When measuring a site’s success, using conversion rates is an effective way of measuring how profitable your ecommerce business is, as well as using them to identify any areas you might need to improve.
while conversion rates tend to differ according to different types of devices, industries, as well as between retail and trade ecommerce businesses, the Cloudfy team has taken a look at some UK benchmark figures that can help you determine where your business stands and what conversion rates you should be aiming for.
Is mobile catching up to desktop? UK retail conversion rates by device
It is important not only to look at the overall conversion rate for your ecommerce website over time, but also to identify how conversion rates vary across certain devices (desktop vs mobile vs tablet).
According to a recent article from Smart Insights, in the UK, the average conversion rate for ‘add to basket’ for retail websites was 4.20% in Q3 2016, but when we take a deeper look, we can see how this varies across different devices with desktop topping the chart at 5.67%, followed by tablet conversion rate of 4.41% and mobile being behind at just 3.05%.
Considering the increase in mobile traffic from recent years, this suggests that conversion rates for mobile still have some catching up to do and this could be caused by a number of factors – from users browsing on mobile without being in ‘buy mode’ to websites not being optimized for mobile and thus completing an order being impossible.
But what about B2B conversion rates?
while there are less studies looking at B2B conversion rates, compared to retail metrics, as less trade businesses operate online compared to the B2C industry, in recent years there’s been a shift for B2B ecommerce to start operating more similarly to B2C one, with users’ expectations increasing. When it comes to B2B conversion rates, things also tend to be quite different compared to retail metrics and we’ve used our years of experience working in the B2B ecommerce sector to compile a list of average conversion rates for B2B we expect to see.
For brand new B2B websites that have just started trading online, ecommerce conversion rates tend to be considerably lower, especially if the main business is still operating offline. In this case, we normally expect an average conversion rate of 1-2% with desktop outperforming mobile significantly.
However, when it comes to well-established online B2B business, conversion rates can reach as high as 6-8%, with desktop conversion rates (8-9%) being also considerably higher than mobile ones (2-3%).
Next step – improving your conversion rates
Now that you know what kind of conversion rates you should expect from your website, it’s time to think about improving them further and the first type of conversion rate you should analyze and look at is the mobile one.
To find out how Cloudfy can help your B2B ecommerce business achieve higher conversion rates, contact the Cloudfy team today.
