E-commerce Benchmarks
For United States Startups

E-commerce is the activity of buying or selling of products and services over the Internet. The leaders are Amazon, eBay and Walmart.

40%

UA Organic
[Revenue]

20%

UA Paid Search
[Revenue]

20%

UA Offline
[Revenue]

5

Pages Per Session
[Average]

3m

Session Duration
[Average]

41%

Bounce Rate
[Average]

11%

Add-to-Cart Rate
[Average]

70%

Cart Abandon Rate
[Average]

$120

Order Value
[Average]

35%

Gross Margin
[Average]

57%

Desktop Usage
[Revenue]

2.7%

Website Conversion
[Average]


Marginalia


The e-commerce market in the United States has been constantly evolving over the past decade. Retail e-commerce sales in the United States are projected to grow at a fast pace in the coming years. Amazon is by far the most popular e-retailer in the United States. The company also has the most popular mobile shopping apps in the country in terms of reach and monthly users. Other successful online retailers include eBay (which was ranked as the most popular online marketplace by online sellers in the U.S.), Walmart (formerly Wal-Mart), Apple Sites and Target.

Customer satisfaction with online retail in the U.S. is traditionally relatively high. However, online sales still represent only a small share (around 10%) of all retail sales in the States. Nonetheless, an estimate of 80%t of Internet users in the United States purchase products online. American customers often prefer buying books, electronics, clothing and apparel items online. Though, for the last two, B&C (Bricks and Clicks) model dominates.

How did I get those numbers? As I’ve been doing marketing since 2000 I’ve had a chance to accumulate big and small data from corporations, small ventures, own startups, open Google crawlers and API’s, white- and gray-hat marketing communities, helpful insights from colleagues. The final actual numbers for the metrics you see are the results of qualitative research. That means, first, I have an average (mean quantitative) values, and then manually match it with expert numbers (median qualitative). If both data fit - we’re good. If expert numbers go out - I adopt Bayes' law and Daniel Kahneman’s methods to balance the data.

Bear in mind, all those marketing benchmarks and startup metrics below relate to the United States market only. Though they can be applied to other T1 countries (US, UK, CA, AU, NZ), these metrics don’t represent traction benchmarks for startups and companies in T2 and T3 regional markets.


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