Author: Vendrux

Mobile is the biggest growth opportunity for ecommerce brands today.

The share of ecommerce sales on mobile continues to grow each year, yet the mobile shopping experience for many stores is lacking.

With many sites built primarily for desktop, along with the natural limitations of the mobile browser in terms of user experience, conversion rates are typically lower on mobile than on desktop.

That just means there’s a huge opportunity to increase your sales, and set your brand apart, if you can get this right.

Keep reading and we’ll explain more about the mobile conversion rate problem with most ecommerce stores, and a bumper list of tips to help your brand turn this around.

Did you know that mobile app users spend more, shop more frequently, and are more loyal to your brand?
Use our Ecommerce App Revenue Calculator to see just how much you can gain by launching an app.

What is the Average Mobile Ecommerce Conversion Rate?

The average conversion rate for ecommerce stores on mobile devices is 1.8%.

In comparison, the average conversion rate on desktop is more than double, at 3.9%.

Each year, this becomes a bigger problem, as the market share for mobile commerce continues to grow.

More people worldwide shop on mobile than desktop, and this share is projected to increase further.

Yet the average mobile ecommerce conversion rate continues to lag behind, as many stores haven’t caught up to the fact that the majority of their customers are mobile-first.

What is a Good Mobile Ecommerce Conversion Rate?

If 1.8% is the average mobile ecommerce conversion rate, should this be the bar you’re aiming for?

Considering most ecommerce brands are stuck in a desktop-first mindset, forward-thinking brands should be able to attain a conversion rate significantly higher.

There’s no reason you can’t convert visitors on mobile at close to the same rate as desktop.

This means you should be aiming for at least 2.5-3% conversion rate on mobile – perhaps even higher, if you really dial in on mobile-first CRO.

With 5.22 Billion Mobile Users, Fixing Mobile Conversion Rates Should Be Your Top Priority

Why do mobile shoppers convert at a lower rate?

Desktop sites have more real estate to work with. 

Bigger screens means it’s easier to fit key, conversion-driving elements, without making the page feel cramped.

Mobile users are typically more prone to distractions, too. Notifications appear, and people are already conditioned to bouncing around between multiple actions on their phone, more so than on desktop.

Then, some consumers just have a higher level of trust when using a desktop site than a mobile site.

Whatever the reason, there’s almost certainly something you can do to fix the problem and boost your conversion rate on mobile.

Next, we’ll list more than 20 things you can do to turn more mobile shoppers into paying customers.

How to Beat the Average Mobile Ecommerce Conversion Rate of 1.8%

Let’s explore best practices to optimize your mobile ecommerce conversion rate. Focusing on creating a better customer experience, particularly on mobile, is key to getting a higher conversion rate.

A large part of this is to build better, more optimized PDPs (product detail pages). If you want to dive deeper into this topic, our Ultimate Guide to Ecommerce PDPs is the best resource for this on the internet.

Here are 21 strategies to significantly improve your mobile ecommerce conversion rate and close the mobile-desktop conversion rate gap. 

1. Launch a Mobile App

One of the best ways to increase conversion rates for mobile shoppers is by launching a mobile app.

Mobile apps drive 3x higher conversion rates than mobile websites (and our data shows as much as 6-10x higher conversion rates in some cases).

Mobile apps are tailor-made for higher conversion rates.

By removing the browser tabs and serving shoppers a more immersive, contained experience, you remove a lot of the distractions that lead to lost sales.

If the cost has you thinking a mobile app is out of reach, think again.

By simply converting your existing website into a mobile app with Vendrux, you can launch an app for a small expense, in as little as two weeks.

Click here to learn more about how to convert your website into an app, and why Vendrux is the best way to do it.

Want to launch your own app in less than 30 days, with zero effort and minimal investment?
Get a free preview of your app to see what’s possible.

2. Make Call-to-Action Buttons Stand Out

Optimizing your calls to action (CTAs) is important for your CRO strategy.

Test and analyze various elements of your CTAs, such as buy and add-to-cart buttons, to stop your customers from scrolling and get them to take action.

Tools like HotJar can help track the effectiveness of your buttons. Make your buttons visible and “sticky” to improve mobile conversion rates.

3. Make Navigation as Easy as Possible

It’s vital you make navigation easy for mobile users.

An expandable, hamburger-style menu is standard on mobile. But along with this, you should ensure key sections of your site are easy to find.

It should take zero thought to get to wishlist, add to cart, account, and category sections.

On category pages, make product filters clearly visible, and easy to use.

All in all, just make your mobile shopping experience easy.

4. Show Product Recommendations (in the Right Place)

Display product recommendations on all mobile product pages.

Product recommendations help boost AOV, but can also increase conversion rates.

When someone views a product which is not quite what they’re looking for, you may be able to convert them by showing a few similar options.

Just be careful where you place these product recommendations.

Shoppers still want to see the key details for the product they clicked on first.

Below that, below important details like pricing, product description, shipping and return information, display your recommendations.

This ensures the shopper’s journey doesn’t stop at that page, but doesn’t obscure anything that will help you close the sale then and there.

5. Optimize Load Speed

Reduce load times and optimize the speed of your mobile store to improve CRO.

The longer shoppers have to wait for a page to load, the more likely they’ll get fed up and go somewhere else.

Make sure your images are optimized, and the underlying architecture of your website is clean.

If you have an app, reduce app launch time by delaying resource-intensive tasks until after the first screen is rendered.

Load data when required instead of when the app launches.

6. Simplify Mobile Forms

Mobile forms should be simple to fill out by design – from sign-up forms to booking forms.

Optimize mobile forms with clear labels and use single-column layouts and larger form fields.

Additionally, forms should be as concise as possible to minimize user effort and make them easy to complete on mobile devices.

Pre-fill information, if you have it (e.g. if the user has an account and is logged in), and in general, do anything you can do reduce friction with user input.

7. Shorten Mobile Processes With Smartphone Features

Design your app to make autofill available, especially for payment details and mobile forms.

Autofill can also save users time and make checkout processes quicker.

66% of consumers expect online checkout to take four minutes or less.

If yours takes longer than this, you’ll almost certainly be losing out on sales.

8. Provide Different Payment Methods

Entering payment details on a mobile device is time-consuming, and requires a lot of trust from the customer.

Offer shortcuts by saving customer payment details or providing alternative payment options like PayPal, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, or Google Pay.

Not only does this make it quicker and easier for the customer, but there’s an higher level of trust when they’re not giving a store their actual credit card details.

9. Offer Guest Checkout

To reduce friction for mobile customers, offer a guest checkout option, where you allow users to complete their purchase without creating an account.

This eliminates an additional step that may deter customers from completing a purchase – even if you’d prefer to have someone’s contact details, to be able to market to them in the future.

10. A/B Test Your Checkout Process

Optimize your ecommerce checkout process and prevent customer drop-offs by tweaking and testing the process continuously.

A long and complicated checkout process can deter customers from completing their purchases – but you often won’t know what the problem is until you test and gather data.

Things like adding guest checkout, reducing the number of input fields, or changes in copy or page design, might bring an improvement – or they might not.

Continuously test factors like this, to come up with the perfect formula to get the highest conversion rate possible for your audience.

11. Use Mobile Conversion Messaging

To increase mobile commerce sales, try being pro-active about communicating with your site/app visitors.

Browse abandonment notifications can recapture shoppers who let their attention drift away, while abandoned cart notifications are a great way to recover abandoned carts.

Otherwise, in-app messages and customer service prompts may help solve questions or objections that otherwise would result in lost sales.

Apps provide the perfect way to communicate with your customers, via push notifications. Check out our complete guide to Push Notifications for Ecommerce to learn just how powerful a tool this can be.

12. Use Color Blocks to Highlight Promotions

Make your best deals stand out!

Implement color block items to highlight ongoing sales in your mobile storefront.

