E-commerce is a growing industry, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s no secret that eCommerce is here to stay, and the numbers will only get bigger. According to Deloitte, eCommerce sales in 2022 totalled USD1.47 trillion — up 15% from 2022.
E-commerce is a data-driven business. E-commerce businesses must be able to monitor their performance and make decisions based on real-time data. They need to be able to answer questions like:
How many customers are visiting the website?
What products are they viewing?
What categories do they browse?
How long do they stay on each page?
How much money are they spending?
In today’s business climate, “performance” is often used to describe excellent work or achievement. But in the world of e-commerce, performance has a different meaning: metrics that monitor and measure the success of online businesses. E-commerce performance, when measured correctly, can not only be used to help a company determine how well it can compete in various channels but is also crucial for gauging whether an e-business’ marketing campaign is working as expected based on traffic levels and conversion rates.
While many data points go into measuring the performance of an e-commerce business, the following five recommendations highlight the most important metrics you should be tracking.
5 Top Practices for Monitoring E-Commerce Performance
Today’s e-commerce sites are complex and dynamic, requiring proactive monitoring to ensure they run smoothly and securely. Many factors contribute to an eCommerce store’s success: product quality, customer service experience and more. But one of the most important factors is how well you monitor your site’s performance. Here are five top practices for monitoring e-commerce performance:
- Start with a Good Baseline
A baseline is the starting point of your monitoring program. It should include a list of key metrics that tell you how things are performing now, so you can compare them over time. You’ll want to have metrics like orders per day, average order value, average revenue per visitor and conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who make purchases).
You can do this by looking at historical data from past months or years or by averaging the performance of similar sites in your industry. This will help you identify any behaviour changes and give you an idea of what constitutes “normal” for your website. Once you know what normal looks like, you can set up alerts so that when things change significantly (either positively or negatively), you will be notified immediately via email or text message.
2. Audit Your Data Sources
You may be collecting data from multiple sources, such as Web analytics software, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, inventory management systems and e-commerce platforms. The challenge is that each system has different ways of calculating critical metrics like revenue per visitor or conversion rate.
To get an accurate picture of your site’s overall performance, you need to reconcile these differences into a single set of numbers that reflect reality as closely as possible. This will enable you to identify trends over time and make necessary adjustments ahead of time rather than after the fact when it’s too late to recover lost sales.
3. Use observability for optimisation
A significant advantage of the eCommerce industry is that it has a lot of data to analyse. The amount of information is vast, and it’s growing every day. With this much data, it is easy to get lost in the details and forget what matters most: understanding how visitors interact with your website.
The first step to optimising an eCommerce site is identifying key performance indicators (KPIs). It’s important to know what these KPIs are and how they relate to each other so that you can make informed decisions on improving the site’s performance.
One way to do this is by using observability tools such as Middleware that monitor various aspects of your application and give you insights into how users interact with it.
The goal of continuous monitoring is to observe and understand the behaviour of a service or application, so it can be changed or adapted to improve its quality and availability. Achieving this requires that you identify metrics relevant to the business objectives and can capture them at scale, with high fidelity and at low latency.
4. Monitor critical metrics like conversion rates
Optimising your e-commerce website for better conversions is another essential practice that will help you improve overall sales performance. You should closely monitor metrics such as conversion rate, bounce rate and average order value. These indicate how well users interact with your website and whether they’re finding what they want on it. You can then use this information to make necessary improvements to increase conversions and boost sales further down the line.
Use an automated visitor tracking system (VTS) to track user behaviour on your site in real-time, giving you access to recordings of customers’ sessions as they interact with your product pages, checkout process, and more. Look at trends in visitor behaviour over time by comparing different cohorts — for example, comparing new users to returning users — using cohort analysis tools.
5. Customer experience monitoring
In the context of eCommerce, customer experience monitoring (CEM) refers to the practice of continuously monitoring end-user response times, click-through rates and other key metrics that reflect how well the site is serving customers. CEM tools typically use synthetic user agents (SUTs) or bots to simulate real users accessing your site or app, which can help identify bottlenecks in your system before they become apparent through manual testing or customer feedback.
Monitoring tools can be used to measure the performance of various applications and systems, including web servers, databases, networks, servers and applications themselves. They provide statistical data about the performance of these resources over time, including response times and availability information. Monitoring tools also allow you to generate alerts when there is any unusual activity (such as high CPU usage or network latency) that could lead to problems later on.
Wrapping Up
The demand for e-commerce monitoring is growing every year. As companies begin using the latest trends in commerce to reach more international markets, there is a need to be able to identify changes and threats quickly. This will ensure future sales and profit without significant setbacks. By adding these top practices to your current system of online transactions, you can continue growing with confidence.
Author’s Bio –
Srushti Shah is an ambitious, passionate, and out-of-the-box thinking woman having vast exposure in Digital Marketing. Her key focus is to serve her clients with the latest innovation in her field leading to fast and effective results. Working beyond expectations and delivering the best possible results in her professional motto. Other than work, she loves traveling, exploring new things, and spending quality time with family. Reach out to Srushti Shah on Twitter or LinkedIn
