19 Powerful Ecommerce Statistics That Will Guide Your Strategy in 2021

Data is incredible.

With it, you can make informed strategic decisions that will pay dividends in the future. Without it, you must resort to guesswork that may cost you dearly.

Still, not all data is created equal.

Many of the statistics touted online can be at best outdated, and at worst wildly inaccurate.

What’s more, even when you have relevant, accurate statistics, it can be difficult to quickly extract effective strategic insights.

That’s why we’ve created this article.

In it, you’ll learn 19 up-to-date ecommerce statistics and the best strategies to take advantage of them in your ecommerce business. Plus, we also provide killer resources to help you implement these strategies today.

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Ecommerce Statistic #1: It’s estimated that there will be 2.14 billion global digital buyers in 2021.

That’s a lot of potential customers.

In fact, with an expected global population of 7.87 billion people, that’s about 27.2 percent of the world’s population shopping online.

What’s more, this number has been rising rapidly over the years and is expected to continue doing so.

The Key Takeaway: With more and more people shopping online each year, there’s never been a better time to start an online store.

For help, check out: How to Start an Online Business in 2021.

Ecommerce Statistic #2: In 2021, ecommerce sales are expected to account for 18.1 percent of retail sales worldwide.

In other words, ecommerce is slowly taking over.

This statistic clearly shows how ecommerce is becoming a more and more important part of global commerce.

It’s growing so quickly that it’s expected to make up a whopping 22.0 percent of retail sales worldwide by 2023.

The Key Takeaway: Ecommerce is expanding in every direction and becoming a more integral part of the consumer experience worldwide.

Once again, this trend offers massive opportunities for new entrepreneurs.

For more help, read: How Much Does it Cost to Start a Dropshipping Store?

Ecommerce Statistic #3: More than one-third of American small businesses do not have a website.

With so many businesses slow to capitalize on the growing ecommerce trend, this is great news for new and existing ecommerce entrepreneurs.

The Key Takeaway: Businesses without websites should set up an online store before they’re left in the dust.

Plus, with tools like Shopify, it couldn’t be more simple to set up a website. And if you want to compare some of the biggest providers, check out this list of the best ecommerce platforms.

For more help, check out this video:

Ecommerce Statistic #4: The number one reason people shop online is free delivery.

Other key reasons include the ability to use coupons and apply discounts (41 percent), read other customers’ reviews (35 percent), easily return their items (33 percent), and have a quick checkout process (30 percent).

In other words, the strength of ecommerce lies in its convenience.

The Key Takeaway: Make sure that your customer experience is built for convenience.

Shoppers should find the process simple and intuitive. This also means providing fast shipping and hassle-free returns.

To make things even more convenient, instead of trying to entice shoppers to visit your website, take your store to them.

One way to do this is to set up a Facebook Shop.

To learn how, read: How to Set Up a Facebook Shop: The Quickstart Guide for Beginners.

Ecommerce Statistic #5: 33.6 percent of shoppers look up price comparisons on their mobile device while in a physical store.

This is great news for ecommerce businesses.

Why?

Well, without the costs of maintaining a physical store and large inventory, ecommerce dropshipping businesses can keep overheads low.

This means they’re often able to provide lower prices for customers.

So how can ecommerce entrepreneurs take advantage of in-store shoppers comparing prices online?

The Key Takeaway: Advertise your products where shoppers who look up price comparisons will see them.

How?

Get your products to appear in Google Shopping’s search results. Remember, Google is by far the largest search engine and many shoppers will use it to quickly compare prices.

To learn how, check out: The Beginner’s Guide to Boosting Sales With Google Shopping Ads.

Ecommerce Statistic #6: 81 percent of consumers conduct online research before making a purchase online.

Remember, the ability to research purchases is one of the key reasons people shop online instead of in-store.

The Key Takeaway: Provide shoppers with detailed and accurate product pages that answer any and every question shoppers may have.

Your product pages should have plenty of high-quality product images, descriptions, and specifications.

This will instill trust and help shoppers with their research.

For more help, read: How to Create a Great Product Page.

Ecommerce Statistic #7: 81 percent of consumers trust the advice of friends and family over businesses.

It makes sense, right?

Friends and family just want what’s best for you, whereas businesses have an ulterior motive in promoting their products: profit.

This is a psychological phenomenon often referred to as “social proof.”

The Key Takeaway: Harness the power of social proof to increase sales.

