What are eCommerce Conversions, Average eCommerce Conversion Rate by Industry & How to Optimize Them in 2025?

What's the one key metric indicating your online store or business's success? What's the one top-line KPI that indicates how many website visitors end up closing the deal with your products and services? This key metric implies how much your product reaches and interests your shoppers. 

The answer to the above questions is the eCommerce conversion rate. While eCommerce conversions sound similar to sales, it's a broader concept. 

But what is it? What are eCommerce conversions? What is the eCommerce conversion rate? Does it vary depending on the industry? Let's explore all of these key concepts together in this blog. 

What Are Ecommerce Conversions?

In simple terms, conversion happens whenever a shopper lands on your online site and takes any desired action, thus becoming a potential customer. This desired action may range from simple activities like signing up for an email list to purchasing. 

What action counts as a conversion varies from business to business. While some enterprises consider small steps such as engaging with pop-ups as "conversions," some consider purchasing the ultimate one. 

Summing up, a conversion is any action the customer takes that helps you continue to market with them in the future. 

What Is Ecommerce Conversion Rate?

Conversion rate is the percentage that reflects how many of your website visitors take a conversion action. In eCommerce, you may also understand it as the ratio of the total number of customers in your store who take the desired conversion action to the total number of visitors to your online store. For example, if your eCommerce conversion rate is 25%, 25 of every 100 website visitors become your customers. 

While Google Analytics calls this metric "eCommerce conversion rate," other analytics platforms have different names for it. For example, Shopify terms it as "online store conversion rate," some other platforms also term it as "order rate," etc. However, all these terminologies refer to the same KPI.

Now, why is the eCommerce conversion rate so important? This valuable KPI reflects how successfully you're converting your visitors to customers. It helps you understand how your web pages and store perform regarding customer experience. 

Besides helping you track the progress and success of your online store, this classic metric also enables you to identify loopholes and areas of improvement. It allows you to understand and analyze the key points where customers like your customer experience and the pain points that you can work on further.

How to Calculate Ecommerce Conversion Rates?

eCommerce conversion rate is a crucial business KPI, stating the profitability of your store and the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. Calculate it by dividing the total number of conversions by the total number of website visitors. 

The formula would go around like this:

Conversion rate (in %) = (Total number of conversions / Total number of visitors) * 100 

For example, you have 1000 website visitors on your eCommerce store from January 5, 2025 - January 12, 2025. Out of them, 50 took a conversion action or made a sale. The conversion rate for your store for the specific period would be (50/1000)*100 = 5%. 

The math here is easy. However, you need to take the number of visitors and conversions within the specific time frame to calculate the conversion rate.

 When and how often should you measure and track your conversion rate? While this differs from team to team, most marketers track it at regular intervals such as monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Sometimes, marketers also calculate it right after or during an extensive campaign to know the effectiveness and success of the current campaign in comparison to the earlier ones. 

You can rely on a popular website Analytics tool to measure your eCommerce store's conversion rates. While Google Analytics is the most widely used one, it only focuses on website data. 

If you want to track your eCommerce conversions from multiple sources such as social media and others, you can opt for more advanced tools such as Segment and Heap. Moreover, you can go for Triple Whale if you wish to have a detailed overview of customer touchpoints and interactions across all platforms and search engines. 

Types of Ecommerce Conversions 

Ideally, the shopper goes through eight sales touch points before turning into your customer with their first sale. These touchpoints may vary, ranging from a mere social media post interaction to receiving email promotions. 

That said, as an eCommerce store owner or manager, you should also have a clear and solid understanding of the different kinds of conversions apart from sales. It helps you understand and optimize the pain points wherein your customers bounce from your product. 

Let's discuss some of the main types of conversions for your eCommerce store. 

1. Making a Purchase 

The first, foremost, and undoubtedly the most significant conversion happens when a shopper completes the checkout purchase and makes a sale. A successful sale implies customer loyalty towards the brand or store, which, in the long run, helps the business boost its revenue. 

However, about 69.99% of eCommerce carts are abandoned. Thus, you must focus on making your cart design and checkout process more straightforward and quicker. Offer multiple options, coupons, and a help icon or pop-up for last-minute queries. Lead the customers to the checkout page with a frictionless UX and options such as "Check out Now" for a better customer experience. 

2. Creating an Account 

The simplest thing a shopper can do on an online store is create an account. While you must have guest checkout options to facilitate the checkout process, encourage them with an option to create an account. It's a great way of building a shopper or customer base for your eCommerce store.

This helps you collect basic customer info such as their email ID, contact number, etc. You can also make this process easier for them by offering to create an account post their checkout process using the order information they've provided. 

3. Adding Products to Wishlists and Carts

When a customer likes your products, they will add it to their wishlist. Why not make it easier for them by just helping them create an account wherein they can wishlist all their favorites from your store?

The wishlist products are already your shoppers' favorites. You need to convince them with optimized marketing strategies to make that final call and add it to their cart. Furthermore, whenever they come back to your online store, they can easily find it in their wishlist or cart and make their purchase. 

4. Signing Up to the Email List 

According to Omnisend, email marketing campaigns have an average open rate of 25.10% and a click-through rate of 1.50%. These stats explain why eCommerce stores are constantly building their email list. 

Being a first-party customer channel, email marketing is a great way to improve customer lifetime value. It helps inform your shoppers and customers of upcoming products, back-in-stock favorites, sale alerts, etc. 

