Aim for your best quarter of the past 24 months, at comparable traffic.
To our knowledge, no one publishes conversion rates by industry measured in France. To see where you stand, your average order value will tell you more than the name of your industry.
The benchmark
The Fevad annual report gives the French market's revenue, number of transactions and average order value, with no conversion rate at all.
Shopify used to compare each store with similar stores, then removed that feature on May 19, 2026 and now points to goals that each store sets for itself.
That leaves Dynamic Yield's international panel, which you can filter by major world region but not by country. Here are its 12-month averages, pulled in early October 2026.
| Industry | Published rate | Our read on what the figure blends together |
|---|---|---|
| Beauty and skincare | 5.39% | Share of existing customers varies widely |
| Food and beverage | 4.58% | Subscriptions and repeat purchases mixed in with first orders |
| Fashion and accessories | 2.78% | Multi-size orders destined to be returned |
| Home and furniture | 1.23% | Several visits before purchase |
| Luxury and jewelry | 0.7% | Decision often made off the site |
These figures rank industries against one another.
Based on our reading of its page, Dynamic Yield divides purchases by the people who visited the site, while Shopify divides them by sessions, which are more numerous. That makes its rate come out higher than yours for an identical store.
This spring, my contact at a fashion brand cut me off while I was reading her funnel to her:
"What's the average conversion rate in the apparel business, generally?"
I answered off the top of my head, between 1.5 and 2.5%, which is exactly what this page advises against. We made the same reflex mistake in writing, in an audit that judged a brand with an average order value of several hundred euros against this "fashion" benchmark.
Across the five stores whose rate we measured this year, though, it lines up by average order value. Expect around 0.5% above a €150 order value, a little under 2% around €65, and about 3% when the flagship product costs less than €30.
These measurements don't share the same tool or the same period, so read them as an observed range. Compare yourself with stores whose order value is similar to yours, whatever their category.
The rule
Set your target based on your own history and give it two companions: an average order value goal, and the metric your industry requires alongside the rate.
For a fashion store, that's the return rate, because a conversion rate that rises along with returns can cost you margin. In beauty, track repeat purchases and the share of existing customers.
Food needs two separate rates, first order and repeat order, and furniture needs a time lag: the gap between the first visit and the order.
The steps
- The source. Take orders from the Shopify admin, which counts them server-side.
- The denominator. Stick with sessions and don't change again. Shopify changed how it counts them between September 21 and 23, 2026 without recalculating historical data, so a rate from before and a rate from after can no longer be compared.
- The window. Use a rolling 28 days, exactly four weeks. A calendar month contains four or five weekends, which is enough to shift the rate.
- Constant weights. Before concluding there's a drop, recalculate the recent period using the device and source mix of the reference period. If the gap closes, you're looking at a traffic mix effect.
- The target. Pick your best quarter over two years, at comparable traffic, and track that rate alongside revenue per visit, which is the rate multiplied by average order value. As long as that quarter predates the change in counting, keep it as an order target and reset the rate after four full weeks, as the page devoted to this update explains.
The trap
The overall rate moves when the traffic mix changes, even if the site stays the same. Take a hypothetical example. In May, 60% of visits on desktop at 3% and 40% on mobile at 1.5% give 2.4%.
In June, a social campaign flips the weights, with the same rates per segment, and the overall rate falls to 2.1%. One store manager described this shift to us: since his SEO efforts, his conversion rate had only gone down, whereas it was higher when he relied mostly on paid channels.
Before deciding on a redesign over three tenths of a point, break down your rate by device and by source.
The sentence to present
Copy this sentence, then rewrite it with your own numbers for your leadership (the 1.9% in the example is hypothetical).
"Our target is 1.9% over 28 days: it's our best quarter of the past two years, at comparable traffic. The industry averages going around isolate neither France nor our average order value level, so I propose we judge ourselves on our own history and on revenue per visit."
