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eCommerce Conversion Rate Benchmarks, by Industry and by Device
Three credible sources put the average conversion rate for eCommerce at 1.4%, 2.23% and 2.9%. None of them is wrong. They measure different merchants, over different periods, with different denominators, and that is the single most important thing to understand before you compare your own store to any published figure. Every number on this page carries its source, its period and what it excludes.
FIGURES
24 figures
SOURCES
4 primary sources
LAST REVIEWED
October 2026
NEXT REVIEW
April 2027
A conversion rate is a ratio. Change the denominator and the benchmark moves without anything happening in the store.
- The headline
Three averages, three different numbers
All three are published by credible organisations using real trading data. Read them together, and read what each one counts.
2.23%
average conversion rate across all eCommerce markets on one platform, measured as transactions divided by sessions.
SOURCE
IRP Commerce, eCommerce Market Data, August 2026
August 2026 · UK & Ireland · session-based · one platform’s merchant base
1.4%
median conversion rate across Shopify stores. The mean for the same stores is 1.9%, because a minority convert far above the rest.
SOURCE
Littledata, Average eCommerce Conversion Rate
90 days to 3 October 2026 · 426 Shopify stores · median, not mean
2.9%
overall conversion rate measured as users who purchased divided by site users — a different denominator from the two figures above, which is most of why it is higher.
SOURCE
Dynamic Yield, via Smart Insights, eCommerce Conversion Rate Benchmarks
2024 device data · mixed geographies · user-based, not session-based
- Read it properly
Why the benchmarks disagree, and what that means for you
A conversion rate is transactions divided by something. Change the something and the number moves without a single thing changing in the store. Sessions, users and visits are three different denominators, and a user who returns four times before buying converts at four times the session rate.
Sector mix matters as much. A platform whose merchants skew toward arts and crafts will report a higher blended average than one that skews toward furniture, and neither says anything about how either merchant is performing. So will price point: the sector on this page with the lowest conversion rate also has the highest average order value, by a factor of seven.
- Check the denominator before you compare: sessions and users are not interchangeable
- Check the sector mix, because a blended average is mostly a statement about the sample
- Check the period — conversion rate is seasonal, and a single month proves nothing
- Compare against your own last four quarters, segmented by device and by new versus returning
- Watch revenue per session alongside the rate, because a rate can rise while revenue falls
None of this makes benchmarks useless. It makes them a sanity check on order of magnitude rather than a target. If your rate is 0.3% the benchmarks tell you something real; if it is 1.8% they tell you almost nothing.
The useful comparison is to your own trend. The benchmark only tells you whether you are in the right order of magnitude.
- By industry
eCommerce conversion rate by industry
The six highest-converting sectors in the most recent month published. The spread between the top and the bottom of this list is more than tenfold, which is why a single cross-industry average is close to meaningless.
5.81%
Arts and Crafts — the highest-converting sector, and one of the lowest average order values. Low consideration, repeat purchase, small basket.
SOURCE
IRP Commerce, eCommerce Market Data, August 2026
August 2026 · UK & Ireland · transactions ÷ sessions · one platform’s merchant base
3.31%
Health and Wellbeing — flat year on year, and the sector most driven by subscription and repeat ordering.
SOURCE
IRP Commerce, eCommerce Market Data, August 2026
August 2026 · UK & Ireland · transactions ÷ sessions · one platform’s merchant base
2.98%
Kitchen & Home Appliances — down from 3.47% a year earlier, the largest year-on-year fall in the set.
SOURCE
IRP Commerce, eCommerce Market Data, August 2026
August 2026 · UK & Ireland · transactions ÷ sessions · one platform’s merchant base
2.56%
Pet Care — also down year on year, from 2.62%, while average order value fell by roughly a sixth.
SOURCE
IRP Commerce, eCommerce Market Data, August 2026
August 2026 · UK & Ireland · transactions ÷ sessions · one platform’s merchant base
2.11%
Sports and Recreation — up from 1.57%, one of the largest year-on-year gains in the set.
SOURCE
IRP Commerce, eCommerce Market Data, August 2026
August 2026 · UK & Ireland · transactions ÷ sessions · one platform’s merchant base
1.86%
Fashion, Clothing & Accessories — up from 1.45%, with average order value up by roughly a fifth over the same period.
