The importance of CRO in ecommerce

Shopify writes in Commerce Trends 2023, “Consumers want their shopping to be personal, instant, and responsive — and they want that high-value experience anywhere.”

Optimizing your store’s conversion rate includes more than a swift checkout process, discounting, intuitive UX, or carefully placed ads. It’s about intentionally crafting the flow of your shoppers to ensure the highest percentage make a purchase whenever they visit. And after they make a purchase, it’s about better understanding how they got there. 

Before we dive too deep into website optimization and CRO, let’s establish how to actually calculate store conversion rate. 

How to calculate store conversion rate

Take the number of visitors who converted (aka made a purchase), divide it by the overall number of store visitors you had during a certain period, and finally, multiply that number by 100. This will give you your conversion rate at that particular point in the funnel.

If we used example numbers, and had 250 conversions out of 5,000 site visitors, that would look like: [(250/5000) = .05 ] x 100 = 5%. 

The latest data, which comes from Kibo Commerce in Q1 of 2022, shows that ecommerce conversion rates in the US average out at 2.3%. This is different depending on the industry. For instance, Oberlo sites conversion rates for the food and beverage industry at 6.49%, and home and furniture at 0.89%.

Now that we’ve covered why conversion rate optimization is important and shared how to calculate it, let’s dive into how to actually convert the shoppers who are browsing your website.