However, convincing customers to leave their email addresses and join them in an email list might sound like a task. To tackle this, offer free shipping, discounts, or access to loyalty programs whenever a customer leaves their email address. This feels like a win-win situation for the customers.

5. Connecting with Your Store on Social Media 

It's similar to signing up for an email list. When you display your social media icons prominently across your website, shoppers can connect with your store on them simply by following you. 

While this sounds like an effortless idea, it helps you reach your shoppers with promotional content, like you do in email campaigns. Furthermore, they also get a chance to interact with your content across your social media handles.

Average Ecommerce Conversion Rate by Industry

Realistically, the average website conversion rate across the industry ranges between 2.5% and 3%. While the rate of 2.5% is a significant number to get started with, you should always aim for a 3% plus figure as your baseline. 

Littledata, the Shopify analytics app, states that the average number of Shopify stores is 1.4%. Thus, if your Shopify store's conversion rate is above 3.2%, you are among the top 20% of best-performing Shopify stores.

The average website conversion rate by industry also varies depending on place, country, channel, source, device, etc. For example, gift stores and businesses have a conversion rate of 5%. On the contrary, consumer electronics accounts for just 1.5% of the total. 

Below is a brief list of the average website conversion rate by industry.

• Agriculture: 0.62% - 1.41%
• Health and wellbeing: 1.87% - 4.20%
• Baby and child: 0.87% - 1.43%
• Pet care & supplies: 2.20% - 2.53%
• Food & drink: 1.00% - 2.01%
• Home and kitchen appliances: 1.72% - 3.00%
• Fashion, clothing, & accessories: 1.01% - 2.20%
• Arts & crafts: 3.84% - 4.07%
• Sports & Recreation: 1.18 - 1.62%
• Electrical tools: 1.31% - 2.49%

Factors Affecting Ecommerce Conversion Rate

We've already discussed the benchmarks of the average eCommerce conversion rate by industry. However, if you're wondering for an accurate good stat for your industry, you need to understand that every business has unique aspects, and these figures are benchmarks. 

Moreover, the conversion rates may vary depending on a lot of factors, namely: 

• Type of product: It's pretty clear that the conversion rates differ from product to product. For example, luxury goods and products have lower conversion rates than affordable ones. 

• Traffic source: Your traffic's source, origin, and region also affect conversion rates. The traffic and conversions coming from social media marketing will differ from those coming organically. 

• Seasonality: The product's seasonality and time of the year also impact conversion rates. For example, you'll have higher eCommerce conversions during peak sales than on regular days. 

• Position in the market: The market position of your online store reflects your popularity and authority in the niche. Well-known, established brands have a loyal customer base and are meant to have higher conversions than newly launched ones. 

• Website optimization: A well-designed and optimized website with user-friendly options such as seamless checkout imparts a good customer experience to the shoppers. That's why their conversion rates are better. 

How to Optimize Ecommerce Conversion Rate in 2025?

Are you looking ahead to improve and skyrocket your eCommerce conversions? That's where data-driven eCommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes into the picture. This process helps you understand your conversions beyond numbers, thus taking you deep into the customer journey. It enables you to explore and refine the key touch-points where your shoppers decide to become your customers. 

Start by improving your store and products' value propositions and marketing. The product page should be well-designed to convince the shopper that it fits their needs the best and is worth their time and resources. You can also have an AI shopping assistant on your product page to help them with all the necessary queries related to the product. 

Besides AI-powered FAQs, this assistant will also help them compare and choose the best product suited to their needs. Eventually, it will guide them to the final checkout page to purchase with the available discounts and coupons, if any. 

If you want a similar AI shopping assistant for your shoppers, try App0 today! With deep understanding and expertise in the industry, this US-based SaaS company helps you launch personalized AI shopping assistants. These assistants are tailored and trained for your product portfolio to personalize every customer's journey in your eCommerce store, just like a personal salesperson.

They go beyond providing personalized product recommendations and post-sales support to understand every user's unique needs and assist them on the page accordingly. Furthermore, they offer seamless integrations with popular eCommerce tech stack and enterprise-grade security with SOC-2 compliance. Ready to see App0's assistants live on your online store? See a demo today!

The next step is to focus on improving the customer experience on the website. Reduce friction between the customer interaction and touchpoints to offer a seamless and user-friendly experience. The simpler the user can access and navigate your store, the more they will love it. 

You need to implement many other strategies to boost your eCommerce conversions. Make your store and website mobile-optimized and work on abandoned cart recovery. Go for heat-map tools to understand better customer interaction at your store's various touch points. Communicate and convince your customers to leave feedback on what they liked and didn't. 

Lastly, an exit-intent survey should be built to understand what stopped them from making the final purchase. It will help you identify potential loopholes and areas of improvement from the customers' point of view. Also, an on-site survey should be run regularly to spot the friction points that stop customers from making a purchase. 

Looking for a detailed guide on how to increase your eCommerce conversions? Explore it here!

Wrapping up 

The conversion rate of your eCommerce store reflects how well your customers interact with your store and products. It helps you understand your customers and their journey in your store. It indicates the customer experience and impression you're leaving behind in their minds. Thus, while optimizing your eCommerce conversions, you should always explore user behavior across multiple pages and the factors affecting it. 

If you want to facilitate the shopping experience and make it easier for your customers, launch your AI-powered product expert and shopping assistant with App0 today! They have helped brands improve their average order value and conversion rate by 17%. 

Ecommerce Conversions: FAQs