Use vibrant and eye-catching colors for sale items to help them stand out, create a sense of urgency, and catch the attention of mobile shoppers.

You could also use pop-ups or push notification to improve mobile conversions (just avoid being too intrusive).

This visual distinction is crucial in a digital landscape saturated with numerous sales and promotions.

13. Use Video Content to Keep Shoppers Engaged

Mobile shoppers are conditioned to watch video.

Hours of Reels, TikToks, and Shorts have trained customers to expect video-first feeds on their phones. When they land on a static product page, the experience feels flat by comparison, and their thumb keeps scrolling.

Adding video is one of the easiest ways to hold their attention on mobile. And attention = higher chance of conversions.

Product demos, UGC clips, AI UGC, shoppable videos, unboxings, and creator videos give shoppers something to stop for. Instead of skimming text and bouncing, they watch, linger, and spend more time with your product, which gives you more chances to answer questions and convert.

Learn more: Why Video Commerce is a Winning Strategy for Brands in 2026

14. Build Trust With Mobile Audiences

Design your mobile app with trust signals in mind. According to Marqeta’s 2021 Fraud Report, 67% of all consumers think shopping online puts them at a higher risk of scams.

To increase trust, ensure all mobile data is safe by offering user authentication, displaying your data privacy policy, and integrating with trusted payment methods.

Making the buying experience safe can build trust in your brand and improve mobile conversions.

15. Let Users Zoom and Swipe

Most image sections on product pages are designed for desktop first, and fall short on mobile.

Mobile shoppers use pinch and swipe actions to zoom in on or navigate between product images.

If this functionality is unavailable or poorly implemented, it can put a big dent in your CRO.

Images are absolutely vital for conversions, so ensure that mobile shoppers have no difficulty getting up close and personal with products they’re considering buying.

16. Let Users Go ‘Back’ Easily

The ‘back’ button is a crucial and often overlooked UI element.

On many apps or mobile websites, interactive experiences and desktop-first navigation leads to unexpected behavior when a user hits the back button.

As a result, they get lost, they can’t get back to where they’re supposed to be, and leave your store in frustration.

Make sure your back functionality works intuitively, and include a “previously viewed products” section to make it even easier for shoppers to find their way around.

17. Improve Copy and Product Descriptions

Persuasive copy, detailed, and easy to skim are important for conversion rate.

Find the ideal mix of readability and sales-oriented copy.

Proactively address pain points and common objections, and use real, functional benefits to sell your products.

You should also include important information such as:

• Dimensions,
• Sizing (with links to size guides if applicable),
• Materials or ingredients,
• Compatibility details,
• Included accessories.

However, don’t lead with the technical details. Focus on emotion first, and go into more detail lower down the page for shoppers who want to learn more.

18. Create Mobile-Only Exclusive Coupons, Discounts, and Offers

Creating special promotions for mobile users can incentivize mobile users and website visitors to purchase through your mobile app.

Mobile-only promotions, such as free shipping, can create a sense of exclusivity and urgency.

This drives customers to act and purchase on their mobile devices.

Whether it’s a limited-time discount, a coupon code, or a special offer for mobile users, these incentives can get mobile shoppers over their trust or usability issuesand boost mobile ecommerce conversion rates.

19. Improve Post-Purchase Mobile Experience

Improving the post-purchase mobile experience can improve your CRO on mobile.

Allowing customers to track the progress of their orders easily is one way of doing this.

Offer real-time updates on order status and estimated delivery time via push notifications or messages in their account, and be clear and prompt with any post-purchase communication.

Do what you can to minimize frustration and provide a more inviting, end-to-end shopping experience, and you’ll get more return customers (who will convert at a higher rate than new visitors).

20. Make Reviews and Social Proof Visible

It’s important to establish credibility from the moment someone enters your ecommerce store.

Include customer testimonials or other forms of social proof below product descriptions, around CTA, and in your checkout flow, that highlight your product’s benefits and value.

Real customer reviews, UGC, and social feeds all help built more trust and credibility, and break down the barriers that stop customers from going through with a purchase.

21. Offer In-App or On-Site Customer Support

You can offer in-app customer support through chatbots or chat support software to quickly answer user questions and objections.

Most people won’t go through the effort of emailing you or calling you up, so you want to make it extremely easy for them.

An on-site chat widget with live chat can achieve this, and oftentimes answer very minor questions that otherwise would have resulted in a lost sale.

22. Personalize the In-App Experience

Personalization can have a big influence on a consumer’s journey towards purchasing.

This is true for any device, including mobile.

80% of consumers are more inclined to purchase when brands provide personalized experiences.

Personalization strategies can range from how content is displayed in the customer’s local language or currency to product recommendations.

Tailored in-app experiences ultimately drive higher conversions, improve customer satisfaction, and improve app engagement.

Building an app is the best way to boost mobile conversion rate, AOV and LTV. If you’re new to app development, and don’t know where to start, we made a full guide on building an ecommerce app, that shows you that launching your own app might be a lot easy than you think.

Increase Mobile Commerce Conversions and Optimize CRO with Vendrux

By following these tips to beat the average mobile ecommerce conversion rate, your business can set itself apart and capitalize on the growing share of mobile-first shoppers.

Many CRO issues can be solved by offering mobile shoppers the option to shop through an app.

All ecommerce businesses should have their own mobile app, and Vendrux is the best way to do it.

Vendrux requires little to no effort from you, minimal overhead, minimal investment, yet allows you to ship a full-featured app that looks and feels like a fully native, custom app.

We’ve created thousands of apps, including apps for high-revenue ecommerce brands such as Rainbow Shops, Jack & Jones and John Varvatos.

Let’s beat the average mobile ecommerce conversion rate and boost mobile conversions together.

Get in touch with us and book a free consultation now to see how we can help you build and launch your own mobile app.

Understanding the average eCommerce conversion rate (CVR) is important for you to get an idea of how well your site is performing and how you can improve.

As we’ll establish later, there are a number of factors you should consider when you compare your conversion rates to others.

Still, conversion rate is one of the most important metrics for an ecommerce store. The better your conversion rate, the more effective you are at converting your hard-earned visitors into paying customers.

Read on and we’ll show you the average eCommerce conversion rate, average conversion rates for different categories and a few factors to take into account, before sharing some conversion rate optimization tips for your business.

What’s a Good Conversion Rate for an eCommerce Store?

According to IRP Commerce, the average eCommerce conversion rate across all industries and categories is 1.89%.

Before you start cheering (or crying) because your store’s conversion rate is above (or below) that average, understand that the market average conversion rate is far too broad to paint a picture of how well your site is performing.

You’ll be better to compare your site to the average for your industry – but even then, there are many other things that influence whether your conversion rate is good or not, which we’ll share a little later.

How to Calculate Conversion Rate

You calculate conversion rate by dividing your total number of orders by the total number of site visitors.

Using the average eCommerce conversion rate as an example, this would mean that for every 10,000 visitors, 189 make a purchase.

189 / 10,000 = 0.0189 (1.89%)

Completed orders per site visit is the generally accepted formula if we’re talking about eCommerce conversion rate. But you can use conversion rate for a lot of different metrics and conversion events, such as:

• Add to carts
• Email signups
• Form submissions
• App downloads
• Customer service inquiries
• Video views
• Landing page views
• Clicks from a specific traffic channel

For example, you could use conversion rate to define how many people claimed a coupon code after viewing a landing page, if this is what you wanted to test and optimize for.

The point being that conversion rate is a very broad and flexible term. For the purposes of this article, though, we’ll keep it simple and just talk about your basic purchase conversion rate.

Average eCommerce Conversion Rates by Industry

You want to know what a good eCommerce conversion rate is? This figure can vary greatly depending on the product category. So you’ll be better off comparing your store’s CVR against the average CVR from your industry/category, rather than taking the overall average conversion rate.