SOURCE
IRP Commerce, eCommerce Market Data, August 2026
August 2026 · UK & Ireland · transactions ÷ sessions · one platform’s merchant base
- Rate against basket size
Conversion rate and average order value pull in opposite directions
Ordered by average order value. The sector that converts worst in this set takes seven times more money per order than the sector that converts best, which is why a low conversion rate is not automatically a problem to fix.
Sector
Conversion rate
Average order value
Baby & Child
0.57%
£855.57
Cars and Motorcycling
1.86%
£264.80
All eCommerce markets
2.23%
£129.23
Arts and Crafts
5.81%
£119.78
Food & Drink
1.58%
£118.93
Toys, Games & Collectables
1.64%
£62.36
All figures: IRP Commerce, eCommerce Market Data, August 2026. UK and Ireland, one platform’s merchant base. Values are published monthly and will have moved since; check the source for the current month.
- Before you compare
Four things to settle before you judge your own rate
Do these four and the benchmark question usually answers itself. Skip them and you will chase a number that was never comparable.
Fix the denominator
- Decide whether you report sessions or users, and write the definition down
- GA4 reports session-based by default, which is lower than user-based
- Never compare a user-based figure against a session-based benchmark
- Re-baseline the whole history if you ever change the definition
Segment by device before anything
- Mobile carries most of the traffic and converts below desktop everywhere
- A blended rate moves when the device mix moves, not when the store improves
- Report mobile and desktop separately and set targets separately
- Most of the gap is a mobile experience problem, not a mobile behaviour problem
Split new from returning
- Returning customers convert at a multiple of first-time visitors
- A paid-acquisition push lowers the blended rate while raising revenue
- Judge acquisition on first-visit conversion, not on the blended figure
- If the blended rate falls while both segments rise, you have grown the top of the funnel
Watch revenue per session
- Conversion rate can be raised by discounting your way to worse margin
- Revenue per session catches that; conversion rate alone does not
- Track both on the same chart and judge changes on the pair
- A test that lifts conversion and lowers revenue per session has failed
The eCommerce conversion rate optimization guide works through what to do once the measurement is sound, and the conversion rate calculator puts a pound value on a single point of improvement on your own numbers.
- Context
The distribution matters more than the average
A conversion rate sits inside a funnel and inside a distribution. These three put it in proportion.
12x
the spread between the top and bottom deciles of Shopify stores: 3.5% at the top 10%, 0.3% at the bottom 10%, against a median of 1.4%. The distribution matters far more than the average.
SOURCE
Littledata, Average eCommerce Conversion Rate
90 days to 3 October 2026 · 426 Shopify stores · percentile bands · ratio calculated by us from the published deciles
3.2% vs 2.8%
desktop against mobile conversion rate, while mobile carries roughly three-quarters of retail traffic. The gap is where most conversion work actually pays.
SOURCE
Dynamic Yield, via Smart Insights, eCommerce Conversion Rate Benchmarks
2024 device data · mixed geographies · user-based · the source itself flags internal inconsistencies in this dataset
70.22%
average documented cart abandonment rate, across 50 published studies. At a 2% conversion rate an abandonment rate near 70% is arithmetically ordinary, not a defect.
SOURCE
Baymard Institute, Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics
Aggregate of studies 2006–2025, retrieved 2026 · mixed geographies · rolling average across 50 studies
- The sources
Every source behind this page
What each organisation measured, how, and what it does not cover. Cite the original rather than us.
1
IRP Commerce
Published: monthly; figures here are August 2026 with August 2025 comparatives
Method: first-party trading data recorded on the IRP platform, not survey responses. Conversion rate is defined as transactions divided by sessions, multiplied by 100. Figures are aggregated to protect merchant confidentiality and calculated before rounding.
What it does not cover: UK and Ireland, and one platform’s merchant base. No sample size is published. Sector figures move month to month, so treat a single month as a snapshot rather than a trend.
2
Littledata
Published: benchmark generated 7 October 2026, covering the 90 days from 6 July to 3 October 2026
Method: aggregated analytics data from 426 Shopify stores using Littledata’s tracking, reported as percentile bands rather than a single average. Median 1.4%, mean 1.9%, bottom decile 0.3%, top decile 3.5%.
What it does not cover: Shopify stores only, and only those using this one analytics product, which skews toward brands that have invested in measurement. No sector breakdown.
3
Dynamic Yield and Baymard Institute
Published: Dynamic Yield device data 2024, accessed via Smart Insights 2026 · Baymard aggregate of studies 2006–2025
Method: Dynamic Yield measures users who purchased as a share of site users, which is a higher figure than the session-based rates above. Baymard averages 50 separate published abandonment studies alongside its own usability research programme.
