The Nielson Company regularly releases data for conversion rate of different websites via its MegaView Retail service. The data (as of March 2010) for top 10 online retails by conversion rate is analyzed in this post. The objective of this list is to give you an idea about to what extent these retailers have been able to optimize their conversion rates.
Note the eligibility criteria for this list: To be considered, e-commerce sites must have had a minimum of 500K unique visitors during the month. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.
Schwan’s: 40.6% conversion rate
Schwans.com is an online grocery store and food delivery business. A conversion rate of 40.6% sounds too good to be real but Schwan’s is an old company which started home deliveries of food in 1952. So, it has a good brand name as far as food delivery is concerned and now most of its customers are simply visiting the website to order the food they want. No wonder, conversion rate is so high!
Woman Within: 25.3% conversion rate
Woman Within offers Plus Sized clothing for women. Note their laser-sharp focus: “plus sized clothing for women” which (combined with large collection and clean site design) is probably the reason for high conversion rate.
Blair.com: 20.4% conversion rate
Blair.com sells clothing online. Just like Schwan’s, Blair.com is also a very old business (started in 1910!). So it has brand and customer base already established and the website serves as a channel for ordering.
1800petmeds.com: 17.7% conversion rate
As its name says, 1800petmeds.com sells pet medication. This eCommerce store is a perfect example of focusing on a niche. I bet they would never see such high conversion rate, if they attempted to sell everything related to pets (food, clothes, grooming products, etc.) The focus of store is pet medication and that’s the reason conversion rate is high. Also note that they have an extensive mini-site on Pet Health education, which probably drives them numerous targeted prospective customers.
Vitacost.com: 16.4% conversion rate
Online store selling vitamin supplies. I love the clean sidebar on the left. The website is bit old-schooled and is optimized for IE (that too for a lower screen resolution). They probably get a lot of non-tech savvy visitors so the sidebar would be very helpful for product selection. This shows how focusing on the customer (and not on the design) can help increase your conversion rates.
The rest 5 ecommerce sites (by conversion rate)
Secret of high conversion rates
Of course, there is no secret for such high conversion rates. These companies have been doing conversion rate optimization for years now and one cannot hope to replicate the same overnight. However, looking at the websites above, I can imagine a few general trends on why they have such high conversion rate:
Hope you liked the examples and my analysis. Please leave a comment below if you have any other examples of high converting websites.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Sorry, if my question is dumb but how do you define and distinguish conversion ratios for repeat and new customers? Or is it not relevant?
I think what old customers want and what new customers want could be very different.
Your insights please?
Comment by bipin — November 26, 2010 @ 10:42 pm
Yes, conversion rates (sale per visit) for repeat and new customers are very different (of course). This is aggregated conversion rate and my guess is that it is dominated by new visitor conversion rate (because their numbers will b probably much more than repeat visitors).
Comment by Paras Chopra — November 27, 2010 @ 12:24 am
I actually miss more takeaways, on what got these companies to have such great conversion rates. Be it
- choices of color
- placement of items
- use of images
- wording
- etc.
So generally I would love to see you go in-depth with each case, and show us the before/after case
Comment by Thomas Clausen — December 1, 2010 @ 4:45 pm
Good Conversion rates for e-commerce websites.
Comment by Chandrashekar Reddy — December 2, 2010 @ 10:54 am
How “real” are these rates? Where do the come from?
Comment by Webcamseks — December 5, 2010 @ 5:51 pm
I agree with Thomas I would like to know more about exact how they got a high conversion rate, their home pages do not look special.
Comment by Ron — December 12, 2010 @ 3:12 am
These conversion rates are so high because due to direct traffic/ peopl are going there already with the intent of buying (prime example is QVC)
No doubt a lot of work has gone into optimizing these sites anyhow..
Reaching these rates from ad traffic would be the real trick
Comment by Ben — January 15, 2011 @ 9:00 am
Conversion rates are hugely different between repeat customers and non-customers. A customer of mine has a CR over 35% for repeat customers, and below 3% for non-customers. Combined CR is around 5% – they have a lot of new visitors traffic. However, if they did no PPC, no SEO, they would have only repeat customers, and would rank better than most of the sites listed here.
I see that many of these sites are niche-oriented, in sectors that favour repeat orders. So this effect is clearly working here.
So, this ranking is very newsworthy, but also pretty useless, as it says nothing about how the site is really performing. Figures are not comparable, and cannot be benchmarked against.
Comment by Xavier Paz — April 24, 2011 @ 11:33 am
I would like to have a great conversion percentage like the one in this article
Comment by Jason — June 6, 2011 @ 8:11 pm
Look at these products: food, vitamins, clothing. these are all repeat purchases, with a high lifetime customer value. You cannot use this data and think your can sell tv’s or jewelry at the same conversion rate due to the nature of the product. Conversion data should be broken out by industry to get a real view of who is doing what great.
Comment by David — June 19, 2011 @ 11:13 am
It is hard for me to beleive that a frozen entree retailer would convert at 40%.
Comment by Sitepro Conversion Optimization — June 24, 2011 @ 1:14 am
E-commerce for the current stage of this new concept brought online the new revolution in the world and act as an ideal platform to give your business to find new markets around the world. Buying and selling of goods or services on the Internet has completely changed the direction of the discussions. Now you can advertise, buy or sell products on the site, pay or accept payments online through credit cards and other means of payment online.
Comment by Affordable Website Design — June 24, 2011 @ 10:24 am
[...] trovato la top ten dei migliori siti US per tassi di conversione: ci sono tassi dichiarati altissimi, molto probabilmente hanno considerato il rapporto tra ordini e [...]
Pingback by Migliorare il tasso di conversione di un e-commerce « Marketing per il Web — June 30, 2011 @ 2:49 pm
[...] hvor vi har slået det på plads, så bør du læse alle disse gode indlæg om [...]
Pingback by Min konverteringsrate er længere end din! — Frederik Trovatten — July 29, 2011 @ 3:28 pm
Wow. Those are some really high conversion rates.
Comment by Lawson — August 25, 2011 @ 6:41 am
I’m curious about how much this article lowered that 40% conversion rate from all of the “wtf how” reactions
Comment by Tom Lambert — September 7, 2011 @ 10:34 pm
@Tom: good one
Comment by Paras Chopra — September 8, 2011 @ 12:11 am
There is no way the women’s apparel website can get anywhere close to that ratio. There is so much scrolling needed and multiple clicks required in order to just get to get something in the cart and into checkout. Once in the cart scrolling is needed as well. Now, if the cart-visits-to-purchase ratio was used rather than total-visits-to-purchase ratio then it is possible.
Comment by Mike — September 13, 2011 @ 9:58 pm