4 replies to this topic

[PatrickGer]

I've been wondering - what are the highest conversion rates anyone of you has seen on the www?

Typically conversion rates are in the low single digits for most sites, but i bet there are outliers....like when everything is in place:

- a true need people have to fill
- very few or no good (or none at all) competitors - including offline

An analogy might be...whenever Im up at night and get hungry, but didnt buy food during the day.....I drive to the nearest gas station and buy food there. Being truly hungry is a need I have to fill, and there really isnt any other gas station close to where I live (or well there is but the cost of driving there would be higher and they dont have better food)....I wouldnt be surprised if that gas station has a close to 100% conversion rate with everyone who lives in my area, gets hungry at night and has no food around.

Has anyone ever seen a monetization model like this (or anything close to it) online? And how high were the conversion rates with it? Deep into the double digits?

Anything else that's noteworthy in terms of high conversion rates would be extremely interesting, too, of course!

[Jill]

Too bad Randy isn't around. I think he has a lot of insight and numbers on this.

[MaryKrysia]

There was a report published by Nielsen Research in May 2008 ago with the following:

Here are the top 10 converting websites for May 2008*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculators by toolbar user to final conversion.

1. ProFlowers 35.70%
2. Office Depot 31.40%
3. Blair.com 23.80%
4. FTD.com 21.30%
5. QVC 18.70%
6. CDW 17.90%
7. Lands End 17.50%
8. 1800flowers.com 16.80%
9. Drugstore.com 16.20%
10. HSN.com 15.80%

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

This information was published on the grokdotcom.com (if I can include this)

You should find more recent information by going through the Nielsen.com blog. I found numbers for 2009 by retail sector but the information is in chart form and too long to publish here. Ebay and Amazon, not surprisingly, are high up on a few of these charts.

[PatrickGer]

Considering what website it is, I had a pretty difficult time to navigate it to find what I was looking for lol, then again I guess nobody's perfect.

I came across a piece ofi nformation that basically read "april showers bring moms flowers" or something along those lines. Now I see that the data you quoted were for May (even though 2008 not 2009)...I was gonna mention i was surprised at flowers getting such high conversion rates...but that might have to do with the month of april/may, I guess?

not really sure how it affects the conversion rate (rather than just overall traffic), but you get the idea..

[freeflyer]

typically i see between 1-3% on ecommerce sales.. which is the recognised average. One site i have has only 1000 visits per month but a 3.5% conversion rate on products which are quite unique.. another site has 20,000 visitors a month but never goes above 1.5% on an everday DIY product. I think a lot of it (assuming everything is equal in terms of product deployment, carts etc) comes down to product type, prices etc and goes way beyond actual site presentation, deployment and branding.