How to Improve Sales Conversion Rate: 11 Ways That Work

Most businesses turn two to five out of every hundred interested people into buyers. That is the short answer, and for a lot of shops it is all you need.

The longer answer is that the number on its own says almost nothing. What you sell, what it costs, and where the person came from all move it more than anything you change on the site.

Here is what normal looks like, and what to do if you are below it.

Short answer: two to five percent is normal. Under one percent and you are probably reaching the wrong people rather than selling to them badly. Over ten and you are most likely counting only the warm ones.

Why every article gives you a different number

Search for this and the first page of results will tell you 2%, 5%, and 11%. All three are true. They are just counting different things.

What gets counted	Usual range	Who counts it this way
Every visitor to a sale	1% to 3%	Ecommerce and retail data
Every lead to a customer	2% to 5%	Most sales teams
Warm lead to customer	13% to 25%	B2B and field sales
Sales call to signed deal	8% to 27%	Bigger deals with a person involved

Work out which row you are in before you compare yourself to anyone. A team counting only warm leads will always look better than one counting every message that comes in, and neither is cheating.

Most people reading this are in the second row.

What counts as a good sales conversion rate

For lead to customer, which is what most people mean, anything from two to five percent is fine. Five to ten is good.

Above ten and you have either a very tight list or something cheap that people buy without thinking.

Below one percent is worth a proper look. Nine times out of ten it is the leads rather than how you are selling.

Where you land	What it usually means
Under 1%	The people arriving are not the people who buy
1% to 2%	Right people, but something puts them off partway
2% to 5%	Normal. Work on order size instead
5% to 10%	Good. Go and find more people like these
Over 10%	Check what you are counting before you celebrate

Sales conversion rate by industry

What you sell moves this more than anything. The cheaper and simpler the thing, the more people buy it.

• Food and drink: 4% to 6%. Cheap, familiar, bought on impulse and bought again.
• Professional services: 3% to 7%. Not many people ask, but the ones who do mean it.
• Health and beauty: 3% to 4%. Repeat buyers who already know what they want.
• B2B software: 2% to 5%. Slow decisions, though a free signup lands sooner than a payment.
• Clothing: 2% to 3%. Sizing doubt and easy returns pull it down.
• Home and furniture: 1% to 2%. Expensive, and people measure the room first.
• Luxury and jewelry: under 1%. Months of thinking before anyone buys.

A jewelry shop at 1% may be doing better than a snack box at 3%. Compare yourself to shops like yours or you learn nothing.

Four things that move the number more than your website

Split your own numbers these four ways first. Usually one slice is dragging everything down and the rest is fine.

Split by	What you usually find
Where they came from	Email and referrals do several times better than paid social
Phone or desktop	Phones bring most of the traffic and buy the least
Price	Cheap things sell fast. Expensive things take thinking about
New or returning	Someone who bought before is several times likelier to buy again

A shop sitting at 1.2% often has three good sources and one bad one dragging the average down.

11 ways to increase your sales conversion rate

Roughly in the order most shops need them. Pick the ones that match your problem rather than doing all eleven at once.

1. Spend where the buyers come from

Under one percent, it is nearly always who you are reaching. You can rewrite the page a hundred times and it will not help people who were never going to buy.

Pull your last three months of orders and work backwards to where each buyer came from. The answer is usually lopsided, and rarely where the budget sits.

The trap is judging a source on visits. One sending 200 people and 12 buyers beats one sending 2,000 and 5, but the second looks better on every dashboard.

Judge on buyers, on what each one costs you, and on whether they come back.

Our guide to working out who your buyers are walks through it.

2. Send ads to the page that answers them

Someone who clicked an ad for one thing and lands on your homepage has to go looking for it. Most will not bother.

Three versions of the same mistake, in the order they cost you money:

• Ads pointing at the homepage. The most common and the easiest to fix.
• Offers that do not carry through. If the ad said forty percent off, the page has to say it too.
• Out of stock and still advertised. Pause the ad, or send it somewhere that has stock.

These product description examples show what that page should say.

3. Show that other people are buying

Someone who has never heard of you cannot tell a busy shop from a dead one. Live orders and signups settle that without you saying a word about yourself.

It works because it is not a claim. You are not saying you are popular, you are showing what just happened.

Around 92% of people trust a recommendation from someone else over any advert you run. That is the whole idea in one line.

Our social proof statistics have more of the same.

Recent orders do the most, then live viewer counts, then weekly totals when single orders are too thin on the ground.

WiserNotify picks those up from your store and shows them as small popups or on the page itself. Our social proof examples show what they look like.

4. Put reviews next to the price

Reviews hidden behind a tab do nothing. Around 95% of shoppers read them before buying, and just five on a page can lift the chance of a sale by as much as 270%.

A star rating by the price, with two or three real ones under it, does most of that work.

Which ones you show counts as much as having them. Twenty five-star one-liners read as bought. Two or three long, specific ones read as real, and the occasional three-star does more good than harm.