Thankfully, there are numerous ways businesses can take advantage of social proof. For example, you can engage in influencer marketing or display positive reviews and testimonials to build trust.

To learn more, read: Social Proof: What It Is and Why It’s Great for Marketing.

Ecommerce Statistic #8: 58 percent of people stop doing business with a company because of poor customer experience.

Trust is hard to build and easy to lose.

After being let down by a business, it’s understandable that consumers would be hesitant to buy from them again.

Left unchecked, providing a poor customer experience will be the death of any business. However, retaining customers over time can lead to huge business growth driven by repeat purchases.

The Key Takeaway: Ensure you provide your customers with a stellar customer experience from start to finish.

Done right, customers should look forward to purchasing from your business again in the future.

To learn how, check out: Customer Retention: 10 Tips to Keep Your Customers Coming Back.

Ecommerce Statistic #9: Consumers are most likely to trust a business that makes it easy to contact people at the company.

Relationships are vital in business.

Think about it, people don’t actually trust businesses per se – they place their trust in the people who run them.

In other words, a brand is simply a representation of the values and promises the people behind a business promise to uphold.

The study behind the statistic also found that consumers are also more likely to trust businesses that are open and honest about negative news or events:

The Key Takeaway: Build strong relationships with your customers and make hands-on customer service a priority.

And ensure customer service representatives are easily accessible.

Strong relationships create trust. In turn, this will help to increase conversions and customer retention.

To learn more, read: How to Harness the Awesome Power of Customer Relations.

Ecommerce Statistic #10: On average, only 1.94 percent of ecommerce website visits convert into a purchase.

Roughly speaking, this means that only one in 51 website visitors actually buys something.

That’s a lot of missed opportunities.

Think about it, if you have a store converting at two percent, simply increasing conversions to just four percent will double your sales.

In other words, a small increase in your online store’s conversion rate can massively increase profits.

The Key Takeaway: Pay close attention to your website’s conversion rate and consistently work to increase it.

Thankfully, there are tons of ways you can do this.

To learn more, check out: Why Nobody Is Buying From Your Store – And What You Can Do About It and Help! I Have Lots of “Add to Carts” But No Conversions.

Ecommerce Statistic #11: 69.57 percent of shopping carts are abandoned.

This sucks.

It may have taken you weeks of Facebook advertising and retargeting to entice these people to your website.

Perhaps you spent ages choosing the right products and optimizing your product pages to convince your visitors to decide to purchase from your store – and they want to!

They even add a product to their shopping cart… only for two-thirds of them to click away.

The Key Takeaway: Optimize your checkout process to reduce as many of those abandoned carts as possible.

To learn more, read: How to Recover Abandoned Carts.

Ecommerce Statistic #12: High extra costs are the top reason shoppers abandon carts.

Can you blame them?

They’ve done their research and decided to purchase your product. After going through the entire checkout process, they’re confronted with a bunch of extra costs for shipping and taxes.

Complicated checkout processes and forcing customers to create accounts are also huge turn-offs.

Sure, it might be tempting to reduce your prices to entice customers to buy, and then increase your shipping fees to make up for it. But this could lead to shoppers abandoning their carts.

The Key Takeaway: Don’t hit shoppers with unexpected fees during the checkout process or force them to create accounts. Make the checkout process short, fast, and easy.

You might even want to consider raising your prices slightly and offer free shipping.

To learn more, read: Should You Offer Free Shipping?

Ecommerce Statistic #13: Abandoned cart follow-up emails have an average open rate of 41.09 percent.

This is extremely high.

In comparison, according to Campaign Monitor, the average email open rate is just 18.0 percent.

This makes sense when you consider the high level of buyer intent shoppers have when they add products to their cart.

The Key Takeaway: Make sure you have an email campaign to automatically follow up on abandoned carts. This can make a huge difference to your bottom line.

To learn more, check out: 6 Vital Email Templates Every Online Business Should Steal.

Ecommerce Statistic #14: On average, 52 percent of online stores have omnichannel capabilities.

Today, most businesses are multichannel.

This means they sell to and communicate with customers through multiple channels. For example, you might have a website, Facebook Shop, Instagram account, and an email list.

Omnichannel is the next level up – and it’s the future of ecommerce.

This strategy involves not only having multiple channels but integrating them seamlessly and tracking individual customer interactions across the channels.

For this reason, the strategy requires organization and the integration of new technologies.

But, it’s tremendously powerful.

