E-commerce Update: After Hitting Peak Demand, Website Traffic Tapers Off

Here, the IndieCommerce team shares an important look at current trends in the world of e-commerce.

Wednesday, June 3; Thursday, June 4; and Friday, June 5 (blue linebelow ) reflected the peak demand we saw for antiracism titles on IndieCommerce (IC) and IndieLite (IL) websites. Weekend traffic on Saturday, June 6, and Sunday, June 7, was in line with the previous week’s traffic and shows fewer customers on their computers over the weekend, which is normal for this time of the year.

Of particular note, last week saw a big drop in the e-commerce conversion rate. This rate reflects the numbers of users to IndieCommerce websites who complete an online purchase. We’ve been averaging over 7 percent since mid-March, which is very high.

Over the past seven days (blue line below), the conversion rate has dropped to 5.85 percent; on Monday, June 8, we saw it drop to 4.36 percent. It looks like a great deal of that traffic on Monday was coming from social media referrals. Depending on the social media messaging that sent them to IC and IL stores, these visitors may not have been as motivated to make online purchases or were not familiar with the stores they were referred to, which may have contributed to the decreased conversion rate.

Last week’s rapid surge in traffic and sales was a good test of IndieCommerce’s ability to scale up quickly. For the time being, we are going to keep those additional hardware resources in place in the event of another surge. We’re also in the process of evaluating what additional services to bring online to address what we will see during the 4th-quarter holiday shopping season.