The first of a 2-part series on 4 core ecommerce goals and their associated Key Performance Indicators.
A partner of ours recently drew our attention to a post we published a good few years ago in which they were featured, and we thought it was worth updating the series for 2021. Key performance indicators (‘KPIs’) are, as the name suggests, important markers for your online retail success. Monitoring your past and present performance using insightful systems like Volo Vision will help you identify trends, anticipate issues, and plan your business decisions accordingly. By analysing your data, you’ll gain an accurate perspective on how your business is progressing towards its core goals. Some of these objectives will have many performance indicators, so narrowing these down to the most impactful data will help keep you focused. Here are two of the four core goals and their associated KPIs that help boost sales, streamline marketing and improve customer service.
Boost sales. Associated KPIs: Daily sales, average order value and site traffic.
Being able to report on and analyse your past sales performance will help you anticipate trends and issues your business needs to react to. Look at things like how much and how fast individual products are selling across different channels and regions. How profitable is each item? What’s the average order value? What’s selling seasonally and how can you be best prepared? There are lots of ways you can use this data to boost your top line sales, but start by looking at the state of your listings. Poorly performing products may be down to quality of information, language or pricing presented to buyers.
It’s also worth taking a look at the sales data for each of your channels. Although the more places you sell stock on generally means your products have more potential for people to see them, it’s a good idea to take a serious look at the channel or channels that are under-performing and draining your resources, and focus your energies on the successful platforms.
International sales is another key driver of sales growth. Volo Vision has a report that drills down into your performance to see what products are accounting for growth in new markets. Furthemore, If you haven’t really experimented with promotions and kits or bundles, now may be the time if you want to increase sales fast as well as increase your SKUs on offer. Choose a system that allows you to create bundles easily to cut down on the workload.
Start by analysing which products best suit promotions or start to recommend to your customers products that work well together. Make sure your analytics/reporting engine allows you to gather daily and hourly averages to point the way towards the best time to run promotions.
Increase conversion rates. Associated KPIs: Conversion rates, shopping cart abandonment rates, shipping rate trends, competitive price trends and pay per click (‘PPC’).
Getting customers to your store is one challenge, but getting them to the checkout is a completely different ball game. If you manage to get them there, there are still many road blocks which see them abort their shopping session. Can you find out why people aren’t completing their orders? If so, this analysis provides very valuable intel. Don’t have a complex checkout process that undoes all your hard work.
Could it be that customers are dropping off when they see your shipping rates, or when they find the payment process too difficult and timely, or they find a better price with a competitor, or that the product has sold out by the time they get to checkout? If your data points to any of these culprits, tweak these things one at a time and see how your conversion rates alter. Test, test and test again is the motto.
Other KPIs can give you a view on what’s affecting conversion. Stock forecast reports help you understand the average lead time on SKUs, so you can keep up with demand or streamline your offering if the demand doesn’t exist. Ideally, your system can send you instant email notifications if an item’s stock level goes ‘amber’ or ‘red’, according to the rules you put in place. Trend forecasting is something that comes naturally to some people, and a well-developed hunch or gut feel can help some sellers to take markets by storm. But for most, it’s about hard work and researching which products customers and regions are reacting to in order to achieve better conversion rates.
To talk to us about your ecommerce growth goals, please get in touch here.
