Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for every Ecommerce business

Countants
4 min readJul 23, 2018

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As an established Ecommerce business, are you solely relying on your sales numbers to measure your overall success? To be able to improve your sales revenue, you must also track and measure your key performance indicators (or KPIs), which act like milestones to help any Ecommerce business achieve their sales and customer support objectives.

Focusing on your crucial KPIs can indicate whether your online retail business is on track to meeting its goals and objectives, along with the changes you need to make to increase your customer base and revenues.

This article outlines the top 10 KPIs that are applicable to any Ecommerce retail business

1. Sales Conversion Rate:

Sales conversion rate is the percentage of visitors on your Ecommerce website that go on to make a purchase. This metric is calculated by the number of sales divided by the number of visitors. The average conversion rate for most successful Ecommerce sites is between 1–2%.

2. Website Traffic:

In simple terms, website traffic is a measure of the total number of visitors to your Ecommerce website. Thanks to technology, Google Analytics and Ecommerce business analytics tools can provide deeper analytics on website traffic including:

– Number of page views per visit

– Traffic sources other than Google search engine

– Average time spent on your website

– Differentiating between first-time and repeat visits

With the growing number of visitors using their smartphone to access or make purchases on Ecommerce sites, measuring the mobile visits (or mobile site traffic) and optimizing your website display for smartphones can be another crucial KPI.

3. Average Order Value:

Average Order Value (or AOV) is an indication of the average order value in terms of your local currency. AOV indicates how much any customer spends in a single order and is measured by dividing the total earned revenue by the number of orders.

4. Number of Transactions:

This KPI can be more effective when used in combination with AOV or the Website traffic KPIs.

5. Revenue:

This metric is calculated per visitor and provides the average revenue earned from each visitor during a single website session.

6. Conversion Rate:

This crucial KPI metric is calculated by dividing the number of website visitors by the total number of conversions. Similar to sales conversion, this metric is also represented by percentages.

7. Gross Margin:

In simple terms, gross margin is the profit earned from the sale of each product. A healthy gross margin is required for the managing the bottom line of any business. It is measured from the overall sales revenue minus the cost of the sold goods. According to a 2014 Ecommerce benchmark study, the average gross margin was 40% for companies earning $1 million (or above) and 30% for earnings under $100,000.

8. Returns on Ad Spend:

You can use the Google Analytics tool to measure the returns (or revenue) on Advertising spend. This indicated the overall revenues earned from money spent on online advertising.

9. Customer Lifetime Value:

Customer Lifetime Value (or CLV) metric is an indication of the business value of your customer over their lifetime to your brand. Easy to measure using Google Analytics, CLV enables Ecommerce businesses to estimate marketing costs and improve customer loyalty.

10. Cart Abandonment Rate:

The average rate of users abandoning their shopping cart (without making a purchase) for Ecommerce sites can be as high as 69.2%, based on statistics compiled by Baymard Institute. Shopping cart abandonment can be due to several reasons including high shipping charges, complicated checkout processes, and website errors.

Measuring the Cart abandonment rate is important for Ecommerce businesses to understand the reasons and make required website changes. This rate is measured using the total number of completed and initiated transactions.

Summary

This article outlines only 10 of the crucial KPIs that are applicable to any Ecommerce business enterprise. Depending on your business objectives, you can choose from a host of other KPI metrics that are more relevant to your online retail business model and can help you position and market your retail products more effectively to your online customers.

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Countants

We build cloud-based data infrastructure & custom analytics solutions for eCommerce companies. www.countants.com