Use figures from the same period and the same traffic.
Sessions or unique visitors, whichever your analytics reports.
Orders, signups or whatever action you count as a conversion.
Conversion rate and average order value multiply together, so lifting either one lifts revenue per visitor. Work out what your orders are worth with the average order value calculator.
See how Mage helps Shopify brands lift repeat purchase rate with loyalty, referrals and store credit.
Conversion rate is the share of visitors who complete the action you care about, shown as a percentage. On an ecommerce store that action is almost always a completed order. It is the cleanest measure of how well a site turns attention into outcomes, because it strips traffic volume out of the picture.
Divide conversions by visitors, then multiply by 100. If 10,000 people visited your store and 250 of them placed an order, that is 250 divided by 10,000, which is 0.025, multiplied by 100 for a 2.5% conversion rate. At a $65 average order value that traffic produced $16,250, or $1.63 of revenue per visitor.
Whatever you have decided the page or the store exists to do. For a store it is a completed purchase, for a lead generation site it is a form submission, for an app it is a signup or trial start. Pick one primary conversion and hold it steady, because changing the definition halfway through makes every historical comparison worthless.
Most ecommerce stores land somewhere around 2% to 3%, and anything above 5% is genuinely strong. The spread by category is enormous though: low consideration products such as consumables convert far higher than furniture, jewellery or anything with a long deliberation cycle. Compare yourself against your own trend first and your category second, never against a generic industry average.
Revenue per visitor is total revenue divided by total visitors, and it is often a better north star than conversion rate alone. A change that pushes conversion rate up while dragging average order value down can leave you worse off, and only revenue per visitor catches that. In the example above, $16,250 across 10,000 visitors gives $1.63 per visitor.
Either works, as long as you stay consistent. Sessions produce a lower conversion rate than unique visitors, because one person browsing three times counts three times in the denominator. Most analytics platforms report ecommerce conversion rate on sessions by default, so check which one your numbers came from before comparing them with anyone else.
Mobile traffic mixes casual browsing with buying intent in a way desktop traffic does not, and small screens make forms, filters and checkout fields harder work. It is common to see mobile convert at roughly half the desktop rate. Since mobile usually carries most of the traffic, a small improvement there moves total revenue more than a large desktop gain.
Hugely, and blending sources together hides the whole story. Email and returning direct traffic tend to convert best because those people already know the brand, branded search follows, and cold paid social usually sits at the bottom. Always segment before you judge a number, otherwise a spike in cheap top of funnel traffic will look like a conversion problem when it is really a mix change.
More than most people assume. At a 2% rate, 500 visitors will produce roughly 10 orders, and one or two orders either way swings the rate by a fifth. Look at several thousand visitors and a few dozen conversions before you trust the figure, and be very careful reading daily numbers on a small store.
A micro conversion is a smaller step on the way to the real one: an add to cart, a checkout start, an account creation, a newsletter signup. Tracking these tells you where people fall out. If add to cart is healthy but checkout completion is poor, the problem is shipping cost, payment options or form friction rather than the product page.
Check traffic mix before you touch the site. A new campaign, a viral post or a broad prospecting audience can pour in visitors who were never close to buying, which drops the rate while revenue holds steady or grows. After that, rule out tracking breakage, a checkout error, a stock outage on a bestseller, or a page speed regression.
Comparing sessions against unique visitors, judging a rate on a handful of orders, averaging every traffic source into one number, and chasing the rate at the expense of order value. The other big one is measuring conversions and visitors over different windows, which quietly inflates or deflates the result with no obvious sign anything is wrong.
Start with the checkout, since that is where committed buyers are lost: fewer form fields, guest checkout, clear delivery cost and timing, and the payment methods your customers actually use. Then work on product pages with better photography, honest reviews and specific answers to buying questions. Returning customers convert several times higher than first-time visitors, so anything that brings people back, such as a loyalty program or store credit, lifts the blended rate over time.
Yes. No signup, no email and no cap on how many calculations you run. It is built by Mage Loyalty, a loyalty, referrals and store credit app for Shopify.
Mage is a loyalty, referral and store credit app built for Shopify. Reward repeat purchases, run VIP tiers, and give customers a reason to come back, without writing a line of code.
