Sales Conversion Rate

[alacar-8]

Just out of curiosity, what do you guys (gender neutral!) think is a good sales conversion rate? I stand at 1.8 and really have no idea if that is good, bad or ugly.  It must mean something, right?

[ilikehockeyjerseys]

I don't know if it matters, or can be contextualized as an individual number. 

You would have to compare it to the conversion rate of sellers in the same category. Or, if you do something differently with your listings, your previous conversion rate.

I am skeptical about the accuracy of the stats that eBay provides. My page views and impressions make no sense. Some days, I get 10k external page views. I sell niche media. There is no way that is accurate. It is either caused bots that scrape listings for other uses, or eBay's system is broken. The point being, I don't trust eBay's numbers. 

If you want to contextualize your conversion rate, I would look at other Canadian sellers in your category (comics?). Look at how many listings they have, what genre of comics they sell. Then look at their sold listings and see what ratio of comics sold they have to comics listed. 

For example, if you have 1300 sales in the last 90 days, and 4200 listings, you have had 5500 active listings, and roughly 24 percent of everything you have had up on eBay in the last 90 days has sold. Look at other sellers and see how well their ratio of sales stacks up. If your type of inventory is similar, you can try to figure out what is or isn't working that way. Does the person selling more have better pictures? Clearer titles? Better shipping policies? Etc etc. 

Point being, if you want to find out how your conversion rate holds up, I think you have to do some digging by looking at comparable sellers. I don't think there is a universal average number that someone can give you in this thread to let you know if your rate is good or not. I also think eBay's internal stats might not be accurate for some sellers who for one reason or another get weird amounts of external page views or impressions that probably aren't actual views.

[msau4301]

ilikehockeyjerseys summed it up nicely! The numbers are very confusing to me and it is best to compare to your own selling category. I sell mostly vintage toys/Barbies and my sales conversion rate for the last period was 2.1.  I don't usually look at it but I had a couple of months back when someone was talking about it here and I was curious, it was lower then (maybe 1.7?) and I'm surprised the current period (Nov. 30 - Dec. 30) is higher given that I stopped all my listings December 12 (crazy month for me personally) and yet the rate is higher?? I would imagine there are more view this time of year for everyone.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

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@alacar-8 wrote:

Just out of curiosity, what do you guys (gender neutral!) think is a good sales conversion rate? I stand at 1.8 and really have no idea if that is good, bad or ugly.  It must mean something, right?

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According to my wall of figures & stats I''m at 1.1 % .  So you are kicking my posterior at 1.8%.  Down approximately 100 sales over last year. 45 of those were to US buyers. Selling fees make up 11.2 %. Approx 1100 searches for my items from eBay... 2100 externally. Complete 180 of what I was seeing last year at this time.

I did make 11 purchases this year. Mind you 6 were "free shipping supplies".  Sellers that are no longer buying may have something to do with the drop in my business/traffic. My guess is they are going elsewhere, where it is easier to find what they are looking for.

-Lotz

[ricarmic]

My current ones are: (stamp seller).

1.0 down from 1.5% on .COM

1.3 down from 1.8% on .CA

My sales were quite slow in the last couple weeks leading up to Xmas. Since Christmas things are "back to normal" actual sales wise. During the time of slow sales, promoted listings views were down but not hugely, so it looks like there were more "lookers" at that time.

To be honest I've never spent a lot of time trying to understand these numbers and whether I'm doing ok or not. Generally I look at how many things sell in an average day. (I'm with @ilikehockeyjerseys I dont think the numbers are trustworthy on a continual basis).

Because of how I sell, generally I'm in the long game, my prices aren't meant to be lowest, and I'm not trying to turn things over quickly. This means that when lots of auctions are going low, my stuff will be slower and/or when lots of folks are listing I will probably be slower too. It appears to me that my categories still have a higher number of auctions as opposed to BINs compared to other categories and the auctions tend to go 50% or lower than a comparable BIN would be.

IMO this kind of number would be most usable for folks selling a "gadget" that is identical to other sellers selling the same "gadget". I think ebay will tell you the "average" sell rate is and you can compare yours. Not sure what good it does you as you don't know who's doing better than you or worse than you....without a lot of investigation....

[marnotom!]

I would only start worrying about my conversion rate if my sales were slow or I had items going unsold that I felt should be easy sellers.

Your sell-through rate appears to be stellar, so I don't think you really need to worry about stuff like views versus actual sales.

[kawartha-ephemera]

My listings are mostly postcards and a few antique photographs. The current quarter's number is 2.3, previous quarters this year were 2.2, 3.4, and 2.8. The lower rate recorded during the second half of the year reflects my having taken a holiday from writing new listings from August through December.

[kawartha-ephemera]

I agree, at times it's tough to believe the data being reported is accurate. Taken as a whole though I believe the data is worth monitoring.

[recped]

I have a relatively high conversion rate but I think one should be looking at all three numbers (Impressions/click-through/sales) to get a good perspective of what is going on. To me the Impressions is the least interesting and basically useless on it's own, click through can tell you quite a bit but nothing tops the conversion rate.

my views/sales for the full year 2021

You can load up with Keywords and Item Specifics that will get you plenty of impressions but if your click-through is really low it's telling you that your listings are triggering a lot of impressions but the majority of those are being seen by people with no interest in your listing (for various reasons).

A good click-through rate with poor sales indicates that while buyers are attracted to your listing once they get there they see something that leads them to NOT buy.

Whenever trying to analyze these numbers just keep in mind that there are so many factors that can affect Impressions and Views it is easy to go down a rabbit hole.

[lotzofuniquegoodies]

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@recped wrote:

I have a relatively high conversion rate but I think one should be looking at all three numbers (Impressions/click-through/sales) to get a good perspective of what is going on. To me the Impressions is the least interesting and basically useless on it's own, click through can tell you quite a bit but nothing tops the conversion rate.

my views/sales for the full year 2021

You can load up with Keywords and Item Specifics that will get you plenty of impressions but if your click-through is really low it's telling you that your listings are triggering a lot of impressions but the majority of those are being seen by people with no interest in your listing (for various reasons).

A good click-through rate with poor sales indicates that while buyers are attracted to your listing once they get there they see something that leads them to NOT buy.

Whenever trying to analyze these numbers just keep in mind that there are so many factors that can affect Impressions and Views it is easy to go down a rabbit hole.

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In the past traffic reports for a Canadian seller mirrored eachother if you listed on both sites. Since August 2021 that has changed. Now the only traffic that displays on dot ca is for listings created on dot ca. Same situation for listings created on dot com. (I list on dot ca because I require calculated shipping.)

Currently I have 1147 listings on dot ca with  385,000 impressions 3300 views as per report on dot ca

                     &  9 listings on dot com with 1000 impressions and 6 views as per report on dot com

I brought this up back in Aug/Sept but there was no follow regarding the change in display. As for the "traffic/Impressions" from US visitors that is anyone's guess going forward. Unfortunately this is the rabbit hole I went down because of a sudden drop in sales matching IS/Category updating by eBay also in August 2021.

-Lotz

Note: Numbers quoted above are for Dec 2021.

[mrdutch1001]

I never look at those numbers...my "occasional" selling dictates it would never matter anyway...

these are my .COM stats for 2021:

0.6%

Avg click-through rate

1.3%

Avg sales conversion rate

.CA stats are even less

I also did not list or sell for over 6 months during 2021...

[recped]

I also did not list or sell for over 6 months during 2021...

That would have zero effect on your numbers related to click-through or conversion rates wich are percentages.