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Metrics type: Supporting Metrics • Category: Ecommerce Platform
Conversion = orders / sessions per channel (sessions from analytics sibling if connected; else from BC stats endpoint cached on the channel doc).

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At a glance

Conversion rate (orders divided by sessions) decomposed per channel_id over the trailing 30 days, with a week-over-week comparison for trend. Sessions come from the connected analytics sibling (GA4 ideally; BC’s native stats endpoint as fallback). The single most diagnostic card for “is the channel converting?” because aggregate conversion rate hides massive cross-platform variation: web typically 1-4%, B2B portal 8-25%, POS 95%+ (walk-up customers don’t browse).

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your BigCommerce data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A US apparel brand on BigCommerce Pro with GA4 connected, B2B Edition active, and POS at one flagship store. Snapshot for week 13 Apr to 19 Apr 26 vs prior week (6 Apr to 12 Apr 26). What’s interesting:
  1. Facebook Shop alert is the actionable signal. A 2.4pp drop from 3.23% to 0.83% on Facebook Shop is a 75% relative collapse, almost certainly a Meta-side issue. Investigation sequence: (a) Meta Business Manager → policy notifications, (b) try to load the Facebook Shop product page in incognito, (c) check Meta Status. Most Facebook Shop conversion-rate collapses resolve with a policy-acknowledgement click in Business Manager.
  2. The B2B portal “elevated” reading is interesting but not actionable. A 1.5pp drop from 11.5% to 10.0% B2B conversion sounds bad but is within normal B2B variance (B2B order cycles are 2-6 weeks; a single big deal landing or not landing moves the rate). Watch for two consecutive weeks below 10%; one isolated week is noise.
  3. DTC web is healthy at 3.0% (-0.2pp). This is the heartbeat metric for this merchant; -0.2pp WoW is well within noise. The 3.0% figure aligns with the BC apparel benchmark of 2-4%.
  4. Amazon “conversion” reads as 4.3%. This is not session-to-order conversion; Amazon doesn’t expose sessions. The card uses Amazon impressions as the denominator, so the figure is impression-to-order, structurally higher than session conversion. The label clearly notes “(impressions)” so it isn’t confused. For true Amazon session conversion, connect Amazon SP-API which provides Brand Analytics session data.
  5. POS at 95.5% is correct. Walk-ins to POS terminals don’t browse; almost everyone who interacts with the till is buying. The 5% “non-conversion” represents return-only visits, employee adjustments, and aborted transactions. Don’t treat POS conversion-rate as a marketing metric; it’s an in-store-operations metric.
Action priority order (when this card moves):
  1. Filter to channel cohorts. DTC vs B2B vs Marketplace vs POS, alert separately within each.
  2. For Facebook Shop fires specifically, check Meta Business Manager first; 60%+ of Facebook Shop conversion drops are policy / status issues outside merchant control.
  3. For DTC web fires, pair with BC Alert Abandoned Cart Spike, conversion drops with abandonment spikes signal funnel issues, conversion drops without abandonment signal traffic-quality issues.
  4. For Amazon fires, audit Amazon Channel Manager → SKU listings, OOS and buy-box loss are the most common Amazon-conversion-killers.
  5. For B2B drops, look at active quotes in B2B Edition; “low conversion” often means quotes are sitting unconverted because pricing is wrong, not because the funnel is broken.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in BigCommerce Control Panel: Analytics → In-store Conversion (Plus / Pro / Enterprise) shows store-wide conversion rate but not natively per-channel; per-channel breakdown requires GA4 Audiences or BC’s stats API. Channel Manager → individual channel → Analytics shows per-channel order count; sessions are not natively exposed for marketplaces. For B2B: Channel Manager → B2B Edition → Customers shows logged-in B2B portal session counts. Why our channel conversion rate may differ from BC / GA4: Cross-connector reconciliation (when GA4 and marketplace integrations are connected): The per-channel conversion rate view is BC-aligned with similar cards on Shopify (per referring_site or landing_page) and Adobe Commerce (per store_id plus session attribution); merchant-facing semantics are equivalent though session-attribution methods differ.

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

My DTC web conversion is 3% but my Amazon “conversion” is 4.3%. Is Amazon better? No, the two figures aren’t comparable. Web conversion uses sessions; Amazon “conversion” uses impressions in the absence of a session metric. Amazon impressions are inherently rarer than web sessions (you have to actively search for the listing) so impression-to-order is structurally higher. Don’t compare across the cohort boundary, only DTC vs DTC, or marketplace vs marketplace. My POS shows 95.5% conversion. Is that right? Yes. Customers don’t browse at the till; they pay. The “non-conversion” 4.5% is return-only visits, employee adjustments, and aborted transactions. POS conversion-rate is a useful fraud / training signal (sudden drops to 80% suggest staff issues) but isn’t a marketing metric. The alert fires every Friday afternoon. Why? Likely your weekly Friday email blast is bringing tire-kickers (high-volume browsing, low intent) into the funnel. Conversion drops because the denominator inflated. Cross-reference with BC Channel Revenue Trend, if Friday revenue still grew, the conversion-rate dip is healthy mix shift, not a problem. My GA4 isn’t connected. Is this card still useful? Less so for marketplace channels, fully useful for DTC web. Without GA4 we use BC’s stats endpoint which provides good DTC-web session counts. Marketplace conversion will read as estimates / “(impressions)” denominator. Connect GA4 for full per-channel accuracy; the integration takes 5 minutes. Why is the alert threshold 2pp absolute and not a percentage? Because percentage-based thresholds don’t work across cohorts. A 10% relative drop on a 3% conversion (3% → 2.7%) is noise; the same 10% relative drop on a 0.5% conversion (0.5% → 0.45%) is a meaningless number. 2pp absolute treats all cohorts consistently. For very-high-baseline channels (POS at 95%) configure a tighter threshold (0.5pp); for very-low-baseline channels (Pinterest typical 0.2%) configure looser (1pp). My new B2B Edition portal launched 14 days ago. Does this card work? Yes, but with caveats. B2B portal conversion needs sessions data; if your B2B portal isn’t tagged in GA4 or doesn’t surface to BC’s stats endpoint, conversion will read N/A. Configure GA4 audience for B2B login URL pattern to enable accurate B2B conversion measurement. Why does Facebook Shop conversion read so low (0.83%)? That’s normal for Facebook Shop, in fact 0.83% is on the lower end of the typical 0.5-2% range. Meta’s commerce surface attracts impulse / discovery traffic with low purchase intent. A 0.83% baseline isn’t a problem; the alert fires when it drops below baseline by 2pp, which would be near-zero. Multi-storefront stores: does conversion aggregate or split by storefront? By default per-storefront. Each storefront has its own theme, traffic mix, and conversion baseline. Aggregating storefronts produces meaningless rollups. Use the storefront selector at the top of the dashboard to switch. Should I see the Incomplete-orders count as a “soft conversion”? Some merchants do. Configure under Settings → Conversion definition → Include Incomplete; this changes the numerator to “orders + incompletes”. Useful for stores where Incompletes have high downstream conversion (cart-recovery email flow). Default behaviour excludes them. My conversion rate dropped 1.5pp this week but my revenue grew. What’s the explanation? Volume and conversion can move in opposite directions. Most likely you ran a paid-traffic campaign that brought more sessions (denominator up) at lower intent (numerator up by less). Net result: more revenue, lower conversion rate. Check session count against prior week; if sessions grew 30%+ while orders grew 20%, that’s the explanation, and the campaign is profitable despite the conversion-rate dip.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Conversion Rate by Channel is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across BigCommerce and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.