Critical Metrics In Ecommerce

For most websites, visitors rarely convert after the first visit. Most commonly, the first visit is used to gauge credibility. Subsequent visits may involve more complex interactions and, possibly, conversion events, which may happen weeks or months after the initial visit.

You should look for metrics to measure how many times do people visit before they finally convert or take some other desirable action. The metrics helps to answer questions like Do those visits occur within a short time frame or are there large gaps between sessions?

Such knowledge can be used to turn visitors into valuable, engaged users.

Another metrics you should keep on eye on are product returns. I would go out on a limb to say that ecommerce proudct return is the 'North Star Metrics'. eCommerce proudct return are a good measures of your shipping, content marketing, advertising, return policy and quality of Merchandise. This metrics is a good proxy to measure whether well your customers responds to all your business activities from your promoises to your quality of your product images.

Here are some figures

“Shoppers return 5 to 10 percent of what they purchase in store but 15% to 40% of what they buy online,” David Sobie, co-founder and CEO of Happy Returns told CNBC.

This metrics has one of the potential to bring everyone from marketing to fulfillment to cusomter service together to figure out what can be improved

- Are people being flicker minded? ( we are barking at the wrong trees)

- Is there a disconnect from what we put up on the products pages to what buyer expect?

- Are third-party shippers take care in delivering the promises of the brand? (If the merchandise arrives in a sorry state, that not going to reflect well on your brand)

- Do the brand over promise and under deliver?

Marketing Tech like Google Analytics, Facebook Ads Manager, Google Ads Manager, Email Service Providers, Retargeting Providers, Mobile App Marketing Partners, and App Store Marketing Partners don’t give you the product returns rate. They just tell you what credit they’re taking in terms of sales and performance a.k.a marketing attribution. (Assuming your nail this part in your analytics set-up)

Business are not being exposed to the data, and the tools they use don’t have a model to even work with the data.