How Does Your Buyer Funnel Compare To Your Competitors?

How Does Your Buyer Funnel Compare To Your Competitors?

Let’s take a look at buyer funnels across different verticals and AOV (Average Order Value) price points to help you evaluate your own site metrics and how you compare.

If you haven’t yet read our previous article on The One Simple Graph To Quickly Identify Where Your eCommerce Store Is Underperforming, take a look at that to get an understanding of how to interpret this data.

Looking at the image below you can see that it skews outwards from the green dashed line at the ‘Window Shopper’ stage, meaning visitors are viewing product pages but aren’t ‘adding to cart’ as much as we would like.

Anywhere a particular sections skews outwards from the standard results means it will skew inwards at a different stage as this is based on percentages adding up to 100.

Vertical = AU Fitness Apparel – AOV = $117.10

Compare the image above to the one below of a Bulky Goods retailer.

Vertical = AU Bulky Goods – AOV = $406.02

This journey graph is quite different to the previous. It’s quite top heavy, meaning there are a lot more visitors to the site who are browsing pages and products, but aren’t converting into buyers as much as the last example of the Fitness merchant.

So, now you’re likely thinking…

“Is the difference because of differing industries, poor UX design, or is this normal due to the bigger volume numbers of the second merchant?”

Well, let’s take a look at some more examples to get a better idea. Reaching out to our friends at HiConversion, we pulled together a few more graphs in similar industries to compare buyer journeys.

You can see below this graph of a merchant in the US Fitness Apparel industry looks quite similar to the first merchant above in AU Fitness Apparel.

Vertical = US Fitness Apparel – AOV = $91.91

Similarly, the graph below from a Bulky Goods retailer in the US is visually similar to the AU Bulky Goods merchant above.

Vertical = US Luxury Bulky Goods – AOV = $1050

Putting all this data together we can make the observation that differences in vertical market do impact the buyer journey funnel quite significantly.

Next we need to take a look at how various price points affect online sales as this could make quite a considerable impact.


How Does Average Order Value (AOV) Influence eCommerce Sales?

As quoted from Joey at HiConversion:

“I would say that both the industry vertical of the merchant, and the general price point/order values of the merchant, influence the shape of the funnel significantly.

Higher-consideration purchases, which usually are on the more expensive side, definitely create more of a martini-glass shape with Shopper and Buyer being quite skinny at the bottom. More everyday purchase/lower price point sites will be a little wider/more evenly-distributed.

Across verticals and/or price points, the average conversion rates can change significantly. So while we might see some shoppers browsing online and buying in-store, (considering some merchants could be eCommerce only), the average conversion rates for merchants grouped at a lower price point, or that sell more basic retail items, will naturally be higher. These factors correlate fairly consistently with the general idea of low-involvement vs. high-involvement purchases.

The top-funnel sections are usually a little more variable between merchants in the same industry, influenced more agnostically by things like UX and marketing strategies.”

So, does this mean that for more expensive items, users are researching and browsing online but buying offline in their retail stores?

We’ll take a look at this in an upcoming article and how various price points affect online sales.

To find out more about the initiative, visit the website here → https://mobop.org/onvisli3

As your local partner agency, we can help you get started and on your way to higher conversions and more revenue.