Omnichannel allows you to optimize your communications with potential customers to nurture them through the sales funnel however they come into contact with your business.

The Key Takeaway: Businesses that can create a seamless, personalized omnichannel experience for customers will own the future of commerce.

Learn more by reading: Omnichannel Explained: Why You Need It and 3 Killer Examples.

Ecommerce Statistic #15: Nearly half (48 percent) of online shoppers simply head straight to a large ecommerce marketplace.

These marketplaces have brand appeal.

Plus, many people already have existing accounts on large ecommerce marketplaces that they know and trust.

The Key Takeaway: Ecommerce brands must work hard to capture the attention of these shoppers, inspire them to visit their website, and then build trust.

To learn how to capture the attention of consumers, read: How to Create a Killer Facebook Ad Design for Your Ecommerce Store.

And to effectively build trust, check out: 9 Ways to Boost Sales by Making Your Store More Trustworthy.

Ecommerce Statistic #16: Mobile ecommerce accounts for 45 percent of US ecommerce sales.

So it’s likely that a good portion of your customers will be accessing your website from a mobile device.

What’s more, annual mobile ecommerce sales in the US are projected to grow from $284 billion in 2020 to $488 billion in 2024.

The Key Takeaway: Ensure your website is optimized for mobile devices.

Thankfully, these days, most website themes come optimized for mobile. Still, it’s important to choose a theme that works particularly well on mobile devices.

Plus, you should make sure to view your website on different types of devices to ensure it looks great however shoppers access it.

To learn more, read: How to Pick the Best Shopify Theme for Your Ecommerce Store.

Ecommerce Statistic #17: Users who have a negative experience on a mobile website are 62 percent less likely to purchase from that business in the future.

This ecommerce statistic hammers home how important mobile commerce is.

The Key Takeaway: For the sake of customer retention, it’s vital you provide a fantastic mobile shopping experience.

To gain inspiration, check out: Blog Design Inspiration: 20 Designs to Help You Start Your Blog.

Ecommerce Statistic #18: Longer mobile page load times drastically increase bounces.

In fact, the probability of a user bouncing off a mobile webpage increases by 32 percent when the page takes between one and three seconds to load (compared to pages that load in under one second).

The longer the load time, the higher the bounce rate.

Speed matters – people won’t wait around if your website is slow to load.

The Key Takeaway: Ensure your website loads fast – super fast.

One of the easiest and most effective ways is to decrease the size of the image files on your webpage.

To do this, check out: Shopify’s Free Online Image Resizer

Ecommerce Statistic #19: Younger people shop online more than older people.

Specifically:

• 38.4 percent of online shoppers in the US are below the age of 35.
• The biggest group of digital buyers is millennials aged 25 to 34.
• Just 14.4 percent of people who shop online in the US are 65 years old and above.

This isn’t particularly surprising. However, it’s worth noting that different demographics interact with online commerce differently.

The Key Takeaway: It’s extremely important to have a clearly defined target market.

This will allow you to tailor every aspect of your customer experience to the needs and preferences of your ideal customers.

To learn more, read: Why You Desperately Need a Defined Target Market and Target Audience.

Summary

When applied, the strategic takeaways from these 19 ecommerce statistics have the power to supercharge your online business.

Here’s a quick summary of those strategic insights:

• There’s never been a better time to start an online store.
• Offer ecommerce options to cater to the consumer experience.
• Businesses without websites should set up an online store as soon as possible.
• Optimize your customer experience for convenience – one way you can do this is to set up a Facebook Shop.
• Advertise your products with Google Shopping so shoppers looking up price comparisons will see them.
• Create great product pages that are detailed, accurate, and answer every question shoppers might have.
• Harness the power of social proof to build trust and increase sales.
• Boost customer retention by providing a stellar customer experience.
• Build strong relationships with customers and make hands-on customer service a priority.
• Consistently seek to improve your website’s conversion rate.
• Optimize your checkout process to reduce abandoned carts.
• Avoid springing high fees on customers during the checkout process and consider offering free shipping.
• Create an email campaign to automatically follow up abandoned carts.
• Look to create a seamless, personalized omnichannel experience for customers.
• Optimize your website to instill trust in visitors quickly.
• Choose a great website theme that’s optimized for mobile devices.
• Provide a great mobile experience to boost customer retention.
• Resize your images to improve your website’s load speed.
• Define a clear target market to cater to.

Which key takeaway has been most useful to you? Let us know in the comments below!

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