6 Key Metrics to Audit the Performance of E-commerce Stores

Measuring the performance is as important as optimizing the e-commerce store to increase conversion. Measuring the performance will help you to find the effectiveness of your strategies, and plan for the future. Through various analytic tools, you can get valuable insight into your e-commerce store.

Key Performance Metrics for Online Stores

To frame effective strategies you need to keep track of some key metrics, the values of these metrics will help you to measure the performance of your e-commerce store. Here are 6 key metrics to keep track of:

Gross Profit Margin

It is important to know if the store is creating enough profit, to find the actual profit you will have to reduce all the expenses from the revenue. You have to make sure that the store is generating profit as well as revenue because you will need a profit for future expansions.

Conversion Rate

You will have to make sure that the website is fulfilling its purposes, either generate sales or convert leads. Conversion isn’t limited to website traffic. Evaluate conversion from different sources; advertising, email campaigns, and promotions to understand which is most effective in driving sales.

Store Traffic

Understanding visitor statistics such as where the traffic is coming from. Are the social media pages driving in traffic? How long are the visitors staying on the site, what is the bounce rate? Keeping track of unique visitor numbers will help find who is a returning visitor and who is a new visitor with new lead potential.

Average Sales Value

Having a large volume of sales is good for revenue and conversion rate, but if the average sale is of low value then it will affect the overall net profit. Check the average cart value of a customer, if it is low consider creating some new strategy to increase it such as providing relevant product suggestions before they checkout. Offering free shipping above a price level will also help to increase the average cart value in certain cases.

Cart Abandonment Rate

If you are getting more traffic and fewer sales, it means that visitors are leaving without making purchases. You can track the rate of cart abandonment with help of an analytics tool and find why the visitors are abandoning the cart. One of the solutions to reduce this is to send a personalized email reminding the users that they have left this product in their cart, you can even provide some offers on those products to encourage the user and make them purchase it. Read one such case study on how an eCommerce site improved its sale by 20%.

Mobile Traffic

The use of mobile devices has increased rapidly and most of the users are accessing the web through mobile devices, so it is important to measure and monitor the traffic from mobile devices and to make improvements and optimize the site for mobile users to easily access all the features of the e-commerce store.

Keeping track of these key metrics will help to find the effectiveness of the e-commerce store. With this, you can also evaluate the success of various strategies that you have in place to boost the performance. The data that you have got from the audit will also help to frame future strategies.

Looking to improve the performance of your ecommerce site? Get in touch with us, for a solution that solves your particular dilemma.

References:

[1].Rebecca Corliss, ‘How to Measure the Success of Your eCommerce Website’, Blog, Published June 2011,Blog.hubspot.com, accessed July 2017

[2].Elizabeth Hollingsworth, ‘How I measure eCommerce success’, Blog, Published May 2016, Practicalecommerce.com, accessed July 2017

[3].Igor Faletski, ‘3 Key Metrics for Evaluating Your Mobile Ecommerce Site’, Blog, Published Mar 2012,Mashable.com, accessed July 2017