Here’s the benchmark for a few of the most popular eCommerce categories:

• Arts and Crafts: 4.60%
• Baby & Child: 0.78%
• Cars and Motorcycling: 1.33%
• Electrical & Commercial Equipment: 1.44%
• Fashion Clothing & Accessories: 1.57%
• Food & Drink: 1.36%
• Health and Wellbeing: 3.56%
• Home Accessories and Giftware: 1.49%
• Kitchen & Home Appliances: 2.97%
• Pet Care: 2.01%
• Sports and Recreation: 1.72%
• Toys, Games & Collectibles: 1.68%

These figures show why it’s so important to compare your conversion rate to the industry average, rather than the average eCommerce conversion rates across the market as a whole.

If you were selling a product in the Health and Wellbeing market with a conversion rate of 2%, you might think that your conversion rate is above average if you only look at the broad average. Yet by looking at the average for this category, you’ll find you’re actually below average.

Still, this is not the be all and end all. This conversion rate might actually be ok, depending on certain factors we will establish very shortly.

Mobile vs Desktop Conversion Rates

We need to consider device type when looking at average eCommerce conversion rates as well.

According to Retail Touchpoints and Endertech, the average conversion rate on desktop is 3.9%, compared to 1.8% on mobile.

This is most likely due to the sub-par user experience many websites offer on mobile, as well as the distractions and usability issues present with most mobile websites.

This presents a clear opportunity for growth if you can improve your user experience and conversion rate on mobile. We’ll share a great way to do this later on in the article.

Why eCommerce Conversion Rate Benchmarks Don’t Tell the Whole Story

Conversion rate is important, no doubt.

Improving conversion rate is almost always going to result in better revenue and profitability. But there are a number of reasons why comparing your conversion rate to the industry average, or to another store, can be deceiving.

A “good” conversion rate for one store may be not-so-good for another. Or it could be incredible for one store and alarming for another.

That’s because of the range of factors that influence conversion rate. You need to take all these factors into consideration before deciding whether or not your conversion rate is acceptable or not.

Price Point

Higher priced items usually have a lower conversion rate. These products require more thought and deliberation from customers before making the decision to buy or not.

Often you’ll find people take a look at the product, shop around, check reviews and recommendations, and if they decide to buy, it will be after a longer period of time.

A lower conversion rate is expected and acceptable for high-ticket items. The value of each purchase is higher, so you can be ok with a lower volume of sales.

Traffic Source

You also need to consider where your customers are coming to you from.

Customers from different traffic sources have different levels of awareness and intent. Customers from some sources are hyper-focused on making a purchase and thus will have a higher average conversion rate. While others will be less focused, and you can expect them to convert at a lower rate.

Here are some conversion rate benchmarks for various traffic sources, according to the same data from Retail Touchpoints/Endertech we shared above:

• Direct: 2.2%
• Email: 5.2%
• Search: 2.1%
• Facebook: 0.9%
• Adwords: 1.4%
• Referral: 5.4%
• Social: 0.7%

To know how well you’re doing, consider where you get the majority of your traffic from, and even consider segmenting your conversion rate by traffic source.

If you’re converting 2% of your traffic from Facebook and social media, for example, you’re probably doing very well. A 2% conversion rate from email or referral traffic, however, is not so good.

Platform

Some platforms are better suited for conversions than others.

We’re generally referring to your own, branded website in this article. But you may be selling products on other platforms, which are better or worse for conversion.

For example, shoppers on a marketplace like Amazon, or on your own mobile app, have higher intent and thus convert at a higher rate than new visitors to your site. While other platforms – like your shopping page on a social media site like Instagram or TikTok – may naturally have a lower conversion rate.

Retention

You also want to think about how good your retention rate is. How often do people come back to your site? Do most of your visitors land on the site, look around and leave?

Or do people visit, leave, but come back and potentially buy later?

The better your retention rate for visitors and buyers, the lower you can afford your conversion rate to be. You can still benefit from increasing that rate, but you may be able to maintain good revenue and profitability with a lower than average CVR.

Retargeting

Similar to the section above, think about what you’re doing to retarget site visitors and market to them after they leave your site.

If you’re not doing any retargeting, it’s extremely important that you convert people the first time they land on your site. But if you have a good retargeting funnel, you can get by with a lower conversion rate.

Secondary Conversions

Finally, take into account any “secondary” conversions, other than purchases.

Do you have a newsletter or VIP list signup form? Is there anything else, such as a demo or a pre-sale inquiry form, that signals intent and higher likelihood of the customer ultimately making a purchase?

You prefer to get the purchase, of course, but a very high secondary conversion rate can make up for a lower than average purchase rate.

How to Increase Your Conversion Rate

Now onto what you really want to know: how to increase your conversion rate.

A higher conversion rate is something that benefits any eCommerce store. Generally, this means more revenue, more profit and a lower average customer acquisition cost.

There’s no shortage of ways that eCommerce websites can increase their conversion rates. Here are some of our top eCommerce conversion rate optimization tips.

Improve site speed

A slow website is one of the top reasons people bounce and don’t convert. So one of the first things you should look at when it comes to eCommerce conversion rate optimization is site speed.

A few things you can do to improve your site speed includes optimizing the images on your site, getting rid of any bloated plugins or apps, and using a CDN (content delivery network).

You may even want to move your site to a different host if your load speed is significantly slower than average.

Build more social proof

In ecommerce (and all business), social proof is king. Customers want to see proof that other people bought the product and loved it in order to be comfortable making a purchase themselves.

Reviews are the most common way to display social proof in ecommerce. Make sure you’ve got reviews on your product pages – the more positive reviews, the better.

Consider other ways you can show social proof as well, such as recommendations from influencers or other brands, or more impactful reviews, like video reviews.

Get better (or more) product images

Images are another key for ecommerce sites. Since customers can’t see or feel the product, they rely on images to get a good understanding of what they’re about to buy.

If your images are unclear or unconvincing, the customer isn’t going to buy. Make sure you have clear, high-quality images, showing the product from a variety of angles and in different use cases and environments.

Add video to product pages

Videos are even more effective than images for showing off your product to potential buyers.

A video gives a more immersive look at the product and a better demonstration of what the customer is about to buy. Many customers prefer to consume content in video form too, so adding a video explaining the features and benefits of your product may help convert a wider range of visitors.

Cut down your copy

Written content is still important, and a lot of ecommerce sites have room for improvement in their copywriting.

Most commonly, this means condensing your copy. Online shoppers don’t want to read walls of text, especially with today’s shortening attention spans.

The more concise you can be with your copy, while still communicating why the reader should buy your product, the better.

Add product FAQs

Potential customers often have a few questions about the product. They can get these questions answered when shopping in-store, but ecommerce sites aren’t always as convenient.

Shoppers often have to take a leap of faith and make a purchase with these questions unanswered, or search around online for answers (which gives the opportunity for other sites to jump in and steal the sale).

Do your best to answer any common questions on the product page, and give the customer everything they need to comfortably make a purchase (like Amazon does in their Q&A section).

Put a live chat on your website

If you want to take your conversion rate optimization efforts a step further, provide a live chat bubble for customers to interact with a member of your team and get any questions answered in real time.

The added cost of having someone on hand to answer questions all the time won’t be worth it for some stores, but for higher priced items it may be a smart move.

Test different CTAs

A/B tests are a great way to make small, low-effort changes to your site and assess what difference they make to conversion rate.

One of the easiest areas to test are your call-to-actions (CTAs). Switch up the text on your CTA buttons, the color, position, and more.

You might find the difference is not statistically significant, or you might find a small change makes a big impact on your conversion rate.

Streamline the checkout process

In general, less friction means more conversions. The longer and more complicated it is to check out, the more chance there is of a potential customer dropping off and leaving.

You want to make this process as simple as possible. Many checkout flows require a lot of additional information from the customer, which is valuable to you, but weigh up the choice of collecting this information vs shortening the checkout process.

