The top 10 conversion rates by online retailers in January ranged from 9.6% (Amazon.com) to 14.1% (proflowers.com), according to Nielsen/NetRating (insert huge grain of salt here).

Depending on your disposition, this is either encouraging or disheartening news.

• Does it mean that 10-15% conversion rates are a goal you should work towards?
• Does it mean your 2.4% conversion rate is a terrible embarrassment?

I don’t think it means either. Let’s take a closer look at who made this list and how they did it.

• Three firms sell flowers. Who comparison shops flowers? What would you compare? If you just did something stupid, or tomorrow is ‘the day’ and you just remembered that, you buy the flowers.
• Tickets.com. Everyone must know by now that every ticket seller on the internet sells from one database (ebay, stubhub, and craigslist excepted.). There is no point in comparison shopping. You want tickets, you buy them.
• QVC. What’s their conversion rate for TV viewers? Their website is functionally a cart, so it could be argued that they’ve got 86.2% cart abandonment.
• Coldwater Creek and Lands’ End. Huge catalog mailers. Again, many many visitors coming just to place orders considered offline. If your site dropped 4M catalogs, your conversion rates would zoom too.
• OfficeDepot.com. Many no-point-in-comparing products and I assume lots of business orders from people who have accounts and replenish online frequently.
• eBay and Amazon. These are impressive - but they’re ebay and amazon. Comparing them to almost anyone isn’t fair or informative.

The message it seems is that if you need to deliver an overall conversion rate of 10% or greater, you need 30M registered users who buy from you 3-5 times per year, a 24-hour television channel, a pattern of inflicting back pain on innocent mailmen 3-4 times each year, or to sell products which are purchased as a result of some ages-old game of emotional blackmail.

Yet for many, those methods may not be practical.

That doesn’t mean you have to simply accept the shop.org and FireClick reported broad averages of 2-3% range.

There are many things most sites can do to dramatically improve conversion rates. There are also much smarter ways to measure and consider conversion rates than the overall site average. While that may be an interesting for conference-room conversation, it’s a lot more important to break down conversion rates by method-of-contact (email vs organic vs display vs PPC), based on the place in their buying cycle where visitors engage with you, or based on user intent as evidenced in their actions/expressions.

These are big topics in and of themselves, which I’ll dive into more deeply in a future post. Hat tip to Bryan Eisenberg, whose been on conversion rate watch for longer than any of us, for bringing all this up in his recent ClickZ column.