eCommerce KPIs

What is eCommerce KPI?

eCommerce KPIs are the performance indicators, denoting customer behavior, growth, and profitability of an eCommerce business. Some of the basic eCommerce KPIs include website traffic, orders, inventory levels, etc., but there is more if you want to know in detail. It’s like an imaginary scale to determine how far you will go in the future, based on the progress from the past.

Let’s find out the most important eCommerce KPI metrics for modern eCommerce businesses.

9 key eCommerce metrics and KPIs

Website KPIs 

Marketing and growth teams of eCommerce companies must keep track of website KPIs like bounce rates, average user sessions, site load speed, pages per session, time on site, etc. This website KPIs denote detailed insights about people visiting your website, their digital experiences, engagement levels, site effectiveness, and conversion rates. 

One important eCommerce marketing KPI is average session duration, which denotes the average time users spend on the website.

eCommerce marketing KPIs

Other than website KPIs, eCommerce marketing teams should also measure a few other metrics - social media engagement, email open and click rates, ad traction, and return on ad spending. Return on ad spend here indicates the revenue generated from ads for every penny spent. Similarly, open and click rates denote the number of users who opened and engaged with the sales emails and newsletters.

Customer acquisition cost

Customer acquisition cost is an eCommerce KPI for marketing and sales teams that reveals the total cost spent to acquire a customer. It’s the total marketing and sales spending, which includes employee salaries, technology cost, advertising spending, travel and gifts, and other expenses. The rule of thumb is that customer acquisition cost must be lower than customer lifetime value, meaning that you get more than what you spend on a customer.

eCommerce Sales KPIs 

Sales teams of eCommerce companies must track a few KPIs to prove the effectiveness of their strategies. Some sales KPIs for eCommerce companies include total sales by hour, month, year, etc., average order value, number of transactions, average cart value, and more. There are also some advanced sales KPIs like the cost of goods sold, customer retention rates, cart abandonment rates, customer lifetime value, and the like.

Cart abandonment rates

Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of customers who add things to cart but leave before the check-out and payment process. Cart abandonment is an important eCommerce sales and marketing metric, which helps in increasing conversions and sales. Measuring cart abandonment, the company could understand issues that users face with making purchases, payment issues, poor navigation, high shipping costs, etc.

Customer lifetime value 

Customer lifetime value stands for the total revenue from a customer over their course of the relationship with an eCommerce company. It is a measure of customer loyalty and profitability. Understanding this can help the eCommerce business put more effort into making the relationship better and maximizing CLV and overall revenue. Example: running a rebates campaign for high-revenue-yielding customers.

Inventory turnover

Inventory management is a crucial part of eCommerce businesses. Inventory turnover is a KPI to measure how streamlined this operation is. It denotes how fast a company stocks up and sells its inventory stocks within a given time. A high inventory turnover denotes a fast movement of goods, better sales, and right stocking.

You can measure inventory turnover rate using the formula, cost of goods sold/total average inventory.

Other Inventory KPIs

Other than inventory turnover, there are KPIs like out-of-stock rate, return rate, inventory levels, and inventory carrying cost. All of this denotes how well you stock up goods and what is total expenditure to carry out goods storage.

It can also highlight any vendor, supply chain issues or sudden demand for a product (product going out of stock in a small duration).

Customer support KPIs

It’s important to know for eCommerce units how customers feel about the product, delivery timings, and customer service. To do that, the following customer support KPIs are a must—customer satisfaction rates (CSAT), average resolution time, net promoter score, and other product ratings. Here, average resolution time means the time taken to resolve a customer’s issue. Product ratings denote the ratings and reviews left by customers for each product.

Track eCommerce KPI with real-time dashboards 

There are in fact more than 9 eCommerce KPIs for growing businesses. But, you can’t track them all manually, which can become a hectic data collection and math task. Here’s where you could use eCommerce analytics dashboards, which automatically tracks it for you and keeps you up to date. Good news is that they are customizable, meaning you can pick any metric you want to analyze every day. 

It’s much easier to view real-time stats with dashboards than maintaining heavy spreadsheets and doing manual data analysis. 

Track all important eCommerce KPIs in one place with the help of interactive, colorful, and customizable dashboards.