Top Ecommerce KPIs To Optimize Your Shopify Site For

Understanding how your Shopify store website performs is essential to staying competitive in the ecommerce marketplace. Accurate benchmark data is the key to understanding your site’s performance, as it provides insight into bounce rates, home page reliance, and other core elements of your store’s sales and marketing. It is critical to monitor this data so you can identify areas of improvement for your online store and increase conversions!

Ecommerce Conversion Rate Benchmark

The average ecommerce conversion rate benchmark for mobile on Shopify is 1.1%. If your store’s conversion rate is greater than 2.8%, you would be in the top 20 percent of all Shopify stores. The conversion rate for mobile is lower than that on a desktop since most customers typically stick to browsing on their mobile devices, rather than actually making a purchase.

As for desktop, the average conversion rate is 2.1%. A conversion rate greater than 5.1% would put you in the top 20 percent of Shopify stores. Although this number is usually higher, it doesn’t include the discovery process, which more often than not occurs on mobile devices. Conversion rates are generally lower on mobile devices for multiple reasons: concerns for security and privacy, difficulty to input customer information (i.e. payment and address fields), and it’s tougher to switch screens and compare different products in different tabs.

You can improve your conversion rate by optimizing your product display pages: including image/video quality and size, and reviewing product copy to include more detail and clarity. You can also improve the checkout process for usability to make it as simple as possible, and review your conversion rate and landing page performance by traffic source.

Bounce Rate Benchmark

Your bounce rate is arguably one of the most critical metrics for your ecommerce site. Pages that load within 2 seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, compared to pages that load in 5 seconds see their bounce rate rise to 38.7%. Thus, it is important for your store to continuously monitor not only your bounce rate, but which content is causing them to leave.

For Shopify, the average bounce rate is 47.5% for mobile and 38.7% for desktop. There are plenty of ways to reduce your bounce rate, and we suggest installing heatmaps to get to the root of the issue. Page speed is often a big culprit, so you can optimize images and other media, clean up your plugins and code library to speed things up. Sometimes a poor UX design is the cause of high bounce rates, or if it’s a landing page that you’re running ads to your targeting might be off.

Add-To-Cart Rate Benchmark

For Shopify, the average add-to-cart rate is 4.8%. Your store would be in the top 10 percent of Shopify stores if your rate is greater than 10.4%, while a rate of more than 8.3% would place you in the top 20 percent.

You can improve your shop’s add-to-cart rate by reviewing pricing, images, product information/descriptions, utilizing social proof by adding reviews and testimonials, offering shipping/delivery information upfront so users aren’t surprised at checkout, and providing as much information as possible on the product page.

Checkout Completion Rate Benchmark

Checkout completion rates are lower on mobile at 41.1%, while desktop’s benchmark is at 49.1%. Similar to conversion rates, users might abandon their carts during checkout on mobile since it’s tougher to navigate, information isn’t displayed in an actionable way, or call to actions to convert are too far out of reach. There are also concerns for security, such as inputting payment information.

In order to improve completion rates, we suggest ensuring that the checkout process is easy-to-navigate, utilize one-page checkouts and instant checkout options like Apply Pay and PayPal. Payment and delivery options should also be expanded so they can work with more customers’ preferences, otherwise, they might seek out another store with better options. You might also consider using the Shopify plugin Persistent Cart for cross-device checkout if your customers move to their desktop to shop.

Average Order Value Benchmark

The average order value (AOV), or average revenue per paying user (ARPU), is calculated by dividing total monthly revenue by the number of transactions for that month. The average order value for average Shopify stores is $69, while smaller stores’ AOV is $63.50. Of course, this depends on the price point of your products.

To increase your AOV, consider upselling and/or cross-selling, providing targeted product recommendations, offering free shipping at a minimum price value, increasing pricing on select products, and offering volume discounts. You can also use ecommerce tracking on Google Analytics to track AOV and to gain more specific insight.

Reliance on Homepage Benchmark

Reliance on homepage translates to the percentage of visitors who land on your Shopify store’s homepage. Your Shopify homepage is important as your homepage captures your store’s brand or paid search traffic. The average percentage of visitors on Shopify homepages are capturing is 27.9%.

To increase traffic to your Shopify homepage consider adding product landing pages to your Shopify store. Google rewards sites that have various landing pages which align with specific keyword searches, which can increase traffic to your homepage.

Server Response Time Benchmark

Server response time affects the speed in which your site loads. The benchmark for Shopify is 741ms, as compared to 792ms for WooCommerce and 1.0 seconds for Magento. Wondering how to decrease this server response time?

Three ways to increase server response time is to rewrite your site’s code base, invest in faster servers, and to utilize Google Developer’s minification service to remove poor code which can slow site’s performance. The more time it takes your Shopify store page to load, the lower your site will rank on the search engine results page.

Accurately benchmarking and interpreting data on your Shopify store’s performance can allow you to identify areas for improvement, as well as increase conversions. The key performance indicators in this article are just benchmarks, there are plenty of opportunities to surpass these metrics and outperform your competitors with the proper ecommerce optimization.

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