You might want to allow guest checkout, where people can make a purchase without creating an account, or integrate with mobile payment solutions like Google/Samsung/Apple Pay.

Build an app

Our last tip to help you increase your conversion rate is to create a mobile app for your store.

This is one of the best ways to increase conversion rate for users on mobile devices, which as we established, is around half that of desktop.

A mobile app provides a better, smoother user experience than a mobile website, leading to higher conversion rates. On top of this, without other browser tabs in the picture, there are fewer distractions and less chance for the user’s attention to be diverted to other sites.

The data backs this up, as apps convert on average 3x as much as mobile websites.

In addition, getting your app into the app stores is a big social proof signal. Just being able to display the “Available on the App Store” badges on your site may even boost conversion rate for your desktop website visitors, by showing them that your brand is legitimate and trustworthy enough to have your own app.

Apps provide even more benefits, such as increased retention and higher AOV. But the increased conversion rate alone may be worth the decision to create your own app.

Want to read more about eCommerce mobile apps and why you need one for your business? This Ultimate Guide has everything you’ll ever need to know about eCommerce apps and mobile commerce.

How to Build an App for Your Site

Building your own shopping app is easier and more affordable than you might think. Gone are the days when the only way to do it was to pay developers tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars for a custom mobile app.

With Vendrux, you can launch native apps for a fraction of the cost, in less than a month. Instead of building custom apps from scratch (which is expensive and time-consuming), Vendrux converts your existing website, with all your existing themes, plugins, apps and custom features, into mobile apps.

This lets you get into the app stores and onto your user’s home screen, contact users with push notifications and give customers a better mobile UX.

Your apps and website are fully synced, meaning you still just have one platform to manage moving forward.

Rainbow Apparel is just one of many examples of eCommerce websites who launched an app with Vendrux. VP of Marketing David Cost had this to say:

“The expense isn’t that big, and operationally, there’s not that much we have to do for the app. It’s a no-brainer, especially when you add push notifications on top.”

They also found that their conversion rate increased after launching their Vendrux app – proof that this can be a great way to increase conversion rate for your store too.

Not sure whether an app is right for you? Get a free preview of your app and book a free demo to get a first-hand look at Vendrux’s capabilities with one of our app experts.

Wrapping Up

Increasing your conversion rate is one of the key steps to building a more profitable and successful online store. The average conversion rates across all eCommerce businesses shows there’s a lot of room for growth here.

Understand the eCommerce conversion rate benchmarks for your industry and calculate how your website’s conversion rate compares. Just be sure to take into account the other factors we mentioned, like price point, traffic source and retention rate.

Even if your conversion rates are above average, it’s still worth putting effort into improving it. Use the tips from this post as a guide – a faster site, with better images and a more streamlined checkout flow is a good start.

If you want to go a step further, build an app. This is the best way to boost conversion rates on mobile, and also increases retention, unlocks the power of push notifications and positions your brand as an authority in your field.

Ecommerce customer acquisition costs have been rising steadily for years, and 2025-2026 data confirms the trend isn’t slowing down. 

Between iOS privacy changes, ad auction inflation from mega-retailers like Temu, and Google Ads CPCs climbing 12.88% year-over-year, every dollar spent acquiring a customer buys less than it did a year ago.

This article breaks down what ecommerce brands are actually paying to acquire customers in 2026, across industries, channels, and business models, and what the data says about where those numbers are headed.

Like this kind of thinking? You’ll like the Retention Edge. Every week, we break down what separates DTC brands that grow from the ones that just spend more. Free, practical, no BS. Check it out →

What Is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)?

Customer acquisition cost measures the average amount your business spends to convert someone into a paying customer. It includes everything that goes into getting that sale: ad spend, marketing team salaries, agency fees, creative production, software tools, and sales costs.

The formula:

Total sales & marketing spend / Number of new customers acquired = CAC

For example, if you spend $15,000 on marketing in a month and acquire 200 new customers, your CAC is $75.

CAC on its own doesn’t tell you much. A $75 CAC is excellent if your average customer spends $400 over their lifetime. It’s terrible if they buy once for $50 and never come back. The benchmarks below give you a starting point, but the real question is always how your CAC relates to what each customer is worth.

Average Ecommerce CAC: The Overall Benchmark

No one has complete data on average ecom acquisition costs – that’s why we gathered data from a range of sources.

Most sources converge on a similar range for ecommerce retail:

The practical takeaway: if your ecommerce CAC falls between $50 and $90, you’re within the normal range for most verticals.

Anything above $130 warrants a closer look at your channel mix and conversion funnel, unless you’re selling high-ticket items where the unit economics still work.

CAC by Industry

Vertical matters more than most brands realize. A beauty brand and an electronics retailer operate in completely different cost environments, even if they’re running ads on the same platforms.

Sources: First Page Sage (2025, 80+ clients), Upcounting (2025). Where both sources report data for the same vertical, ranges reflect both.

A few things stand out. 

• Food and beverage brands consistently have the lowest CAC across sources, likely because the purchase decision is low-risk and repeat purchases happen naturally. 
• Luxury goods have the highest CAC but also the highest LTV:CAC ratio (5.2:1), which means the unit economics still work despite spending $175 or more per customer. 
• Fashion and electronics sit in a tighter spot, with above-average acquisition costs and below-average LTV ratios.

Learn more about LTV:CAC ratio and why it’s one of the most important metrics you can track.

CAC by Marketing Channel

Where you spend your budget changes your CAC dramatically. The gap between the cheapest and most expensive channels can be 10x or more.

Sources: First Page Sage (2025), Phoenix Strategy Group (2025)

To put these numbers in some context:: The SEO and email figures look high because they include all the upfront investment (content production, list building, tooling) divided across customers acquired. 

Over time, both channels compound: the content you create and the list you build keep generating customers at near-zero marginal cost. 

Paid search and paid social, by contrast, stop producing the moment you stop spending.

Referral programs consistently deliver the lowest CAC. Referred customers also have 16% higher lifetime value and are 4x more likely to refer others, creating a compounding effect.

Influencer and Affiliate Marketing

Influencer-generated content delivers roughly 30% lower cost per acquisition than brand-produced content, according to Impact.com’s 2026 data. 

Micro-influencers cost 60-70% less than macro-influencers while producing higher engagement rates, making them particularly interesting for brands watching their CAC closely.

US affiliate marketing spending crossed $10 billion for the first time in 2024, reflecting how seriously brands are investing in performance-based acquisition channels.

CAC by Business Model

How you sell matters as much as what you sell.

DTC brands face a particularly challenging environment right now. 69% are increasing their marketing spend in 2025, but 88% of subscription-based brands report higher acquisition costs compared to last year. 

The DTC share of total retail ecommerce has plateaued around 19%, suggesting the easy growth phase is over.

The marketplace advantage is real but comes with tradeoffs. 

Amazon sellers benefit from built-in traffic that cuts CAC roughly in half, but they give up margin, customer data, and brand control. 

Wholesale is the cheapest acquisition channel of all, but the same limitations apply. 

For brands that want to own their customer relationships and build long-term value, DTC remains the right model. It just requires a sharper approach to both acquisition and retention.

CAC by Company Size

Geography also plays a role. Southeast Asian markets see CAC 40-60% lower than the US, while Australia runs 20-35% higher. 

Even within the US, West Coast brands tend to pay 15-25% more than the national average, likely reflecting higher competition density in those markets.

How Ecommerce CAC Has Changed Over Time

This is where the data gets uncomfortable. CAC isn’t just high, it’s been climbing faster than most brands’ margins can absorb.

That SimplicityDX stat is worth sitting with. Ecommerce brands now lose an average of $29 on every new customer they acquire, after accounting for marketing costs and returns. 

The only way to make up that loss is through repeat purchases, where profits average $39 per transaction.

In other words: the first sale is a loss leader. If your customers don’t come back, you’re paying to lose money.

Ad Platform Cost Trends

The major ad platforms tell a consistent story of rising costs.

