According to a report from Monetate, it looks like both conversion rates and add-to-cart rates have been falling over the past year, with the exception of a fourth quarter holiday bump.
In the report, which analyzes a random sample of more than 7 billion online shopping experiences using “same store” data across each calendar quarter, shows that there have been a decline, even though the average number of product pages views per session has been going up, from 2.09 a year ago to 2.28, year-over-year during the first quarter of 2105.
Average conversion rates have been falling from 2.54 percent in Q1 2014 to 2.32 percent in Q1 2015. The rate at which ad-to-cart rates have been dropping is 8.31 percent a year ago to 7.39 percent in the first quarter of this year.
You can check out the chart below that shows conversion rate benchmarks by device over the past five quarters.
According to the suggestion of the report, personalization of product recommendations can make a big improvement for retailers and cites several case studies. Although this is true, this information is is self-serving, as this is what Monetate does. There are other benchmark charts like the one above, which can be downloaded here.