32 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Ecommerce - KPI Examples

8/18/2019 32 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Ecommerce - KPI Examples

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32 Key Performance Indicators

(KPIs) for Ecommerce

319 shares

Analytics (/blog/topics/analytics)

37 comments (/blog/7365564-32-key-performance-indicators-kpis-for-ecommerce#comments)

by Mark Hayes 7 minute read

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Performance should inform business decisions and KPIs should drive actions.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are like milestones on the road to online retail success.

Monitoring them will help ecommerce entrepreneurs identify progress toward sales, marketing,

and customer service goals.

A performance indicator is simply a quantifiable measurement or data point used to gaugeperformance relative to some goal. As an example, it may be a goal for some online retailers

to increase site traffic 50 % in the next year. Relative to this goal, a performance indicator

might be the number of unique visitors the site receives daily or which traffic sources send

visitors (pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization, brand or display advertising, or

a YouTube video).

For some goals there could be many performance indicators — often too many — so often

people narrow it down to just two or three impactful data points known as key performance

indicators. KPIs are those measurements that most accurately and succinctly show whether or

not a business in progressing toward its goal.

Setting Goals and Identifiying KPIs


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Selecting KPIs begins with clearly stating goals and understanding what areas of business

impact those goals. Of course, KPIs can and should differ for each of an online retailer's goals,

whether those are related to boosting sales, streamlining marketing, or improving customer

service.

Here are a few examples of goals and associated KPIs:

GOAL 1 — Boost sales 10% in the next quarter. KPIs include daily sales, conversion rate(http://www.shopify.com/blog/6700752-9-elements-you-need-to-conversion-test), site traffic.

GOAL 2 — Increase conversion rate 2% in the next year. KPIs include conversion rate,

shopping cart abandonment rate, associated shipping rate trends, competitive price trends.

GOAL 3 — Grow site traffic 20 percent in the next year. KPIs include site traffic, traffic

sources, promotional click-through rates, social shares, bounce rates.

GOAL 4 — Reduce customer service calls by half in the next 6 months. KPIs include

service call classification, identify of page visited immediately before the call, event that

lead to the call.

It should be easy to see that there are many performance indicators, and the value of those

indicators is directly tied to the goal progress measured. Monitoring which page someone

visited before initiating a customer service call makes sense as a KPI for GOAL 4 since it

could help identify areas of confusion that when corrected would reduce customer service

calls, but that same performance indicator would be almost useless for GOAL 3.

With the idea that KPIs should differ based on the goal being measured, it's possible to

consider a set of common performance indicators for ecommerce. Here are 32 common

ecommerce key performance indicators. Just remember that the performance indicators listed

below is in no way exhaustive.

32 Key Performance Indicators

Sales Key Performance Indicators:

Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual sales

Average order size (sometimes called average market basket)

Average margin

Conversion rate

Shopping cart abandonment rate

http://www.shopify.com/blog/6700752-9-elements-you-need-to-conversion-test


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New customer orders versus returning customer sales

Cost of goods sold

Total available market relative to a retailer's share of market

Product affinity (which products are purchased together)

Product relationship (which products are viewed consecutively)

Inventory levels

Competitive pricing

Marketing Key Performance Indicators:

Site traffic

Unique visitors versus returning visitors

Time on site

Page views per visit

Traffic source

Day part monitoring (when site visitors come)

Newsletter subscribers

Texting subscribers

Chat sessions initiated

Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest followers or fans

Pay-per-click traffic volume

Blog traffic

Number and quality of product reviews

Brand or display advertising click-through rates

Affiliate performance rates

Customer Service Key Performance Indicators:

Customer service email count

Customer service phone call count

Customer service chat count


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Average resolution time

Concern classification

Once you have set goals and selected KPIs, monitoring those indicators should become an

everyday exercise. And most importantly: Performance should inform business decisions,

and you should use KPIs to drive actions.

319 shares

37 comments

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Wes CoughlinFebruary 21 2013, 12:26pm

You mention " monitoring those indicators should become an everyday exercise."

Is there any online software to help quickly monitor these figures? A combo of google

analytics, Sumall, Mailchimp, and social on a one page dashboard would be cool.


