Matt Collins

Magento E-Commerce Checkout Conversion Rates

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Matt Collins
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Screen Pages, a UK ecommerce agency, publish some great data on their blog. Their latest post is about Magento e-commerce checkout conversion rates.

It’s interesting for a couple of reasons:

  1. It gives some useful benchmark conversion rate numbers.
  2. It shows how conversion rates can and do vary significantly between sites with checkouts that are functionally almost identical. (Clearly other factors are at play, e.g. brand, initial purchase intent, removal of any impediments, etc.)

Here’s a quick summary of the findings.

Data collected:

  • Analysed 2.5m visitors to over 27 websites.
  • All used standard Magento ‘accordion-style’ checkout page (customised for each brand).
  • All niche brands selling lifestyle goods.

Findings:

  • Average conversion rate (visit to sale): 2.47% (ranging from below 1% to over 10%)
  • Average % of visits leading to a basket page view: 5.76% (mostly between 3% and 7%)
  • Basket page exits: 9.29% (mostly between 7% and 11%) [people who leave the site at the basket page]
  • Overall checkout completion rate (basket page view to sale): 37% (mostly between 22% and 48%)

 

 

Comments

3 responses to “Magento E-Commerce Checkout Conversion Rates”

  1. The eWAY Team avatar
    The eWAY Team

    These are some interesting statistics – we may share them with our payment gateway clients.

    Do you think a faster checkout process (fewer pages, or pre-filled fields) would reduce the 9.29% drop-off rate at the basket stage? Or would the drop-offs just be relocated to an earlier page?

    Kind regards,
    The eWAY Team

  2. Matt Collins avatar
    Matt Collins

    Good question. First, just to clarify, the basket page typically just shows the customer what’s currently in their basket (and may allow them to enter a discount code). That’s the page where the 9.29% drop-off I mentioned occurs.

    After they click “Checkout” from the basket page, they then move to the “accordion-style” checkout page. It’s this page that Magento checkout extensions have typically tried to enhance.

    OneStepCheckout is one popular extension that replaces Magento’s default multi-step checkout with a 3-column page showing all the fields at once.

    Unfortunately, for now there seems to be very little published research into whether this sort of checkout tends to improve or degrade conversion rates. I suspect this is because it’s a slightly tricky thing to A/B test. Opinions seem to vary from “cramming all the fields together goes against basic usability principles, so can only hurt conversion rates” to “it usually helps conversions, but not always – you need to test it on your particular site”.

    The “Optimized Checkout” Magento extension is another one that might be interesting to look at. It aims to make Magento’s default checkout more intuitive by merging the (potentially confusing) Checkout Method step with the Billing Information step.

  3. Isabel avatar
    Isabel

    Hi Matt,
    interesting article.
    do you have any experience or stats on drop offs at check out page for online travel agencies?
    thanks
    Isabel

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