MarketingSherpa and eBay’s Magento have a new E-commerce Benchmark Study out, which utilized data from 3,000 hours of research, survey responses from 4,346 marketers, interviews with “key e-commerce leaders,” and a review of academic works related to e-commerce. It has nearly a hundred charts looking at various points of analysis aimed at illustrating trends, those with the most prevalent marketplace strategies, and insights into successful tactics.

The research found that email marketing and organic search were the most frequent sources of e-commerce traffic across all revenue ranges.

While the percent receiving significant traffic from each channel was mostly consistent across product categories, percentages were increased for those using email in the apparel market and using referrals in business services. Jewelry and gifts, publishing, computer software, and business services are using content marketing less than other categories.

Among other key findings were that those lacking robust reporting tools giving a “360-degree view” of all aspects of a customer purchase and profile are significantly hindered when it comes to growth and optimization.

It also found that companies with a testing and optimization strategy based on extensive historical data saw higher median conversion rates than those that test based on intuition, best practices or that don’t do any testing.

Additionally, the research found that margins are generally either holding steady or rising for the majority of companies.

The paper was led by Diana Sindicich, PhD, Senior Director of Data Sciences for MECLABS, the parent company of MarketingSherpa.

You can find the whole report here.

Image via MarketingSherpa