Meta (Facebook/Instagram)

Meta’s Q1 CPM hit an all-time high of $10.88 in 2025, up 19.2% year-over-year, based on benchmarking data from Varos (6,000+ companies, $4B in annual ad spend). 

During Q4 2025, CPMs averaged $22.98, with November peaking at $25.22 during Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

The lead generation picture is similarly inflated. The average cost per lead on Meta rose to $27.66 in 2025, up 20.94% from $22.87 the year before, while conversion rates dropped from 8.67% to 7.72%.

Google Ads

87% of industries saw CPC increases in 2025, with an overall average CPC of $5.26, up 12.88% year-over-year. 

Shopping ads specifically jumped 33.72% to $3.49, and beauty/personal care saw the steepest climb at +60.11%.

TikTok

TikTok remains the most affordable major ad platform with an average CPM of $4.26, roughly 49-53% cheaper than Meta during peak holiday periods. 

CPCs range from $0.20 to $2.00, with optimized in-feed and Spark ads landing around $0.40-$0.70. 

The trade-off is typically lower purchase intent: TikTok’s ecommerce conversion rates range 0.5-5%.

What’s Driving CAC Up?

Four structural forces are pushing acquisition costs higher. These aren’t temporary blips; they’re shifts in the landscape.

1. iOS App Tracking Transparency

Apple’s ATT update in April 2021 was the single biggest shock to ecommerce advertising economics. 96% of US iPhone users opted out of tracking in the first month. The effects cascaded quickly:

The global ATT opt-in rate has settled at around 13.85% as of Q2 2024. This isn’t getting better. 

Brands that relied heavily on Meta’s pixel-based targeting in the pre-ATT era have had to fundamentally rethink their acquisition strategies.

2. Temu and Shein Flooding Ad Auctions

Between them, Temu and Shein spent an estimated $2.7 billion on digital advertising in 2023 alone, with Temu reportedly funneling $1.2 billion into Meta. 

As Etsy’s CEO put it, these companies were “almost single-handedly impacting ad costs” across the industry.

3. Google Ads Inflation

Google’s ad costs have been rising steadily, with CPCs up 12.88% year-over-year in 2025 and 87% of industries seeing increases. 

Shopping ads, the bread and butter for many ecommerce brands, saw a 33.72% CPC jump to $3.49. 

Meanwhile, overall ROAS declined 10.03% in 2025, meaning you’re paying more and getting less back.

4. The Privacy Landscape

Google ultimately reversed its plan to phase out third-party cookies in April 2025, keeping them enabled by default. 

But the damage was already done in terms of market direction: roughly 90% of marketers have shifted toward first-party and zero-party data strategies. 

Even under Google’s alternative Privacy Sandbox, early testing showed ~30% lower publisher revenue per impression compared to traditional cookie-based targeting.

The overall direction is clear: targeting will continue getting less precise and more expensive, regardless of what happens with cookies specifically.

What Makes a “Good” CAC?

Raw CAC numbers are meaningless without context. The metrics that matter are how your CAC relates to what each customer is worth, and how quickly you earn that investment back.

The LTV:CAC Ratio

The universally cited benchmark is 3:1, meaning you earn $3 in customer lifetime value for every $1 you spend on acquisition. Here’s how to think about different ratios:

That last point surprises people. A 10:1 ratio sounds great, but it often means you’re not investing enough in growth and a competitor who’s willing to spend more aggressively will eventually take your market share.

LTV:CAC by Vertical

Not every industry can hit the same ratios. Here’s how current benchmarks break down:

Source: Upcounting (2025)

Luxury and food brands have the best ratios for different reasons: luxury because of high order values, and food because of high purchase frequency. 

Electronics brands sit at just 2.1:1, which means they need either higher-margin products, better retention programs, or both to build a sustainable business.

CAC Payback Period

How quickly you recover your acquisition cost matters as much as the ratio. Current benchmarks from Qubit Capital:

• Typical ecommerce payback: 3-6 months
• Elite operators: 5-7 months (at scale with healthy margins)
• Maximum healthy target: 12 months

If it takes longer than 12 months to earn back what you spent acquiring a customer, your cash flow will struggle to support growth, even if the lifetime unit economics eventually work.

How to Reduce Your CAC

There are a number of ways to get your CAC down.

• Improve your conversion rate. If you’re spending $10,000/month on ads and converting at 2%, moving to 3% cuts your effective CAC by a third, without spending an extra dollar. Audit your product pages, checkout flow, and mobile experience.
• Shift budget toward lower-CAC channels. Referral programs ($40-$65 CAC) and email marketing to existing audiences are dramatically cheaper than paid social or search.
• Narrow your targeting. Broad audiences feel like they cast a wider net, but they also mean your ads reach people who are unlikely to buy. Tighter targeting around your highest-value customer segments typically reduces waste and lowers CAC.
• Invest in SEO and content. Organic search has a high upfront cost but compounds over time. The content you publish today will still generate traffic and customers a year from now at near-zero marginal cost.

But focusing all your efforts on lowering acquisition costs is not always the best way.

Get More Value from Each Customer

There’s only so much you can do to reduce CAC.

The real boost for your acquisition economics: increasing the value of each customer.

This is where the math gets interesting. If your average customer buys once and never comes back, even a low CAC might not save you. But if you can turn one-time buyers into repeat customers, the economics shift in your favor quickly.

Consider: it’s 5-25x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. A 5% improvement in retention can drive 25-95% more profit. 

The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, compared to just 5-20% for a new prospect.

This is why the smartest ecommerce brands are shifting their focus from acquisition to retention. Not abandoning acquisition, just recognizing that the fastest path to profitability runs through the customers they’ve already paid to acquire.

Why a Mobile App Changes the CAC Equation

When acquisition costs keep rising and you can’t meaningfully control the forces driving them up (privacy changes, ad inflation, competition), the highest-leverage move is getting more lifetime value from each customer. A mobile app is one of the most effective ways to do that.

Here’s why.

Push notifications are a free, owned marketing channel

Every time you want to reach a customer through paid ads or even email, there’s a cost. Push notifications go directly to their phone’s lock screen at essentially zero marginal cost. They’re also harder to ignore than an email sitting in a promotions tab, which translates to higher engagement and more repeat purchases.

Apps drive higher order values and purchase frequency

Mobile app users consistently spend more per order and buy more often than mobile web visitors. That’s partly because of the frictionless experience (saved payment, one-tap checkout) and partly because of the ongoing relationship a home screen icon creates. When your brand is on someone’s phone, you’re part of their daily environment.

Retention compounds against rising CAC

If your CAC is $75 and a customer buys once for $90, you’ve barely covered your acquisition cost. But if that same customer buys four times over the next year because they have your app on their phone and you’re reaching them with relevant push notifications, that $75 CAC now returns $360 in revenue. You didn’t lower your CAC; you made it matter less.

Launching Your Mobile App

Vendrux is the most effective way for an ecommerce brand to launch a mobile app.

You’re not rebuilding anything, you’re not managing a new system, you’re not making a $100K gamble on a new channel.

You’re simply converting your existing website – the website that works, that you’ve spent countless hours and dollars perfecting – into a mobile app.

All your integrations work, all your features work, everything works as it does on the site, with the addition of native features that make your app feel like a real, professional, native mobile app.

If you want to see what your store looks like as a native mobile app, book a free strategy call. We’ll show you what’s possible, share some examples of other brands we’ve helped to launch their own mobile app, and help you understand if this is the right way forward for you.

Of all the metrics to track for your ecommerce website, bounce rate is one that can make the biggest impact.

Getting website visitors to stick around on your site longer is usually going to translate to more revenue and profit. If profit and revenue is important for your ecommerce business, stick around to learn more.

What is Bounce Rate, and How Is It Calculated?

Bounce rate is the percentage of one page visits, i.e. site visitors who leave without viewing any more pages than the one they originally land on.

