What's a Good E-Commerce Conversion Rate, Actually?

This question drives people mad because everyone wants a definitive answer, but it genuinely depends on your industry, traffic sources, and what you're selling.

The Realistic UK E-Commerce Conversion Rate Benchmarks to know:

For most UK e-commerce stores, 1-4% is normal. Fashion and apparel usually sit around 1-2%, beauty and cosmetics might hit 2-3%, and if you're selling luxury goods, you might be at 0.5-1.5% and that's perfectly fine if your average order value is high enough.

Here's What Really Matters:

Your conversion rate from branded search (people Googling your brand name) should be much higher - think 10-15%. If it's not, something's seriously wrong with your website or your brand reputation.

Conversion from cold social media traffic will be lower - around 0.5-2% is typical because people weren't actively looking to buy when they saw your ad.

Email campaigns should convert significantly better than your site average - aim for 3-10% depending on the campaign.

Stop Comparing Yourself to Irrelevant Benchmarks:

I see this all the time - someone selling £200 luxury jewellery comparing their 1% conversion rate to a brand selling £15 phone cases at 4% and feeling terrible about it. Don't do this to yourself.

What actually matters is:

Are you profitable?

Is your conversion rate improving month-on-month?

Are you converting better than you were six months ago?

How to Actually Improve Your E-Commerce Conversion Rate:

Start with mobile. Most of your traffic is probably mobile, and if your mobile experience is rubbish, your conversion rate will be too. Check your site on an actual phone (not just your laptop with the screen shrunk down) and honestly assess whether you'd buy from yourself.

Use heatmaps (Hotjar is the one I use with clients) to see where people are clicking, scrolling, and abandoning. This is proper detective work and it's fascinating. You'll often find people are trying to click things that aren't actually clickable, or dropping off at specific points you can then fix.

Test one thing at a time. Change your checkout process, wait two weeks, measure results. Don't change your checkout, product pages, and homepage all at once because you won't know what worked. Remember, your conversion rate is relative to you, if you compete with yourself, month on month and you see progress - you're already winning.

If you'd like us to run a full conversion rate audit of your website for you, get in touch.