Next to Amazon, IHerb.com and Walmart Best at Converting Shoppers Into Buyers

Alibaba and Michael Kors saw the most improved conversions

Ecommerce success starts with getting visitors to your website – but is ultimately about how many of those shoppers convert to buyers. Amazon shows up as the ecommerce king when we look at that data, but lesser-known names like IHerb.com also show outstanding performance.

For this analysis, we looked up conversion rate data for the top websites ranked by traffic in Similarweb’s classification of ecommerce websites. These are sites for which Similarweb analysts have mapped out the ecommerce workflow, from items placed in a shopping cart to confirmed purchases. Our estimates are based on desktop web traffic from within the US for the three months, March to May 2023.

Key takeaways

• The sites with the best conversion rates are amazon.com at 11.1%, iherb.com, 7.9%, and walmart.com, 6.8%.
• Alibaba.com had the best combination of a high conversion rate (6.6%) and year-over-year improvement in that rate, up 1.2 percentage points from the same three months of last year. Apparel retailer Michael Kors (michaelkors.com) gained 1.2 points year-over-year to a 4.4% conversion rate.
• For many other sites, conversion rates were either flat or down slightly from last year. Amazon’s conversion rate was down a fraction of a point (0.8) year-over-year and Duluth Trading Company (duluthtrading.com) was down 2.4 points, albeit to a still strong 6.6%.

Top conversion rates

Amazon has a strong lead in conversions, 11.1% compared with an average of 3.9% for the other websites studied. In the next tier down, 15 players had conversion rates of better than 5%. Here is how that breaks down.

IHerb.com, which sells nutritional supplements, had the second-best ecommerce conversion rate, 7.9%. Similarweb ranks IHerb.com #31 among top ecommerce marketplaces. The site gets 27% of its traffic from organic search and 22% from paid search.

Most improved conversion rates

Conversion rates tend to remain relatively constant, but alibaba.com, michaelkors.com, partycity.com, and seatgeek.com showed notable improvements in their ecommerce conversion rates.

At the other end of the spectrum, duluthtrading.com, samsclub.com, iherb.com, wish.com, orientaltrading.com, and kohls.com each saw their conversion rates drop by more than 1.5 points.

Of those, iherb.com, duluthtrading.com, and kohls.com remained near the top of our list despite that drop.

Omitted from this list: bedbathandbeyond.com, which dropped 3.4 points – but the company was in the process of going out of business at the time.

Best converting sites by traffic

The sites with the best combination of a high conversion rate and a large volume of traffic in our analysis were amazon.com, walmart.com, target.com, ticketmaster.com, kohls.com, and samsclub.com.

While IHerb.com punches above its weight with an estimated 7.9% conversion rate, it’s a small site on the scale of Amazon. In May, amazon.com attracted nearly 1.9 billion desktop and mobile web visits, and others listed above got tens or hundreds of millions of visits, compared with 4.8 million for iherb.com. On a global basis, however, iherb.com drew more than 35 million visits in May.

Read more: eCommerce Conversion Rate Optimization: 15 Tips to Grow Sales

The Similarweb Insights & Communications team is available to pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (journalists are invited to write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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