Research from Nielsen and SeeWhy Reveals a 23 Percent Average Conversion Rate for Top 10 vs. 2-3 Percent for Typical Ecommerce Sites
ANDOVER, Mass. – SeeWhy, Inc., the company that boosts website conversion with real-time remarketing, announced the 10 top-converting ecommerce sites listed in “Lessons Learned from the Top 10 Converting Websites,” a free eBook that identifies the top websites and the strategies they use to drive conversion. As a group, the top 10 have an average conversion rate of 23 percent compared to the 2-3 percent conversion rate of typical ecommerce sites.
“Ecommerce teams have an understandable fascination with the top 10 converting websites,” said Charles Nicholls, founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy. “As a group, the top 10 convert approximately 10 times more visitors than most ecommerce websites. Unexpectedly, four out of the top five converting websites force a full registration before purchase. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom which suggests that a full registration reduces your website conversion rate. Rather, the top 10 focus on capturing visitor details up front and building a relationship spanning many years of repeat sales.”
The Top 10
The ranking of the top 10 converting websites below is based on Nielsen data for six months, ending in November 2009. To qualify, a website needed to achieve a minimum of five million unique visitors per month. Conversion is measured based on the ratio of site visitors to purchasers in a given session. For comparison, Amazon has a conversion rate of 16.5 percent, almost two percentage points below the lowest-ranking member of the top 10, QVC. The top 10 are:
1. Schwan’s (food) 41.7 percent
2. ProFlowers (flowers) 26.5 percent
3. Vitacost.com (health and nutrition) 24.0 percent
4. Woman Within (catalog/clothing) 22.4 percent
5. Blair.com (catalog/clothing) 20.5 percent
6. Lands’ End (catalog/clothing) 19.5 percent
7. DrsFosterSmith.com (pet supplies) 18.6 percent
8. Office Depot (office) 18.4 percent
9. Roaman’s (catalog/clothing) 18.4 percent
10. QVC (jewelry) 18.3 percent
Visiting the top 10 sites reveals clear patterns. All are direct marketers, focused less on the initial sale, but on facilitating a lifetime of transactions. The categories of goods sold may differ, but all the companies are grounded in marketing directly to customers. Only two companies, Office Depot and Lands’ End, also have physical stores. The others use distance selling, so customers can only purchase online or by phone. Other key summary statistics include:
9 out of the 10 have a catalog
9 out of the 10 do not offer free shipping
8 out of 10 offer a simple sign up on their home page
4 out of the top 5 force a full registration before a first purchase
10 out of 10 use remarketing
9 out of 10 offer a 1-800 number on their homepage
“Ecommerce managers can learn a lot from the top 10 converting websites,” continued Nicholls. “These sites focus on identifying their prospects as early in the buying cycle as possible and remarket to them continually across channels to build relationships. This results in high quality, qualified traffic returning to their websites regularly to buy again, and again, and again. This is very different from the ‘drive more visitors’ tactics that are so common across the ecommerce sector.”
For information on SeeWhy, visit www.seewhy.com. For additional perspectives, please visit and subscribe to the SeeWhy RSS blog feed at http://www.seewhy.com/blog, and follow SeeWhy on Twitter at @seewhyinc.
Resources
SeeWhy website: http://www.seewhy.com
SeeWhy press releases: http://www.seewhy.com/about_press_releases.htm
SeeWhy blog: http://www.seewhy.com/blog
SeeWhy on Twitter: http://twitter.com/seewhyinc
SeeWhy on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/SeeWhyInc
SeeWhy resource center: http://www.seewhy.com/resources.htm
About SeeWhy
SeeWhy is the industry’s only real-time shopping cart recovery service to follow up in real time via email and social networks. SeeWhy’s services (SaaS) deliver the highest ROI in ecommerce by responding immediately to shopping cart and web form abandonment with behaviorally triggered 1-to-1, real-time messages.
Powered by a unique “in-memory” event processing engine, the SeeWhy suite of real-time web analytics is delivered “on-demand.” Remarketing to abandoned visitors using the SeeWhy Conversion Manager service converts up to 50 percent of visitors that had abandoned their shopping carts, online forms, applications and registrations.
SeeWhy is a Red Herring Top 100 Company, was selected by AlwaysOn as an OnMedia 100 company in 2010 and was highlighted as a cool company by Gartner, Inc. SeeWhy has also been featured in publications such as The New York Times; Inc. Magazine; and TechCrunch. SeeWhy was incorporated in 2003 and is headquartered in Andover, MA. More information can be found at http://www.seewhy.com/.
SeeWhy and the SeeWhy logo are trademarks of SeeWhy, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Tags: shopping cart abandonment, website conversion, web analytics, SeeWhy, ecommerce, internet marketing, email remarketing, marketing software, 1-to-1, social media, email conversion