As long as you know the number of pages each visitor views per session, calculating bounce rate is pretty straightforward. Just divide the number of sessions with just one page view by the total number of sessions.

For example, if you have 100 user sessions on your site, and 40 result in just a single page view, your bounce rate is 40%.

What is the Average Bounce Rate for Ecommerce Sites?

The average bounce rate for ecommerce websites is 45.68%, according to bounce rate data from CXL.

Other sources may return different results, and there will be different benchmarks depending on niche and a number of different factors. But on the whole, the average for ecommerce websites generally falls between 20 and 45%.

With that knowledge, we can conclude that a “good” bounce rate for ecommerce is anything below 45%, though again, there are more factors you need to take into account before throwing a celebration or hitting the panic button.

Average Bounce Rate by Industry

Let’s take a look at a few more granular bounce rate benchmarks.

First, we’ll take a step back and see the average bounce rate by industry.

You’ll see “Shopping” comes in near the bottom of the list, with the average of 45.68% we mentioned earlier.

That means online shopping websites traditionally have lower bounce rates than all other types of websites, aside from real estate sites. This makes sense, as both ecommerce and real estate sites are designed to get people to browse multiple pages (product pages/collections on ecommerce sites, and listings on real estate sites).

Average Ecommerce Bounce Rate by Traffic Source

Traffic source is one of the most important things to take into account when assessing your website’s bounce rate. Where someone came to your site from has a big difference in their interest level and the likelihood of them browsing multiple pages in their session.

The sources with the lowest average bounce rate for ecommerce sites are email and referral. Visitors from these sources are traditionally warmer, with higher intent to buy.

The traffic channels with the highest average bounce rate are social and display. The opposite is true for these sources. Generally, these visitors are less familiar with your site, not necessarily in the mood to browse or buy, and more likely to leave quickly.

Average Ecommerce Bounce Rate by Device

Finally let’s look at how the user’s device (mobile devices vs desktop vs tablet) affects bounce rate.

Mobile users bounce most often, and desktop visitors the least (tablet in the middle, closer to the average number of desktop).

Is a High Bounce Rate Bad?

Let’s say you have a 50% bounce rate, or even higher. Is this cause for concern?

Generally speaking, yes, you don’t want to have a high bounce rate. But you should also consider the context.

For one, think about where the majority of your traffic comes from. As we showed, there’s a big difference between the expected bounce rate for email traffic vs social, for example.

If the majority of your traffic comes from display ads and social media, a 50% bounce rate might actually be pretty good.

There are also some situations where a bounce (i.e. the visitor leaving after viewing just one page) is not necessarily bad. If you get the visitor to subscribe to email updates or push notifications, for example, this is a big win, and allows you to build more touch points and grow the relationship with this visitor.

On the flip side, a low bounce rate is good, but doesn’t bring in revenue on its own. You need to combine a low bounce rate with an average or above average conversion rate. Don’t optimize solely for bounce rate without thinking about the ultimate goal (conversions).

Why Do Visitors Bounce?

Let’s look at some of the most common reasons website visitors bounce, so you can start to understand the problem in more depth and thus understand how to fix it and improve bounce rate in your online store.

Slow load speed

One of the most common thing contributing to bounce rates is how fast the site loads.

No one wants to wait around for a slow website. According to Google, an increase in page load time increases the probability of a bounce from 32% to 123%.

15 years ago a user might have been ok waiting 3 seconds for a page to load, but today they’re going to bounce and go straight for another option.

Poor UI

First impressions are important. If a user lands on your website and it looks bad, most will be out of there ASAP. You need to capitalize on your first impression and get the visitor excited to view more of your site.

Ensure your website looks clean and inviting on first glance, and meets the standards of what online shoppers expect today.

Poor, confusing or unclear UX

It’s also important to guide website visitors towards the actions you want them to take, such as adding a product to their cart or shopping around for more products on your site.

If visitors are unclear or confused about where to go next, they’re not going to stick around for a while to figure it out. They’re going to bounce and find a site with better UX.

Lack of trust

For ecommerce in particular, trust is a big deal. When you’re looking to buy something, you need to have a good feeling that the site you’re on is legitimate and isn’t going to scam you.

Your site needs to convey a feeling of trust and safety to the visit right away. At this stage, it’s not so much about positive trust signals (like reviews and testimonials), but avoiding negative trust signals like spammy popups and intrusive banner ads.

Irrelevant content

If a user lands on your site and feels like it’s irrelevant to them, they’ll probably close the tab or hit the back button. Think someone who’s looking for men’s shoes, and when the site opens all the products showing are womens’ dresses.

With an ecommerce website you may have a brief opportunity to direct people to find the content or products relevant to their desires, but don’t expect them to dig around to find it.

Distractions

Another very common reason people bounce today is not so much a conscious decision to leave your site, but from the user’s attention being pulled away somewhere else.

Most people have multiple tabs open when they’re browsing the web. One study of Firefox users found that one half of users averaged 2.38 tabs open at one time, and one quarter had an average of 3.59 tabs open.

On top of this, one quarter of users in the study had more than 11 tabs open at one time during the week in which data was collected.

All these tabs are other websites competing for your potential customers’ attention. If you’re not able to capture the user’s attention and hold on, you’re going to lose them.

Bad traffic or misleading directions

The quality of your traffic is a common factor that affects bounce rate. If you’re sending a lot of cheap, spammy traffic to your site, you can expect low bounce rates as a result. An example would be a paid traffic campaign with an incredibly broad audience that includes a lot of people who aren’t your target customer.

The same thing goes if you try to cut corners or mislead people in getting them to click to your site, such as promising one thing in an email, social media post or display ad, and serving a page that gives them something else.

The visitor got what they wanted

Some of the time there’s not necessarily something wrong, it’s just that the user got what they wanted and had no need to view another page.

Think of someone who Googled a specific question (“can my dog eat pineapple?”). They click on a result, get their answer, and bounce.

This one is more common for content sites than ecommerce sites. Still, it can lead to high bounce rates if your site is targeting a lot of informational queries rather than just transactional keywords. This is not necessarily bad (you may be pixeling these visitors and retargeting them with ads, or getting them to opt in to email or push notifications), but if informational keywords are part of your strategy, make sure to separate site-wide bounce rate from page-level bounce rate when assessing how well you’re doing.

How to Improve Bounce Rate for Ecommerce Stores

Now onto the important part: how ecommerce stores can improve (i.e. decrease) bounce rates.

Once you understand the reasons people bounce (as outlined above), it’s pretty easy to reverse-engineer and figure out ways to solve these issues and decrease bounce rate. That’s what we’ll give you below.

Make sure your site is fast and responsive

The first thing to do is ensure your site meets modern standards for speed and responsiveness.

Check your pages using tools like GTmetrix and Google’s Core Web Vitals report, and fix any issues. Additionally, ensure your site loads fast and works fine on mobile, including a variety of different devices and screen sizes.

If you need to, hire a web developer to come in and fix any technical problems with your site. With modern users’ demand for fast-loading sites, along with the impact of load speed for ranking in search engines, it’s simply not acceptable to have a slow website today. 

Build a clear, focused UI

Put some effort into building a clean, inviting and professional first impression. Standards for how websites look have gone up. If your site looks like it’s stuck in the 1990s, don’t be surprised if you have a high bounce rate.

Avoid distractions, confusing UI elements, and center everything on the areas of the page you want your users to focus on.

Use clear and obvious CTAs

We could go in-depth into building the perfect UX, but the 80/20 of it is to optimize your call to actions.

Generally speaking, every page should have a CTA. It might be to opt in to an email list, add a product to a cart or sign up for a demo call – whatever the next step is you want users to take.

Make these CTAs clear and obvious (users should know exactly what’s going to happen when they click the button), and ensure they stand out, so there’s no confusion that may lead to users bouncing.