6/16

Wendy Guerin

February 21 2013, 01:50pm

Wes – check out Cyfe for the dashboard.

Lars Groth-Rasmussen


You can also try out Qlikview, they have a full free version

http://www.qlikview.com/us/explore/experience/free-download and if you combine it

with a Salesforce.com developer version http://developer.force.com/ you would get a

fantastic overview. Do Shopify consider collaborating with companies like these in the

future??

Julie Henderson


Nice list of KPIs. I like the idea of defining a goal first then choosing the appropriate

metrics that work toward hitting that goal.

Annie Hawkins


Hi Wes, good question! You should check out Domo. They care about making it easy

to see all the data you care about in one beautiful dashboard. They also have a

solution for retailers: http://www.domo.com/solutions/retail

Jason Greenberg


Hi Wes, you should take a look at Social Annex their analytics include demographics,

Social ROI, audience likes and interest, and more that update daily;

http://bit.ly/VccB1t. Their services also include tools that will help boost and track all of

the KPI’s listed above.

Thanks for the post Mark!


7/16

Kris

February 26 2013, 12:20am

Wes there is geckoboard :)

Website Design Company


This blog is very informative..thanks for sharing your views

Gooddens

March 01 2013, 12:57pm

this is nice list of kpi to check the peormance of shopping sites.

Suana William

March 08 2013, 06:31am

KPIs are bread and butter of successful e-commerce consultancy for sure. This article

explains really well how to go about choosing and setting up your own set of KPIs to

track. I especially like the part about finding your own baseline.

Dave Huss

March 11 2013, 02:30pm

Nice list of KPIs, and yes it is important to track them on a regular basis for sure.

One KPI that you didn’t mention that I use often (especially when doing paid traffic like

Adwords) is profit per visitor.

Profit Per Visitor = Average Order Value * Average Margin * Conversion Rate

That KPI makes it really easy to project if buying traffic through Adwords or other

sources would be profitable because you can directly compare it to cost-per-clicks.


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Example:

You sell widgets with average order value of $200

Your average margin is 50%

Your conversion rate is 1%

$200 * 0.5 * 0.01 = $1.00 Profit Per Visitor

That means you could pay up to $1.00 per click in Adwords and expect to make a

positive ROI

My post here goes into more detail about it:

http://ecommercedouble.com/simple-2-minute-test-to-determine-if-adwords-will-be-

profitable-for-you/

e commerce web solutionMarch 13 2013, 01:23am

Thanks for the idea. For making ecommerce successful, keeping this key performance

indicators in mind is important.

ABC's of Ecommerce

March 16 2013, 09:24am

Good list but you have forgotten one very important performance indicator – the

refund rate. If you have many sales but your refund rate is high, then there is nothing

good about those sales… only loses.

You can read more about this and how to lower your refund rate and increase your

conversion rate in the 6th chapter of my ebook, available at http://www.abc-of-

ecommerce.com

Bernie Smith

March 18 2013, 03:24am

Key Performance Indicator’s are most important factor of online business and play

most important role in decision making process for increasing market strategy and

performance.


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suhana

April 09 2013, 07:12am

HI

Today i came across this amazing new website named nupinch.com…i really think

you guys should check it out..

Link: http://bit.ly/XczfI3

shazzid

June 06 2013, 01:25am

hi

i want to know some KPI examples for Accounts department. can anybody provide methat?

Eco

September 19 2013, 06:12pm

Just starting my goals for my business and putting together my vision for the next 5

years and your post was very informative. Thank you.

Oluwatosin

September 26 2013, 08:43am

Quite educating. Please can i have the KPIs in a Consruction Company?

Apalife.com


Can someone help me ? What formula is caculating the KPI of Ecommerce. Or What

formula does I got a KPI ‘s Ecommerce.


10/16

Debashish Gupta

October 18 2013, 03:45am

Very valuable information in this blog. Thank you very much.