Names and dates help. So do photos from customers, which answer questions your own product shots never will.

Our user-generated content examples show what to ask for, and what customer photos do to sales is worth a look. The wider review numbers are here.

Most people expect to be asked, so there is no need to feel awkward about it. Our guide on how to ask has wording that gets replies.

If your pages have none yet, WiserReview asks after every order and puts what comes back on the page, with the buyer verified against it.

5. Look like a real business

Most of what stops a stranger buying is not the product. It is a quiet worry that nobody will answer if something goes wrong.

None of the fixes cost anything:

• A refund policy people can find. Buried return terms read as something you are hiding.
• A phone number or an address. Proof there is somebody behind the site.
• Payment logos at checkout. Visa, Mastercard and PayPal marks do a lot of quiet work.
• A real about page. Names and faces beat a paragraph about passion for quality. A few testimonials do more than either, and the data on them puts the lift at about a third.
• Delivery dates you can keep. One late order costs you the second one.

Our guide to building trust in an online store covers where each piece belongs.

6. Let people check out as guests

Making someone sign up before they can pay loses more sales than any other single thing on a checkout. Nobody wants an account. They want the thing.

Offer to save their details once the order is through and a good number will say yes anyway.

Three smaller thieves worth catching while you are in there: opt-ins and surveys sitting before payment, a cart that empties itself overnight, and an empty discount box that sends people off hunting for a code.

Our guide to express checkout has the specifics.

7. Show the full cost early

A total that jumps at the last step kills the sale. People do not mind paying for delivery. They mind finding out about it after they have typed in their address.

Four things belong on the product page, not the last screen:

• What delivery costs. Or what you have to spend to get it free.
• When it turns up. A date beats “three to five working days”.
• Whether tax is included. Especially if you sell abroad.
• What returns cost. Free returns sell things. Hidden return fees lose repeat customers.

See our checkout page design guide for how the good ones do it.

8. Ask for less on the form

Every extra box costs you some of the people filling it in. Go through your own checkout on a phone and count the taps. Most shops are surprised.

Company name, a second phone number, how you heard about us. None of it is needed to ship an order, so delete it.

Then fix the two that annoy people most: a postcode lookup turns six address boxes into one, and errors should show where they happen rather than all at once when someone hits submit.

Same with paying. Someone who cannot pay the way they usually do walks away rather than switching, which is why payment options are worth more than they look.

9. Catch them on the way out

An exit popup fires when someone goes to shut the tab. They were leaving anyway, so there is nothing to lose.

The offer has to be worth the interruption, though. Money off a first order still works best, and free delivery often beats a discount of the same value.

A size guide does more than either when people leave from the product page rather than the cart. “Join our newsletter” does nothing at all.

One popup, timed properly, beats three fighting each other. These exit popup examples show what the good ones say.

10. Follow up on what they left behind

Cart emails bring back the ones who got closest. They picked the thing themselves, which makes them the warmest people you have.

Three is enough, and the timing does more work than the wording:

1. Within the hour. No discount. Half of them just got distracted.
2. Next day. Show the item again, and add a review of it.
3. Day three. Now bring the discount, and only now.

Lead with a discount in the first email and you teach people to fill a cart and wait.

Retargeting picks up the ones who never left an email. It works because these people already know you, and the figures show lifts of 30% to 150% over advertising to strangers.

Our guides on winning back left carts and running retargeting ads cover both routes.

11. Raise what each buyer spends

Once you are in the normal range, pushing the percentage higher gets hard. Getting more out of each order is usually easier, and the person already has their card out.

Free delivery over a set amount is the cheapest one going. Put the minimum just above what people usually spend and watch them add something to reach it.

After that, show the better version side by side rather than buried in a dropdown, and put the obvious extras at the cart. Batteries, the case, the refill.

Our upselling guide covers placement.

A real deadline helps too. See limited-time offers, creating urgency, and these countdown timer examples.

Mistakes people make with this number

Mistake	What goes wrong
Comparing yourself to the global average	Your kind of shop can be five times higher or lower
Chasing the rate instead of the money	A lower rate on bigger orders can pay far better
Looking at one number for everything	One bad source hides three good ones
Changing five things at once	Something improves and you cannot tell what
Judging a week of data	Too small a sample to tell you anything
Buying more leads first	You pay twice for people you still cannot sell to

How to tell whether a change worked

Change one thing at a time and give it a month, or a few hundred leads, whichever comes first. Anything less and you are reading noise.

Our guide to A/B testing covers how long to run one and how to read the result.

Watch what each sale is worth as well as the percentage. Something that lifts one and shrinks the other can leave you worse off.

Where to start

Work out which of the four measures above applies to you. Find your own line in the industry list. Then break your numbers down by source and device.

Under one percent, fix the leads. One to two, look at trust and the checkout. Above that, go for bigger baskets rather than a bigger percentage.

For the full list of things to try, see our guides on how to increase online sales and turning traffic into sales.