Fashion ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks 2026

Key figures

Fashion converts at around 1.5% to 2.5% of sessions, and the spread between categories is wider than the spread between benchmarks.

• 2.4%median conversion rate across 500 fashion brandsCentra, 2025
• 1.62%UK and Ireland fashion conversion rate, September 2026 (1.29% a year earlier)IRP Commerce
• 0.8%median conversion rate for men’s fashion, the lowest categoryCentra, 2025
• £88.28average order value, UK and Ireland fashion, September 2026IRP Commerce
• £1.19revenue per session, UK and Ireland fashion, September 2026IRP Commerce
• 70.22%average online cart abandonment, all categoriesBaymard Institute

Benchmark table

What is a good conversion rate for a clothing brand?

Above your category's median: about 3.6% for womenswear, 2.2% for footwear and 0.8% for menswear in Centra's study, so a menswear store at 1.5% is doing well while an accessories store at 1.5% is not.

Accessories convert best because they are cheaper and carry no size risk. Menswear converts worst, at a third of the all-brand median; Centra's figures do not say why. Compare your store with its own category, not with an all-fashion average.

Fashion conversion rate in the UK

UK and Irish fashion sites converted 1.62% of sessions in September 2026, up from 1.29% in September 2025, and rank seventh of ten retail markets.

IRP Commerce also reports, for fashion clothing and accessories in September 2026:

• Average order value of £88.28 (down 2.09% on a year earlier) and an average item price of £59.44.
• Revenue per session of £1.19 and marketing cost per session of £0.11, with marketing costs equal to 9.04% of revenue.
• A bounce rate of 43.94%.
• Paid search brought 46.1% of sales, email 24.3% and direct visits 19.5%.

IRP Commerce publishes these figures monthly from its retailer panel, so they move from month to month. We re-read them at each quarterly review. For the share of clothing bought online, from ONS data, see UK online clothing sales statistics 2026.

Why do conversion benchmarks disagree?

Because they divide different things by different things: orders by sessions or by users, medians or averages, across different sets of stores.

• Sessions or users. IRP Commerce divides transactions by sessions. A rate based on unique users is higher, because one person can visit several times before buying.
• Median or average. Centra reports medians, which a few very high-converting stores cannot pull up. Averages usually sit higher.
• Which stores. Centra measures brands on its own platform; IRP Commerce measures a panel of UK and Irish retailers. Neither is a census of all fashion stores.
• Traffic mix. Paid search, email and returning visitors convert differently, so a store's channel mix moves its rate as much as its product pages do.

Figures circulating online for mobile and desktop conversion in fashion rarely name a primary source, so we do not list a device split. Check your own analytics by device instead.

How to calculate your conversion rate

Divide orders by sessions over the same period and multiply by 100: 250 orders from 10,000 sessions is a 2.5% conversion rate.

1. Pick one definition (orders ÷ sessions is the most common) and keep it.
2. Exclude internal, bot and test traffic.
3. Split by category, device and channel before comparing with a benchmark.
4. Compare the same weeks year on year, because fashion is seasonal.

Return-adjusted conversion: the rate that pays

In fashion a sale is not finished until the return window closes, so also track the share of sessions that end in an order the customer keeps: conversion rate × (1 − return rate).

This is arithmetic, not a published benchmark. As an illustration only, combining two figures from different studies, a 2.4% conversion rate and a 24.4% order return rate (the Coresight figure for US online apparel) would leave about 1.8% of sessions ending in a kept order. Use your own conversion and return rates.

The Fashion Returns Index 2026 lists the published return rates, and virtual try-on conversion statistics covers what is and is not known about try-on and conversion.

How this page is compiled

We list a benchmark only if its publisher names the data behind it, and we link to that publication. Agency and vendor blog figures with no named data source are left out, including the widely repeated device splits. Each figure is re-read every quarter and changes are logged here. Corrections: data@renderedfits.com.

Sources

• Centra, Conversion rate in fashion ecommerce: benchmarks from 500 brands (28 February 2025)
• IRP Commerce, Fashion Clothing & Accessories market data, UK and Ireland (September 2026, read 9 November 2026)
• IRP Commerce, Market Data Centre, all markets (September 2026, read 9 November 2026)
• Baymard Institute, cart abandonment rate statistics (average of 50 studies, updated 22 September 2025)
• Coresight Research, The True Cost of Apparel Returns (6 March 2023)

Every figure on this page links to the publication it comes from. Rendered Fits does not publish a conversion figure of its own. Last reviewed 9 November 2026 by Sienna Stones.