7 ecommerce metrics to focus on

As a Shopify website owner with an up and running product or service business, you know what you want to sell and where you to sell it but understanding the consumer and their behaviour is a long term process. There are certain behaviours and actions of your consumers which, when understood, can help you improve your sales. It is imperative that you fine comb all the metrics that help understand consumer behaviour, that are important for you to determine your future sales. In order to improve your business proficiency, you need to figure out the metrics that play the most important part.

1. Categorized revenues: Now, you know you need to track the overall revenue of the business, which is a must. Although, more importantly, tracking revenues from every product, service, or channel (ecommerce or POS) helps you understand where the business is coming from. With robust reporting tools from Shopify and additional applications such as Appointo, you can even pull reports based on the appointments booked by your customers. Whether a certain product earns you higher revenue or an online appointment is the reason for the boost in your bottom-line, this insight is important to take strategic decisions in the long run.

2. Traffic: This is one of the most important metrics to start your journey. Traffic let's you track other metrics which might be responsible for increasing your sales today or in the future. It helps you keep a track on-

1. How many customers are visiting your website?
2. Who are these customers? What are their demographics?
3. Where are these consumers coming to your site from?
4. What part of the website experiences the highest bounce rate?

These are some of the answers that you will get once you start tracking your traffic. Based on this, you can make an informed decision on whether your marketing is reaching your target audience or whether your website is user-friendly, etc. This will be your first step to understand all other metrics responsible for your consumer behaviour and ultimately your sales.

3. Conversion rates: This is a metric that highlights the customer's trust in your business. The formula to calculate your Shopify site's conversion rate is:

No. of paid customers/ No. of visitors x 100

However, your conversion rates and traffic both can determine a lot of other metrics and areas that you may need to focus on. Your work does not end at the above-said formula. You need to find out the difference between the number of people visiting the website to the number of people checking out after purchase. There are 3 stages that an entrepreneur can determine their success rates in - first, depending upon the visitors, how many of them stay on the website for more than 2 minutes. Secondly, how many of them add items to the cart and lastly, how many of them make a purchase and checkout. Based on the data that you acquire from the above, you will understand some key components that are making your customers visit your website and what is driving them away.

4. Average time spent: Every time a customer engages with your brand, whether it's on your website or in a physical location, the time spent by the customer determines the customer's satisfaction with your company. Simply speaking, a customer who has actively spent more than 2-4 minutes on your ecommerce website - whether they converted into a paying customer or not, determines that the customer was satisfied with the user experience of your site and was interested in your offerings. This metric can be further categorized into the time spent per product/service page, on every section of the page, etc. Whether a visitor has reached your website and has left or bounced from your website within seconds or has managed to browse through your merchandise for more than 2 minutes - each of these numbers tells a story. Industry-standard suggests that if a visitor has stayed on your website for more than 2 minutes, the visitor climbs the ladder onto becoming a potential customer. Although this may differ from brand to brand based on your consumer behaviour, geography, or offering. A simple trick to determine your benchmark would be to keep an eye on the average graph over time and once the graph stabilizes, you have your average benchmark.

For service business, understanding the time spent by the customer on the service description before scheduling an appointment or the time spent by the customer when filling up the appointment form helps you decide what changes are necessary to improve the same. Appointo, the automated appointment scheduling application, with it's exhaustive reporting tool helps keep an eye on each of these metrics.

5. Average page views per session: This metric will play a role in determining how your website's user experience is and whether your marketing tactics have been fruitful or not. It gives you an overview on the number of pages visited by the customer in each of their sessions, i.e. every time they arrive at your website. There are certain behaviour patterns to look for when studying these statistics.   

6. Repeats and returns: This is probably the oldest metric in the history of business. A successful client is not the one who comes once, it is the one who comes back. We have understood the metrics which may have implications on the website and marketing, now let us have a look at the impact your merchandise has on your customers. Your business may flourish with first time customers, however, you may need them to keep coming back. With robust reporting tools from Shopify and additional applications such as Appointo can help you keep a track on the repeat customers based on their appointments alone. Therefore, this is a metric that you need to have a closer look at. This will entail whether your merchandise has the quality or your website provides the services that they promise.

The number of returns is an immediate variable to determine whether your merchandise is being well-received. Research suggests that around 18% returns of your products fall under the average rate of returns, if your returns are higher than 18%, steps need to be undertaken to lower the same. 

7. Miscellaneous metrics: Other metrics that may determine the ability of your potential customers to become customers are the Average Spending Limit of a customer on your website, number of orders, satisfaction surveys, appointments, employee-based revenues, employee-based appointments, appointment no-shows, cancelled orders, etc.

Check out the application on automated software scheduling, Appointo on the Shopify website.