Retailers that offer shopping online need to find ways of assessing how well their sites are operating and whether they are meeting the needs of customers. The latest report from Wolfgang Digital delves into the factors which have to be considered and compared in order to come up with an accurate picture of the relative merits of a particular digital outlet.

Analysts found that Google remains the main source of traffic for shopping sites, with 69 per cent of all visits originating from the world’s biggest search engine. It also generates 67 per cent of the revenue that retailers earn in the e-commerce space, which is undeniably impressive and shows the enduring impact of this service.

Facebook has also been identified as a growing force, as it now accounts for 5 per cent of traffic, up from 1.3 per cent in last year’s study. So retailers are having to account for their social media impact as well as their search rank, even if Google still reigns supreme at the moment.

Forty two per cent of all consumers who visit sites that provide safe shopping online do so via a mobile device, meaning that this is the biggest single platform for browsing in the market at the moment. Just a fifth of revenue comes from smartphone-originated sales, suggesting that people are still choosing to research and browse casually while on the move, reserving their purchases for when they are sitting in front of a desktop computer.

On average, just 1.5 per cent of people who visit shopping sites are then converted into paying customers. However, since it is getting harder and harder to measure the journey that consumers take, this should be seen as a fairly fluid figure and one which does not necessarily represent the reality of the market today.