What it does not cover: the Dynamic Yield device data is 2024 and Smart Insights itself flags internal inconsistencies in it — the stated desktop-to-mobile ratio does not match the published rates. We have quoted only the two figures that are internally consistent. Baymard’s average spans two decades of studies with differing definitions of a cart.
Cite the original rather than us. Each title links to the publisher, and every figure above carries the period and the denominator it was measured on.
- Questions
eCommerce conversion rate FAQs
The questions behind most of the searches that bring people to this page.
What is a good eCommerce conversion rate?
A good eCommerce conversion rate is one above your own last four quarters at a stable or rising revenue per session. If you want an external anchor: on the most recent Shopify data the median is 1.4% and the top decile is 3.5%, so anything above roughly 2.7% puts you in the top fifth of stores. But sector, price point and traffic mix move that so far that the honest answer to what is a good conversion rate for eCommerce, and to what is a good eCommerce conversion rate for your store specifically, is almost always your own trend rather than a published number.
What is the average conversion rate for eCommerce?
It depends which source you take and what it counts. The average conversion rate for eCommerce is published at 2.23% across all markets on one UK platform in August 2026, at a 1.4% median across 426 Shopify stores in the 90 days to October 2026, and at 2.9% in Dynamic Yield’s user-based measurement. The first two are session-based and the third is user-based, which accounts for most of the difference.
Why do published eCommerce conversion rates disagree so much?
Three reasons, in order of size. The denominator: sessions, users and visits give different answers for the same store. The sample: there is no single average conversion rate eCommerce figure that applies everywhere, because every published benchmark is drawn from one platform, one analytics product or one set of studies, each with its own sector skew. And the period: conversion rate is seasonal, so a figure from August and a figure from November are not comparable even from the same source.
What is a typical eCommerce conversion rate by industry?
In the most recent month published by IRP Commerce, Arts and Crafts converted at 5.81%, Health and Wellbeing at 3.31%, Kitchen & Home Appliances at 2.98%, Pet Care at 2.56%, Sports and Recreation at 2.11%, Fashion at 1.86%, Cars and Motorcycling at 1.86%, Toys and Games at 1.64%, Food & Drink at 1.58% and Baby & Child at 0.57%. Average eCommerce conversion rate by industry is the most useful cut of this data, because the tenfold spread between top and bottom tells you that the cross-industry average is close to meaningless.
Is a 1% conversion rate bad?
Not necessarily. It is below the Shopify median of 1.4% but comfortably above the bottom decile of 0.3%, and if you sell high-consideration products at a high average order value it may be perfectly healthy — the lowest-converting sector in the IRP data takes £855 per order. Look at revenue per session before you decide. If that is rising, the rate is not your problem.
Why is our mobile conversion rate so much lower than desktop?
Partly because it genuinely is a worse experience on most stores, and partly because of what mobile traffic is. Phones carry more discovery and more browsing, and the same person often researches on a phone and buys on a desktop, which credits the conversion to desktop. Separate the two, set targets separately, and test your own checkout on a mid-range phone on mobile data before concluding it is a behaviour problem.
How often should we check our rate against benchmarks?
Twice a year is plenty, and only to check you are in the right order of magnitude. Review your own rate monthly against your own history, segmented by device and by new versus returning. Published benchmarks move for reasons that have nothing to do with your store — a platform signing a large merchant in a high-converting sector will move its blended average more than anything you do will move yours.
Can you tell us where our conversion rate is actually leaking?
Yes. The conversion review inside the free eCommerce audit measures your funnel step by step, per device, and walks your actual checkout on a phone including the paths that fail. It reports against your own data rather than against an industry average. The CRO guide covers the method if you would rather run it yourself.
- Keep reading
Related resources
Where to go once the measurement is sound and you want the rate to move.
GUIDE
What a point of conversion is worth on your numbers, where stores actually lose people, and how to test on traffic you realistically have.
TOOL
Put a pound value on a single point of conversion improvement using your own sessions, orders and average order value.
STATISTICS
The 70% figure taken apart: every stated reason ranked, what each one costs to fix, and why it is not a target.
Want to know your own number, properly measured?
A free eCommerce audit measures your funnel per device, separates new from returning, and tells you where the rate is actually leaking — against your own data rather than against an industry average that was never comparable.