Build in personalization

Personalization is key for modern ecommerce sites. Give users a personalized experience and serve content that’s tailored to them.

With email, segment your users and send them to pages geared towards their interests. If you’re running display ads or social media ads, create a personalized landing page for each ad and/or each audience, and ensure when someone lands on your site they feel like the site is speaking directly to them.

Drive high-quality traffic

Don’t get caught in the trap of blindly chasing traffic, without considering the quality of the traffic you send.

It’s easy to trick someone into coming to your site via an ad, or to rank on Google for low-competition keywords that aren’t relevant to your brand, but these visitors do nothing but make you feel good when your traffic numbers look good in Google Analytics.

By focusing only on high-quality traffic, your overall numbers may be lower, but the metrics that actually make a difference will be higher.

Convert your site into an app

Finally, you can fight the issue of a high bounce rate by removing distractions and getting your store’s visitors into a contained, stickier experience. You can do that by launching an app for your ecommerce store.

When someone shops in your app, you get a greater share of their attention. You don’t need to contend with other browser tabs open, so people are more likely to view multiple pages and go deeper along the buying journey.

It also provides a better, faster mobile user experience than what you get in a browser (the lower quality mobile UX is a big reason why ecommerce bounce rates are higher on mobile than desktop).

Being able to show you have an app, and that you’re published in the app stores, is also a great trust signal and can help convince website visitors to stick around on your site longer.

Learn more: Check out all the features of Vendrux’s Ecommerce App Builder

Convert Any Ecommerce Site to Mobile Apps with Vendrux

Building your own, branded shopping app used to take a huge investment in time and money, but not anymore. With Vendrux, you can go live with an app in less than a month, for a cost that’s negligible for any ecommerce store making steady revenue.

Vendrux converts your site as is, including any custom features, apps, theme alterations built into your site. It works with sites built on any platform, from Shopify to WooCommerce, Magento, Squarespace, etc.

You’ll still manage everything from the backend of your website, and any changes you make to the site will be synced with your mobile apps.

To get an idea of what your app will look like, get on a demo call, and we’ll show you a free, interactive preview of your app.

The process is simple and requires zero coding experience, yet doesn’t fit you into limiting templates like so many other app builders. Best of all, you get the support of our team for everything from app store submission to routine updates and maintenance.

Get started and book a free, personalized demo with one of our ecommerce mobile app experts today to learn more about how Vendrux can solve your bounce rate problem.

There are a few important metrics to track and optimize for in your eCommerce business, one of which is your add-to-cart rate.

Improving this is a clear way to boost your store’s revenue and profitability. But first, you’ll want to know what the average add-to-cart rate is for eCommerce stores, so you know how much room you have to grow.

Stick with us and we’ll share all you need to know, including what is a good add-to-cart rate, and how to maximize it for your business.

What is Add-to-Cart Rate?

Add-to-cart rate means the percentage of website visitors who added a product to their cart after browsing your eCommerce website.

Add-to-cart rate is calculated by taking a ratio of the total number of website sessions by the total number that resulted in a product being added to a cart.

It doesn’t take into account purchases or abandoned carts – only the shopper clicking the “add-to-cart” button.

Why Does Add-to-Cart Rate Matter?

This is one of the most important metrics to track in your business because it represents a clear statement of interest and intent from the shopper. Many of your visitors will view a few pages and bounce without doing anything. Adding a product to their cart instantly signifies they are further along in the buyer’s journey.

Adding a product to their cart also gives you more data you can use to market to the customer, as you have a clear idea of what kind of products the shopper is interested in. Even if they don’t purchase, you can now send abandoned cart notifications, emails or retargeting ads personalized towards that shopper.

What is a Good Add-to-Cart Rate?

The average add-to-cart rate in eCommerce is 7.52%, according to data from Dynamic Yield.

This means that for every 10,000 sessions, 783 will result in a product being added to a cart, on average.

In comparison, the average eCommerce conversion rate is 1.89%, meaning that less than a third of add-to-carts actually end in purchases.

The data can vary greatly depending on a few factors. So let’s look a little deeper now.

Predictably, high-ticket industries such as Home & Furniture and Luxury & Jewelry have lower average add-to-cart rates, while Food & Beverage and Consumer Goods, which have more repeat purchases and necessity items, are above the overall average.

In terms of regional averages, the Americas score slightly above average, Asia-Pacific slightly below, and add-to-cart rates in Europe, Middle-East & Africa the lowest.

Tablet, interestingly, has above-average add-to-cart rates, though the sample size of people shopping on tablet is considerably smaller.

Between desktop and mobile, desktop has a higher reliability that people will add a product to their cart, similar to how desktop has higher average conversion rates than mobile.

How to Improve Your Add-to-Cart Rate

There’s little reason why you wouldn’t want to improve your add-to-cart rate. Even if your add-to-cart rate is already above average, there’s probably still potential for you to increase it further, which will mean more leads, and likely more purchases and revenue from your existing traffic.

Here are six tips to help you boost your add-to-cart conversion rate.

Use Clear and Obvious Call-to-Action Buttons

Don’t leave anything up to the customer to figure out when it comes to taking actions you want them to take. CTA buttons (e.g. “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart”) should be big, bold and easy to notice. Any confusion here will result in lost sales.

Provide Complete Product Details

A lot of people leave without adding a product to their cart because they didn’t get the information they needed. This could be product specs, pricing, images or video, or more details the shopper feels they need to be comfortable making a purchase.

Display Reviews & Testimonials

Social proof is another key necessity for eCommerce sites. You can say that your product is top of the line, but shoppers are less inclined to believe brands talking up their own product than hearing the experiences of past customers. Use customer testimonials and reviews to provide this, and convince potential customers that your product is going to meet their expectations.

Improve Your Customer Experience

If your store is frustrating to navigate, takes too long to load, or for any other reason has a poor customer experience, people are going to leave without taking meaningful actions. Improve your customer experience and many other things will improve, starting with your add-to-cart rate.

Cut Out Noise

Similar to a poor user experience, excess “noise” on your site and product pages will cause people to bounce without adding anything to their cart.

This includes excess copy on your product pages, distracting popups or confusing visual elements. “Noise” can even come from other browser tabs, and if you can find a way to get people to focus on your store and your store only, you’ll get fewer shoppers pulled away to other websites who leave your store without purchasing.

Optimize Your Site for Mobile

Average add-to-cart rates and conversion rates are both lower on mobile devices, showing the impact of many sites’ suboptimal mobile user experience.

That leaves a clear opportunity for you to increase add-to-cart rate by improving how mobile shoppers navigate your site. And the impact of improving your mobile UX is only going to get bigger, with mobile commerce predicted to increase by 50% over the next two years.

Let Vendrux Help You Boost Add-to-Cart Rate

Vendrux is the best way to improve your mobile user experience and provide a contained environment that leads to higher add-to-cart rates, along with delivering many other benefits, such as increased conversion rate, average order value and retention.

Vendrux converts your eCommerce store into mobile apps for Android and iOS. With a mobile app, you can provide a better mobile UX, by ensuring that mobile shoppers are getting an experience tailored for mobile phones.

This also lets you cut out the noise of other browser tabs, as people only see your store, nothing else, when they’re shopping with you.

The clear benefits you get from launching your own app, coupled with the minimal cost and time investment to do it with Vendrux means there’s little downside and incredible upside.

Just hear what David Cost from Rainbow Apparel had to say about building an app with Vendrux:

“The expense isn’t that big, and operationally, there’s not that much we have to do for the app. You’re essentially offering an app for free, there’s no reason not to try it.”

To see how easy it is to convert your online store into an app, book a demo now.

We’ll show you an interactive preview of your site as an app, and walk you through the process of turning your web store into a mobile app.

Launching an app is the number one way for eCommerce sites to boost key revenue and engagement metrics, take control of their customer’s journey, and build a business that’s fully optimized for mobile commerce.