Meena

October 25 2013, 09:11am

Very informative blog.Thank you for listing KPIs for Digital commerce

Sreeram

December 18 2013, 07:14am

Hi Wes, you can also check out http://ubiq.co to track Ecommerce metrics

Daniel


I am a very small inbound marketing agency and measurement plus analysis seems

so critical for all my clients but it’s my job to show them why and how. I often have to

use the phrase, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. You were very clear in

this post how important it is to pay attention to analytics. I am learning how to separate

the key KPIs from more useless reports which seems to be expanding all the time. If I

had one item of value that I could offer to your readers, it’s to learn which are the 5 to

10 reports and key performance indicators that make their decision making process

smoother. Your blog posts seem to be, and should be of great help in this area.

Education is everything.

ashraf siddiqui


i would like to know about Logistics supply chain distribution and transport KPI


11/16

RLS-911

March 29 2014, 07:56pm

Great blog with good, clear information. I am just starting out researching how to

effectively and successfully conduct eCommerce. Within the past 2-weeks I registered

a domain name and secured a website host. I have a marketing and business degree

and am looking towards online eCommerce as a way expand business and revenue.

Thanks to those who included informational links in their posts. I’ve looked at themand they are helpful. Glad I happened upon this blog.

Yatin Bhatia

May 29 2014, 01:02pm

I just saw this conversation.. great list of KPI.. But if we look at all of them, these are

high frequency and impact decisions and needs a system that embed properly in thedecision cycle. Systems that can engineer decisions not just share the numbers and

leave us alone in the last mile..

I know some systems that do it very well.. Anyone interested can call me at (510) 517-

3347. I’ll be happy to help..

Mark D

June 22 2014, 06:21pm

Are there ecommerce & retail industry benchmarks so compare the KPIs for my

company against? Where can we find them?

Grant Crowell

July 16 2014, 05:11pm

Great list, although what’s missing are video KPIs! Online video has some distinctive

KPIs of it’s own — both for YouTube and professional online video players.

Carlo Alberto Dall'Amico

July 22 2014, 06:00am


12/16

In reply to Wes, let me suggest our eCommerce analytics platform: Wunderdata.com

We provide you with a cloud BI solution to track and analyze nearly everything

mentioned in the above list.

In reply to Mark D: along the line of this post we recently researched on what are the

essential KPIs for online shops / eCommerce. We provide a framework to choose

which KPIs to track, define the KPIs themselves, and give benchmarks (when data is

available and when it make sense)

here’s the full article: http://wunderdata.com/key-performance-indicators-kpi-

ecommerce/

anuj veer

July 26 2014, 08:11am

quite informative …nice blog.

PETER B.L BORLO

August 31 2014, 08:57pm

this is an illuminating lecture.however,it would more gladdening if u can come up with

KIPs in PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IN THE DEVELOPING COUNTRIES OF

AFRICA.THANKS.

Sean

October 27 2014, 02:48pm

Wes and others—I’m late to the party, but you could check out Spring Metrics.(www.springmetrics.com). They have an easy to read analytics dashboard which

covers the most important KPIs.

The important thing is to identify the KPIs which are central to your unique business.

Conversion rate might not be high on the list, but AOV might be.

Isha Sharma


13/16


Hello!

Great article and advice from everyone. I am in the process of staring my e commerce

business and wondering what should be my Goal for 1st year or which KPI I should be

focussing on(if any in particular). Would love to hear some thoughts from the personal

experiences. Thanks.

J.Nuno

November 15 2015, 01:55pm

Been using Cyfe and realy its all-in-one sollution!!!

http://www.cyfe.com/r/135656

Romain Caisse


Great article. Thanks for putting this together.Looking forward to more of this. I found

an interesting article regarding ecommerce here you can find it http://goo.gl/kmhLsm

Melvin Finner

March 16 2016, 05:17pm

Hell Web developers,designers and fellow Entrepreneurs

I’d like to get some input on my new shopify website www.r3sportsapparel.com and

see what your thoughts may be as far as any advice you can offer. I’m new to the

whole ecommerce thing and would really love to get some input from anyone that’swilling to give it.

Thanks….

Khalid Ahmad Shah

April 04 2016, 04:52am


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Hi Team ,

I’m planning to start my online shopping portal.and I’m alone who will be doing it.

Is it possible for a single person to start at the starting phase.

And I’m on a very tight budget, so if you guys can suggest an estimated budget plan.

Thank you

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32 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Ecommerce - KPI Examples