Before you statisticians start hammering me about it. I’m not saying these are the only stats you should be tracking or paying attention to in regards to your eCommerce site. That’s not what I’m saying at all. This is just a quick primer to make sure merchants understand the context of all of the various data available to them.
With that out of the way. There are only four stats that ultimately affect the success of your eCommerce business. Every single other stat that is tracked filters down to ultimately affect one or more of these core statistics. Understanding this simple concept can help you know which stats you should dig deeper into when you are looking to improve your business.
These are in no particular order and the importance of them can vary greatly depending on the details of your business model. None of these stats on their own are going to be eye opening or revolutionary, but it always surprises me how many merchants don’t grasp that this is really all the core ingredients to a successful business or make sure they focus efforts on improving all of them.
- Number of new customers: Pretty much everyone knows you need new customers to build a business.
- Average order value: Once you have a steady flow of customers coming in the door and a great way to quickly grow your business is to figure out how to get those customers to spend more. There are a lot of great ways to do this from simple cross sells and upsells to complex personalization. I’m sure we’ll get into more detail on some of these in future videos.
- Order Frequency: How often do your customers order from you? It is much cheaper to get a second order from a satisfied customer than it was to obtain that customer’s first order. Making each customer more valuable to you means, theoretically, that you could spend more money to acquire those customers. Keeping your customers engaged gives you a substantial advantage over your competitors.
- Overhead: What does it cost you to do all that you do? This is a very wide range of items depending on your business. From payroll to product costs and logistics, overhead is key to your profit margin and should be something you are constantly evaluating and looking to improve.
That’s it. Those are the 4 core statistics that affect your business. As always, I leave it to you. Is there some stat I’m missing or things that merchant’s should be looking at? Let me know your thoughts in the comments of this video. Do not let my opinion be the only one that’s heard.
