Last week Coremetrics announced that they making free ecommerce data available to their customers for benchmarking. Their announcement included some sample data including the fact that 15% of consumers used site search, resulting in a conversion rate of 5.6%. The conversion rate is interesting when compared to some of the other conversion rates in the sample data: from natural search traffic the conversion rate is 1.66%; from comparison shopping engines and affiliate networks it is 1.97%; and from direct load it is 3.29%.
This is yet more evidence showing that the conversion rates for people who use site search are relatively high.
As to the question around the value of the benchmarks – I think they’re still worth having even though it is hard to compare because of the variety of ways of measuring metrics like conversion rates.
