales funnels, and product pages), it wouldn’t make sense now, does it?
Track lead generations as conversions for any of the above-mentioned free (or generous) offers, and your conversion rates would be high.
It’s not the complete story though until you start measuring how many of those free signups convert into paid upgrades or make actual purchases.
To reiterate, your goal is to achieve above the average conversion rate for a Shopify store (which is anywhere from 2% to 5% roughly).
There’s no single answer to your question, which is: What’s a good conversion rate for Shopify stores?
But the guiding principle that you benefit from is this: How do you increase your Shopify store conversion rate?
The following are tips to help boost your conversion rates.
The starting point to help boost your Shopify store conversion rate is all about the store design, eCommerce store web page copy (such as the welcome page, about page, individual product pages, product descriptions, and so on).
Then, there are a few other aspects to your store such as speed of website loading, SEO-optimization, and others. Thankfully, Shopify does take care of Shopify store loading speeds and allows you to optimize each page (including individual product pages) for Search Engine Optimization.
For that, you’d have to go back to basics as well. This includes working up ways to:
Talk about Conversion Rate Optimization (it’s a big deal) and you’ll mostly hear about pop-ups, landing pages, and optimizing your lead generation sequences.
Beyond that, you’ll often also learn about sales funnels optimization, landing page optimization, email marketing optimization, split testing, and more.
To get higher conversion rates, you’ll need a holistic approach. You’d have to dig in and find all the moving parts of your marketing funnel or marketing workflows.
There’s a good reason for that: Your product pages are the most visited in your Shopify store. Yet, they fail whenever it comes to conversions on your eCommerce site.
See how top direct-to-consumer brands Do it & How You Can Benchmark Your Product Pages
Get this: Nearly 1 in 4 online shoppers start your “product pages” as a part of their online journey. Yet, 94% of them don’t make a purchase right away.
In short, your product detail pages are “failing” (continuously). Here are a few stats to drive this home, according to MarketingCharts:
For all of the reasons above and because you’ll need a focused way to achieve goals for your Shopify store, you’ll need landing pages and sales funnels.
Landing Pages (and pop-ups) are lead generation tools that you can use to deliver precise, targeted, timely, and appropriate windows to allow your visitors to sign up as leads.
It’s after people sign up as leads (usually in exchange for a Shopify store discount) that they actually warm up to potential buyers from your store.
Most landing page and pop-up tools (including several apps on the official Shopify store) also give you statistics on how well these pages (and pop-ups) perform (such as landing page level conversion rates and more).
Most landing page and pop-up tools also provide you with several advanced features like A/B testing, artificial-intelligence driven conversion features, and more.
Learn how to build a conversion machine with sales funnels on steroids with these 5 Sales Funnel Growth Hacking Tips
Assuming you get traffic to your Shopify store (and you’ve essentially covered all of the strategies above), you’ll expect your conversion rate (at this point, we mean actual sales or purchases).
It might not happen.
Whether you use paid ads or organic traffic (from SEO, email, or social media), you are tragically overlooking a few aspects when it comes to the reality that affects your Shopify conversion rate.
Not all those potential customers that do add products to the shopping cart complete their transactions (also called Shopping Cart Abandonment).
According to Geckoboard, the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 74.52%.
Once you have the data you need in place, the best thing you could do is to strive to improve your Shopify store’s conversion rate.
What are you working on to help improve your Shopify conversion rate? What are the typical problems you face?
Let us know.
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