Ecommerce category benchmarks, cited row by row.

Online penetration is the share of a category’s total sales that happen online, across every seller in that category, not just one retailer’s own site. A category at 56% online penetration means 56 cents of every dollar spent in that category is spent online somewhere, whether that’s a brand’s own store, a marketplace, or a competitor.

Blended CAC is the average dollar cost to acquire one paying customer, across paid and organic channels combined, for a typical direct-to-consumer brand in that category. It varies by category because of purchase frequency, competition for the same search and social inventory, and how much of the buying decision happens before someone ever lands on a site. Electronics runs high because of long research cycles and crowded paid search; pet products run lower because of strong repeat and subscription behavior.

We only publish a number when there’s a public source specific enough to defend. Baby & Kids and Other CPG & Retail span purchase behaviors too different to average into one honest figure, so we leave the row blank rather than publish a number that would mislead more than it informs. We’ll fill it in the moment a defensible source exists.

Every figure here is the best available public estimate we could find and independently cite, not a licensed industry data feed. Where public sources disagreed, we used the midpoint of the most commonly cited range and noted it. We review and update this table as better public data becomes available.