Guest comment: 7 ways to monitor your ecommerce performance

The season is now in full swing. Your customers are attentively listening to your special offers and are spending time on your site. It is imperative that you take advantage of this site traffic from both new and old customers by making each purchasing journey quick and easy.

To ensure this, all etailers should be in a position where they can apprehend and react to any and every issue that might keep a consumer from purchasing now or in the future. The key is to monitor every aspect of the business and to react quickly in order to capture every possible sales opportunity.  Every issue that is overlooked or unresolved will invariably cost you money many times in both the short and long-term.

1. Optimise site search

Never allow a customer to receive a “no matches to your search” message on your site.  Review your search terms daily, and create appropriate redirects to relevant products (by offering alternative product recommendations) or to a page that explains you don’t carry the product and offers alternative solutions. Also, take advantage of your search results page by highlighting products at the top based on what you want to promote at the time.

2. Page paths and hurdle rates

One way to determine what’s working on your site and what’s not is to analyse how your customers are travelling through your site and develop ‘hurdle rates’ that define success criteria for a given data point.  Setting a baseline, or a hurdle, based on the past performance of your site will allow you to quickly answer the question, ‘is this good or bad?’ Hurdles should be applied to all types of metrics.  Consider starting with search keywords, promotional campaigns, page performance and product performance.

3. Customer service monitoring

Your customer service representatives give you unique insight into the problems that customers are encountering on your site.  Talk to your customer service representatives regularly as well as their managers and you will soon see clearly the challenges you might not have found otherwise. 

4. Post-purchase surveys

Customer feedback measures can serve as early warning systems for bigger problems down the line. Methods such as one-to-one interviews, email surveys and simple loyalty questions such as “Would you recommend us to a friend?” can be used in conjunction with monitoring of return patterns and trends in customer calls to identify problems and determine areas which need to be the focus of improvement.

5. Daily and weekly sales projections monitoring

Paying close attention to your sales projections and results is always smart, but becomes crucial during the holiday season.  It’s not enough to review them quarterly or even monthly, you need to develop daily sales projections and monitor them every day.  When you aren’t making your numbers, you have to react.  Keep last minute promotions on hand to pull out when needed.

6. Coordination with customer service and fulfilment

Throughout the year—but especially during the holiday surge—you should be communicating your business and promotional plans to customer service and fulfilment teams on a daily basis. Let them know when to expect peaks of activity which will translate to an increase in number of calls and incoming deliveries. Peak season is a key time to be tightly communicating and sharing daily sales projections and results every day.  Work with your sales team to create “Hot Sheets” on a regular basis that outline the hot products of the week and the upcoming promotions scheduled.  And make sure your customer service representatives are communicating issues and feedback to you on a regular basis.  They can help you identify problem areas you might otherwise not know about.

7. Coordination with Third Party Delivery Companies

Don’t forget to prepare your third party delivery companies for peak season. Identify key selling days and even off days when you will be offering appealing discounts and be sure they are ready to meet your needs in a timely, effective manner.

Going that extra mile to ensure that these measures are implemented and that the daily meetings take place will undoubtedly be time consuming and could even mean extra hires to make sure it all gets implemented.

However, consider the typical increase in peak season sales as well as the latest research findings from Verdict which has forecasted online retail growth of 18.6% in 2009 and it justifies the extra investment. Staying focused on apprehending any issues and having the resources to react quickly and effectively will ensure that you can maximise sales both short-term with existing customers and long-term with new ones.

By Steve Davis, evp & president, International and Jeff McCall, senior vice president of strategy services of GSI Commerce

www.gsicommerce.com

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