

Ask HN: When to stop obsessing over conversion - nathanh

I've read that for web products, maximum conversion rates are around 1%. Is this true? If I have a 1% conversion rate, and I'm having trouble getting more, should I stop worrying about it?
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jacquesm
You should stop worrying about it when you've exhausted all the avenues that
you can possibly think of in improving it.

As for the 1%, Patrick already states it's a bogus statistic based on a small
sample, here are some more reasons:

\- conversion rates tend to cluster by industry

\- the majority of public e-commerce figures pertain to the adult industry,
which has notoriously low conversion rates

\- conversion rate is a function of how well you manage to pre-select your
customers through the use of text found on sites linking to you and how much
your visitors are in a 'buying mood' when they finally reach your site. If you
get a lot of flak traffic that automatically reduces your conversion rate, but
I wouldn't worry about it, the number to maximize is the number of people you
sell to in an absolute sense. So better to sell to 1% of 1,000,000 people than
100% of 50.

\- A friend of mine has a relatively small site but sells to - and this is not
a joke - a full 75% of his visitors. Plenty of them become repeat buyers, and
his whole online store fits in a shoebox. There are always outliers to
statistics such as these.

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patio11
_I've read that for web products, maximum conversion rates are around 1%._

This statistic needs slaying. It. Is. False.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=930571>

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fbailey
Amazon gets nearly 10% in some areas, I worked with startups where we got the
Conversion rates from 1% to 5% this was mostly adwords and landing page
optimizitaion.

At the end conversion rates define your cost per user and how much you have to
make with each user. So don't stop worrying.

