How to calculate conversion rate (with examples)

Conversion rate is one of the most important numbers in ecommerce — and one of the easiest to calculate.

The formula

Conversion rate = (orders ÷ visitors) × 100

If you had 400 orders from 20,000 visitors last month: 400 ÷ 20,000 = 0.02 → 2%.

That’s it. The maths is trivial; the nuance is in what you count.

What to count

• Visitors: use sessions or unique visitors consistently — don’t mix them month to month.
• Orders: completed purchases, not add-to-carts or initiated checkouts.
• Window: use a typical month, not a sale week, for a baseline.

Common mistakes

• Mixing pageviews with sessions. Pageviews inflate the denominator and crush your rate.
• Counting bot traffic. Filter it out, or your visitor count is fiction.
• Comparing to a generic average. A 2% rate is excellent for furniture and weak for food & beverage — compare to your industry, not the internet.

Add-to-cart and checkout rates

Two related rates worth tracking:

• Add-to-cart rate = carts ÷ visitors.
• Checkout completion = orders ÷ checkouts started. (A low one points at cart abandonment.)

Together they show where you lose people, not just how many.

Skip the maths

The free conversion rate calculator does it for you and — more usefully — compares your rate to your industry’s average and top performers, so the number actually means something. For the full revenue picture, see Revyfix.