I've read that for web products, maximum conversion rates are around 1%. Is this true? If I have a 1% conversion rate, and I'm having trouble getting more, should I stop worrying about it?
You should stop worrying about it when you've exhausted all the avenues that you can possibly think of in improving it.<p>As for the 1%, Patrick already states it's a bogus statistic based on a small sample, here are some more reasons:<p>- conversion rates tend to cluster by industry<p>- the majority of public e-commerce figures pertain to the adult industry, which has notoriously low conversion rates<p>- conversion rate is a function of how well you manage to pre-select your customers through the use of text found on sites linking to you and how much your visitors are in a 'buying mood' when they finally reach your site. If you get a lot of flak traffic that automatically reduces your conversion rate, but I wouldn't worry about it, the number to maximize is the number of people you sell to in an absolute sense. So better to sell to 1% of 1,000,000 people than 100% of 50.<p>- A friend of mine has a relatively small site but sells to - and this is not a joke - a full 75% of his visitors. Plenty of them become repeat buyers, and his whole online store fits in a shoebox. There are always outliers to statistics such as these.
<i>I've read that for web products, maximum conversion rates are around 1%.</i><p>This statistic needs slaying. It. Is. False. <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=930571" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=930571</a>
Amazon gets nearly 10% in some areas, I worked with startups where we got the Conversion rates from 1% to 5% this was mostly adwords and landing page optimizitaion.<p>At the end conversion rates define your cost per user and how much you have to make with each user. So don't stop worrying.