The Apple and Android app stores get you in front of a huge base of potential app users, and also offer powerful benefits for your brand’s image.

Yet getting past the extensive requirements for app store submissions can be hard. When you build an app with Vendrux, we handle all of this for you, and with the experience of launching over 2,000 customer apps, we know what needs to be done to get your apps accepted.

If you’re doing it yourself, read on to learn what’s to be expected from each of the major app stores’ requirements, and the most common ways that publishers slip up and lose valuable time by having their submissions rejected.

One-Minute Summary:
-The guidelines for Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store are fundamentally very similar (though Apple’s are more strict).
-Follow best practices in regards to content, minimum functionality, design, data security and legality to comply with both app stores’ requirements.
-Before you launch, make sure your app and its information are complete, and that you’ve double checked the app store requirements, to avoid any delays in your listing going live.

Check out the following video for a summary of our top tips to follow when submitting your app to the app stores:

The iOS App Store vs Google Play Store

Though there are other mobile app stores you can consider launching on, the iOS App Store and Google Play Store are the big two. Any e-commerce publisher should be looking to get their app on these two platforms at a minimum.

The core principles of submitting apps to each of these app stores are largely the same. Though there are some differences in the guidelines and regulations for each, much of it involves following a few best practices to ensure your app submission gets accepted.

Apple is generally considered to be more strict than Google in terms of app store requirements, though it’s important you check through both thoroughly to ensure you don’t run into problems.

Pre-Submission Checklist

The app store submission process can take a while even when everything runs smoothly. If you submit your app before it’s ready, or forget to include key information, it’s going to take even longer, and it’s easy for this process to drag out and become a huge time and money sink.

To avoid unnecessary delays, check these items off before you begin the submission process:

• Thoroughly test your app for bugs and usability issues.
• Make sure you have all the necessary information and metadata required by the app stores.
• Provide up to date contact information.
• Ensure everything in your app is complete, live and ready for actual users.
• If your app requires an account or login to use, create a demo account for app reviews to use (that enables them to test all the features of your app).
• Write up explanations for how to use any non-obvious features in your app.
• Double check the app store guidelines and documentation.

Rushing to start the process is likely to cost you more time and money in the long run, so check and double check everything is in order before you submit.

Complying with App Store Requirements

When you go through the submission process for each app store, check the official guidelines in-depth for both Apple and Google. 

You can read through these guidelines here for the iOS App Store and here for the Google Play Store.

There’s a lot of overlap in each store’s requirements. Here we’ll summarize what you should aim for in terms of best practices, to increase the chance of your app being accepted on the first attempt.

Content

Apple and Google both have certain standards for content in apps in their app stores. Apps should not have content that can be deemed objectionable, offensive, risks physical, mental or emotional harm, puts users in danger, or encourages any behavior that may do so.

Content should not facilitate or promote illegal activities, and should not exploit or abuse users.

This also covers user-generated content, with app publishers needing to take steps to prevent users from sharing any content that goes against guidelines as well.

Minimum Functionality

Apps need to meet a minimum level of functionality to be accepted to the app stores. The most notable example of this is an app that is a simple copy of a website, with nothing else added.

Apple and Google (Apple particularly) want to see an “app-like” experience, not a repackaged website. This is particularly important to note if you’re converting an e-commerce store into an app. It’s vital to add some small touches to make your app feel like an app, such as mobile navigation features, a native tab menu and push notifications.

Design & Performance

Apps should also meet a minimum standard for design (UI & UX) and performance. If an app is an incoherent mess, if it has broken or incomplete features, it will likely be rejected.

The same goes if it crashes constantly, if it’s riddled with bugs or if it causes the user’s battery to drain particularly fast.

Data Security & Privacy

Apps’ handling of data is particularly important today, for both app stores. The app needs to be secure in how it handles data, that data is collected and used with permission, and that certain steps are taken to keep user data safe.

Monetization

Both platforms have regulations regarding how in-app payments (e.g. in-app purchases, subscriptions, paid app purchases) work. These payments generally need to happen through the Apple/Google payment systems, and users can’t circumvent this (and thus avoid their payment fees) by taking payments off-platform.

E-commerce apps are excepted from this, however. For both Apple and Google, payments for goods and services used outside the app (e.g. physical product sales) should use an external payment method (e.g. credit cards).

IP, Deception & Impersonation

Apps must not violate any intellectual property (IP) laws. They shouldn’t represent a relationship with a person or brand (unless they have the right to do so), and shouldn’t attempt to impersonate another app, or in any way deceive users.

Malware/Harmful Software

Apps should not contain any malware, viruses, or software that may harm users or their devices. This includes harvesting/transmitting information without a user’s knowledge and software that is abusive, harmful or deceptive.

Common Pitfalls & Things to Avoid

If you want to cut down the time from submitting your review to going live, watch out for a few common issues that cause apps to be rejected and have to be re-submitted.

Incomplete Apps/Information

Don’t submit beta builds, partial builds, or anything else that could cause your app to appear incomplete. Also ensure you’ve got all the necessary information and metadata required for submission.

Broken Links & Placeholder Text

Make sure all links work, and you don’t have any placeholder text (e.g. lorem ipsum) left anywhere in the app. It should work exactly as you intend for real users.

Meeting Minimum Functionality for an App

Don’t submit a direct copy of your website. This is probably the most common reason for apps to be rejected. Apple specifically mentions that apps should have features, content, and UI that elevate it beyond a repackaged website.

Google Play is a bit more lenient in this area, but they still don’t like apps that have very little utility or value.

If you use Vendrux, you can be safe knowing that we’ve found the sweet spot for website-to-app conversions that adds enough to get your app approved while maintaining what makes your website great.

Poor UI & UX

This is likely to be an issue if your website is not optimized for mobile before you start. If your app looks bad or is awkward to use, it’ll likely be rejected. This is especially true if you try to convert a website that’s not responsive and optimized for mobile screens.

Not Giving Reviewers the Ability to Test Your App

Many publishers have lost valuable time having to regather and re-submit their app because they didn’t provide the necessary information, permissions and resources to allow full testing of their app. This includes giving an explanation of non-obvious features and how to test them, and creating a demo account for testers to review account-specific features.

Mentioning Other Platforms

Finally, don’t mention any competing platforms in your app store listing. This is mostly an issue when submitting to the iOS app store, and often results in app submissions being rejected because the publisher mentioned Android or Google in their listing.

How to Submit Your App

For the iOS app store, you’ll submit everything through your App Store Connect account, including all the information, metadata and listing details. When you’re ready to submit your app, hit “Add for Review”. Make sure this is the full, complete, release-ready version of your app.

For the Google Play Store, submit your app through the Play Console. Go to the “All apps” tab and hit “Create Application”. From here you’ll give your app a title, provide information about your app’s content, category, tags and other details (including your listing copy, title, description etc). Finally you’ll upload the files of your app (app bundles or APK).

In the Google Play Store you can upload a beta version of your app for closed or open testing, or go straight to submitting the final version for review.

Final Thoughts

Unless you’re building an app that’s specifically for private use, you’re going to want to get in the app stores. There’s minimal downside – very little expense, no risk – yet big benefits for your brand and huge upside as a user acquisition channel.

The only downside is the time and effort you put into getting your app past the app store review. And though a lot of what’s required lines up with simple best practices for launching an app, the app store submission process can certainly be frustrating and difficult for first-time publishers.

This is one of the most valuable parts about launching your app with Vendrux. We’ve done this countless times, and know the process inside and out. As part of our service, we submit your apps to the App Store and Google Play for you. Our knowledge of the process means you can get approved much faster, and start enjoying the benefits of launching your own shopping app to the public.

Want to learn more about Vendrux? Get started with a free preview of your app, or schedule a free, personalized demo and get a first-hand look at the platform’s possibilities with one of our app experts.

In the next article we’ll dive deeper into how to optimize your app store listing for visibility and downloads, as well as a few other ways you can start getting users after launch.