Top-7 indicators for owners of online stores

Many owners of online stores make a serious mistake, thinking that by creating a website, even with a unique design, on an expensive and functional engine, filling it with goods and eliminating the main mistakes, their work ends here, and after that you just need to monitor the turnover by sales and shipments.

After the launch of the online store, it is very important to keep your hand on the pulse, keeping track of the basic parameters of its life.

1. Income and profit

The first thing you need to look at are incomes and profits. For any business, profit is paramount, it is profit that is the force that moves your business forward. When the business project is still too small, and all costs are in the owner’s head, then everything is simple, and it is immediately clear that it is rational as a cost and what is not. But when it grows, it can be very difficult to detect a leak, so it’s imperative that not only income, but also expenses, must be taken into account without fail.

2. Traffic

Getting traffic to your website is the first step in promoting sales in online store. You can not sell anything if you do not have visitors, and therefore – customers.

• Be sure to monitor the following:
• Total traffic in comparison with each month.
• Your primary source of traffic – referring sites (which), search engines (which), etc.
• Your TOP 10 keywords to get an idea of ​​how effectively you use SEO, as well as to understand how you can attract more new customers (not just people who are looking for a company or brand name).
• What kind of traffic comes from those sources on which you specifically work (forums, bulletin boards, banner placement, contextual advertising, etc.).
• Your % of new visits vs. % of returning users – this can be tracked in Google Analytics.

3. Conversion

If your online store does not allow you to view the conversion rate, you can set it up manually in the Google Analytics panel. To do this, you need to create a buy goal and track conversions for this purpose. The rudest and easiest way to measure conversion is to divide the number of visitors by the number of sales. Having learned it, you can measure its cost. For example, if you have 100 visitors – 1 sale, and to attract 100 visitors you spend $ 10, it’s easy to calculate that one sale from the site costs $ 10.

4. Returning customers and their retention time

Almost always, it is much easier to sell goods to existing customers than to find and sell something new. Re-selling is very attractive, as it costs much less than a new one, so it’s worth keeping track of how many of your customers have returned, why, and how soon.

Often, even such an easy way, like sending an electronic message to the database of your customers, informing about promotions, new goods and services, discounts, etc., gives an increase in sales. And these people are much more likely to buy again.

5. The best products

The Pareto rule states that 20% of the effort gives 80% of the result. Concerning the goods, this rule also works. Approximately 80% of the profit is 20% of production. This is certainly general, but the principle is that focusing on those goods and services that are sold more than others, or products that have much higher profits, can give you the most out of your time and money.

In your reporting, whether it is built into the electronic platform of the store, or accounting, should have indicators of the best-selling and most profitable goods.

6. Refuse to purchase

One of the most disappointing things for the owners of online stores is the statistics of the refusal to purchase. When the buyer has passed a long process of selecting the product, he agreed that with the fact that he is your future buyer and at the last moment closed the page with the basket because of some annoying little thing on the order registration page.

The purchase process should be as simple as possible, no additional fields, for example, when the “Surname” field “Name” “Patronymic” is separated into separate lines, they are also mandatory.

Ordering should be as simple as possible, in a few clicks. Registering on the site to complete a purchase is a guaranteed way to increase the number of refusals from buying through the site.

7. Response Time

Watch how fast you or your staff respond to emails from your site, how quickly it processes the order. Too long an answer is a very big problem from the point of view of the buyer. If he doubts the purchase and asks the question in the comments to the product or by mail, he should receive an answer immediately, because this is his last barrier before making a purchasing decision. If you call the buyer after placing an order after 2 days, but be sure, if he and make a purchase from you, it will be the last. Because if you take so long to answer during the sale, what can you expect in case of service and guarantee?

If the online store is not a hobby, but a serious earnings tool, then it refers to it, respectively. Design should be convenient and unconventional, the product must have an exhaustive description with a photo and characteristics. Collect frequently asked questions from buyers, and create a page with answers to them on the site in the “Frequently Asked Questions” column. On the site, the buyer should see the answers to all his possible questions – is there any guarantee how to buy, how is the delivery going, how is the payment going, what should I do if the goods do not like and so on.