There are many different e-commerce performance indicators you can track and measure to ensure your startup is on the right path. Using an advanced accounting solution, a reliable inventory management app, and a powerful content management system will make the tracking of these indicators much easier. Whether you’re selling high-end IT services or local bakery products, you don’t want to ignore the following 10 key e-commerce startup performance indicators.
- The number of unique visitors your e-commerce store gets daily/weekly/monthly
More than tracking and comparing visitor counts, you want to find out which of your product pages get the most views, and why.
- Time on site per visit
You want to find out what parts of your site engage your visitors and customers the most.
- Return rate
Do many of the orders customers place on your website suffer from high return rates? Are there any specific products that are driving these high return rates, and if so, can you identify them? Or are the return rates caused by poor product descriptions/images?
- Checkout/cart abandonment due to product unavailability
A high rate can be a major sign that your current inventory control system or approach isn’t working properly and that you may need an inventory management app with business intelligence and forecasting capabilities.
- New customers
A healthy startup will have an ever-increasing number of new customers. Do take into account fluctuations due to seasonality (depending on the products/services your selling).
- Gross margin percentage rate
This is the difference between revenue and cost of goods sold, divided by revenue. With an advanced QuickBooks inventory control app it’s very easy to keep track of it.
- Average order value
Are your customers filling their carts with products or buy few products often? Tracking your average order value over time can help inform your marketing efforts, promotions, as well as long-term pricing strategy for new products.
- Social media buzz
Some key performance indicators here are Facebook Likes and number of people talking about this, and Twitter retweets.
- Referral sources
How many of your visitors/customers find your site using search engines/email/ads/social media?
- Open customer support tickets
What are most about? Can you discern any patterns or common grounds of complaint when looking at them? Tracking open customer support tickets can help you understand the most frequent problems your customers are facing and deal with them effectively.
In the end, remember that tracking key e-commerce startup performance indicators becomes much easier if you use an accounting software and inventory management app with advanced tracking built into it. In this way all the data you track is available in an organized format that is easy to browse.
