Most founders ask the same question early in a CRO conversation: what conversion rate should we be hitting? It's a reasonable question with an unhelpful answer, because published ecommerce benchmarks average together businesses with almost nothing in common.
A £40 impulse purchase and a £400 considered purchase don't belong on the same chart. Neither do a brand running heavy discount-led paid traffic and one built entirely on organic and repeat customers. Averaging them produces a number that describes none of them.
What a benchmark actually needs to control for
Average order value changes the decision-making time customers need, which changes conversion rate independently of anything on your site. Traffic source matters just as much — a visitor arriving from a branded search already trusts you; one arriving from a cold Meta ad doesn't yet.
Device mix, return customer percentage and even category (considered versus impulse) all move conversion rate in ways that have nothing to do with how good your website is.
The benchmark that actually matters
The only comparison with real diagnostic value is your own site, segmented and tracked over time: this quarter against last, this traffic source against that one, this template against its predecessor.
That's why our engagements start with your own historical data, not an industry average. It tells us where your funnel is genuinely underperforming — for your business specifically — rather than how you compare to a number that was never built to include you.