Mike Hauben, Editor

Questions? mike@haubenmedia.com

“Understanding Jewelry ECommerce Data” Series Chapters:

Part 1: Customer Lifetime Value

Part 2: Sales Conversion Rate (you are here)

Part 3: Average Order Value

Part 4: Cart Abandonment Rate

Part 5: Email Conversion Rate

Part 6: Social Media Conversion Rate

Part 7: Revenue By Traffic Source

Part 8: Customer Acquisition Cost

My article last week was the first in this series of learning how to read and understand e-commerce data for jewelers. This is part 2: Sales Conversion Rate.

Essentially, this stat tells you the number of sales you’re getting over time against how many users are coming to your website.

This is an important metric, obviously. It’s really the one that matters most. It’s easy to get excited about metrics like “clicks” and “visitors”. However, if those clicks aren’t turning into sales then it doesn’t really matter, right?

Calculating Your Sales Conversion Rate

To determine your sales conversion rate:

Number Of Sales X Total Number Of Users

Improving Your Sales Conversion Rate

One way to increase your sales conversion rate is to improve the checkout experience. In fact, over half of abandoned carts happen on the checkout page.

So what makes a poor checkout experience, and how can we improve it?

E-Commerce Nation gives a really nice breakdown here examining why cart abandonment rates are at around 70%. The biggest reasons for cart abandonment was

1 – Extra Costs on checkout (taxes, expensive shipping, etc)
2 – Site required visitor to create an account (huge headache for visitors who just want to shop and get off your site)
3- Long/complicated checkout process