If you run an online store one of the key numbers you’re going to need clarity on is – out of everyone who visits, how many should you expect to be converting into customers?
The trouble is many answers you’ll find are either a single global average, or a range so wide it tells you nothing, or anecdotal tales (which have their place but aren’t great as reliable benchmarks).
So, here is the UK picture, with the sources named, followed by another question —> which is what you should expect for an ecommerce site like yours, and what moves it.
The short answer
Across UK and Irish online stores, the average conversion rate in July 2026 was 2.26% which is up from 1.94% in July 2025.
That figure is from IRP Commerce’s eCommerce Market Data, which is worth using precisely because of what it isn’t: it isn’t a survey, and it isn’t dominated by Amazon. It’s first-party trading data from independent small and mid-sized merchants on IRP’s platform, far closer to the kind of ecommerce business most UK businesses run. Conversion rate here means transactions divided by sessions.
So roughly one visit in forty-four ends in an order. If your site sits near 2%, you’re not doing anything unusual.
UK conversion rates by sector
As ever though with averages, they can hide an enormous amount. Here is the same month broken down by market, alongside average order value for each.
| Sector | Conversion rate | Average order value |
|---|---|---|
| Arts and Crafts | 5.23% | £122.78 |
| Health and Wellbeing | 3.57% | £51.55 |
| Kitchen and Home Appliances | 3.34% | £53.73 |
| Pet Care | 2.95% | £80.79 |
| Sports and Recreation | 2.12% | £107.12 |
| Cars and Motorcycling | 1.82% | £212.96 |
| Fashion, Clothing and Accessories | 1.81% | £82.08 |
| Toys, Games and Collectables | 1.72% | £64.81 |
| Food and Drink | 1.47% | £106.77 |
| Baby and Child | 0.55% | £737.47 |
Source: IRP Commerce, eCommerce Market Data, July 2026.
The difference between sectors, eg. between a fashion retailer who would be performing as expected at 1.8% and a health and wellbeing store at 3.6%, shows why comparing either to a generic “2–3% is good” benchmark can be misleading in both cases.
Why order value changes what a “good” conversion means
If we take the two ends of that table we see that Baby and Child converts at 0.55%, the lowest of any market, but on an average order of £737.47. Health and Wellbeing meanwhile converts at 3.57%, more than six times higher, but on an average order of £51.55.
The store converting at 0.55%, if it’s in the Baby and Child sector, is not doing worse than a store from another category necessarily. It’s likely, considering the sector (prams, cots etc), selling something expensive that people research for weeks and buy once. The store in the Health and Wellbeing sector which is converting at 3.57% is in contrast likely selling items of a lower cost value but which are bought more frequently.
This is not to say this is a hard and fast rule. Arts and Crafts manages the highest conversion rate in the table and an above-average order value. But the broad relationship holds: the more someone is being asked to spend, the smaller the proportion who will do it on any given visit.
This is why conversion rate on its own is a difficult KPI. IRP’s market-wide revenue per session was £1.90 in July 2026, against £1.83 a year earlier, if you focus solely on raising your conversion rate without due consideration for the impact on order value you can end up worse off.
What the benchmark data doesn’t tell you
There are three caveats worth holding on to when looking at this particular data set.
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It’s one month.
July 2026, against July 2025 which is a snapshot rather than a trend. For this reason we advise building a bank of data across the year to benchmark against.
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The sample has a shape.
In that same dataset, Google PPC accounted for 60.67% of sales. Paid traffic tends to arrive with more immediate buying intent than organic or social traffic, so an ecommerce website whose visitors come mostly from search or social should expect to sit lower without that meaning anything is in and of itself wrong.
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Check how your own figure is calculated.
IRP’s is per session. If you’re looking at conversion rate per user, which produces a higher number for the same underlying performance, because one person often visits several times before buying then you’re not comparing like for like. Our guide to what analytics small businesses should actually track goes into which numbers are worth watching and which are noise.
And before you draw conclusions from any of it that you act upon, it’s worth being confident the traffic itself is real. We’ve written separately about whether a rise in traffic is actually the right traffic, bot traffic and referral spam will depress a conversion rate without anything changing on your site at all.
Two things happening across the wider market
Online’s share of retail has stopped growing.
In Great Britain, internet sales were 27.4% of total retail sales in July 2026. In 2025 the annual figure was also 27.4%; in 2024, 27.1%; in 2023, 26.7% (source: ONS Retail Sales Index, series J4MC, released 21 August 2026). After the 2021 peak of 30.7%, the share has sat in a narrow band for four years.
The practical consequence: there is no rising tide. Growth has to come from converting the visitors you already have, not from waiting for more of them.
Conversion rates are softening globally.
Contentsquare’s 2026 Digital Experience Benchmark (99 billion sessions across more than 6,000 sites, worldwide rather than UK-only) found conversion rates down 5% year on year overall. Two findings from it are worth acting on:
- Returning visitors converted at 2.9%, against 1.7% for new visitors, and made up 52.8% of traffic. The people who already know you are where the money is.
- Desktop conversion rate was 74% higher than mobile, while mobile accounted for 69.9% of all traffic.
That second gap is one we see often in practice and is usually a build problem, eg. a checkout that technically works on a phone but takes a person eleven taps to complete, or a page that loads so slowly on a mobile connection that people give up before they’ve seen anything.
How to impact your conversion rate
If your online store is meaningfully below its sector benchmark, the causes are usually structural rather than cosmetic.
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The journey, not the page.
The point where money is lost is often three or four steps from the page you’re looking at. Basket and checkout abandonment usually trace back to something introduced earlier, whether that be unclear delivery costs, a stock position that wasn’t visible, or a payment method that isn’t offered.
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Speed on a real phone on a real connection.
Not on a fast desktop connection at the office.
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Trust, specifically placed.
Returns policy, delivery timescales and contact details at the moment the doubt actually occurs, not buried in the footer.
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Search and filtering that works on your catalogue.
Generic search behaves badly on specialist ranges, which is exactly where a store’s advantage should be.
Getting this right means reading the data properly, designing against what it says, and then going into the website build armed with ecommerce website development expertise to change the things that need changing. That’s a combination of analysis, design and development judgement and because good work works harder investing time and resources at this stage deliver ROI later.
If the page people are landing on is where you suspect the problem lies, we’ve written separately about what actually moves the number on a landing page, including how to tell a page problem from a structural one.
So, where to start?
Work out your own figure first, on a per-session basis, and compare it to your sector rather than the overall average. If you’re well below the range as per the benchmark data then get in touch. We’ll undertake an audit to establish where the drop-off is happening, explain why and set out a series of recommendations to address the issues we find. These aren’t necessarily expensive fixes, in some cases you might be able to implement these directly, eg. if they’re content related.
