Due to the great ease of opening a virtual store and the success that many achieve, some entrepreneurs and managers believe that it is enough to make their products available on a site that sales will come automatically.
It is necessary, however, to understand that an e-commerce is a business in itself, so it must be managed as such, with information gathering, strategy definition, and constant decision making.
Without this, it is like sailing in the middle of an ocean without any kind of instrument, aboard a small boat.
However, do not be alarmed, because the online market brings a great advantage over physical stores: the metrics for online stores, which allow the measurement of virtually everything that is related to the business, from customer behavior to technical data such as logistics and billing. And another detail: all this in real time.
Now that you understand how important it is to track the metrics for the virtual store, find out some very important ones for your e-commerce.
Average Ticket
This metric is related to how much your customers spend, on average, in your virtual store. It is important to always have this data available, because it allows you to develop business strategies. It is easier to know how many customers you will need to win to reach the planned revenue for the month, for example.
It is also useful to have a panorama of customer behavior, knowing, for example, if the volume of purchases of goods with high added value is higher or lower and if this is in line with the company's strategy.
To calculate the average ticket, simply divide the total value of sales for the period by the number of sales.
An example: Sales in the period were R$ 50.000,00. In the same period 400 sales were made. The average ticket will be 50.000 / 400 = R$ 125,00.
Cost Per Customer Acquisition
This is one of the most important metrics for online stores. The cost per customer acquisition, or CAC, portrays how much the company spent to have effective customers in your e-commerce.
Therefore, this index informs the effectiveness of current marketing strategies. The lower it is, the better, because it indicates that less money is being spent to acquire and retain customers.
To calculate it, it is necessary to add up all the marketing and advertising investments made during the period and divide it by the number of customers won.
This metric must be analyzed together with the average ticket. If the CAC is higher than the average spending of your customer, it indicates that the business is operating at a loss, because more is spent on attracting the customer than it provides in revenue.
Another important use of the CAC is to define the necessary amount of resources invested to win the desired amount of customers to meet the store's goals.
Conversion Rate
The conversion rate indicates how many visitors to the online store actually consumed something. This is one of the metrics for online stores that must be closely monitored, because it is more important than having many visitors, is to have many of these people consuming.
Therefore, the higher the conversion rate, the better your e-commerce performance is. It indicates that visitors found the information they needed and felt confident enough to make the purchase.
The calculation of this metric should be done with the following formula:
(number of buyers / total number of visitors) x 100
The result will be given as a percentage of visitors who made a purchase.
If the result is low, this may indicate a number of factors, such as the online store having technical failures, lack of detailed information, difficult payment system, or a marketing campaign that is attracting people who are not the target audience of the business.
Cart Abandonment
This metric indicates problems in the checkout process in your online store. If the cart abandonment rate is high, it means that your company was able to attract people interested in your product, but they did not make the purchase.
Therefore, it is very likely that the problem is related to this step of the process. It may point to payment failures or difficulties, expensive freight or too long a delivery time, or even a lack of customer confidence in the store.
The calculation of the cart abandonment rate is done like this:
(number of people who include a merchandise in the cart / number of people who make the purchase) x 100
The result will indicate the percentage of people who abandon the cart with some merchandise in relation to the number of people who make the purchase.
This is one of the metrics for online stores that should be constantly monitored by a competent manager, because losing a sale in the final stage means that the company spent to attract a customer that did not generate revenue.
Thus, high abandonment rates demonstrate the need for urgent action to improve the finalization of the purchase process.
ROI & Mdash Return On Investment
To know whether the investments made in marketing are generating a return for the company through profit, this is the right metric. Therefore, one of the metrics for online stores that should be considered indispensable by you.
The ROI calculation is done as follows:
ROI = (revenue - marketing investments) / marketing investments
An example to better understand: A company invested R$ 10,000.00 in marketing campaigns and obtained a revenue of R$ 15,000.00. The calculation looks like this:
ROI = (15000 - 10000) / 10000
ROI = 5000 / 10000
ROI = 0,5
In this case the return was 0.5, or 50%, of the amount invested.
Citing just a few of the most important metrics for virtual store, you must have realized that by monitoring them, the manager is armed with information that allows:
- establish short, medium and long term strategies for e-commerce;
- Follow up the achievement of the established strategies;
- act quickly in case of deviations;
- identify opportunities not yet explored;
- increase revenues and reduce operational costs.
Therefore, monitoring the virtual store's information in real time allows management to follow the development of the enterprise and identify flaws in processes that can generate large losses if not corrected.
So, from now on, be sure to select and monitor the metrics for online stores and achieve the expected success. For this, get to know a tool that detects signals and points out errors in any digital business. Contact Testby!
