Parth Vataliya
An e-commerce dashboard is like the heart of an online store. It is a perfect visual space that organizes the store, customers, and inventory, and more in one place. The market in which one clicks matters; the dashboard can give you clarity on your operations and act in no time. These tools convert key data into actionable insights and make real-time decisions, and help in preventing small changes from causing losses in the business.
Businesses should invest in developing dashboards, as they provide a centralized and visual overview of KPI to boost decision-making. Without using the analytical tool, your businesses will run at snail’s pace. Many times, this is time-wasting and can be error-prone. Whether you want to improve your customer experience, increase ROI, fine-tune your pricing strategies, or quickly make any decision from data visualization.
In today’s comprehensive blog, we will see how e-commerce businesses can leverage a KPI dashboard to unlock their growth and actionable insights. Are you curious to know more? Read the entire blog to learn, step-by-step, how to track seller metrics using the e-commerce KPI dashboard.
What Is an E-commerce KPI Dashboard?
An e-commerce KPI dashboard is a powerful interface to visualize data at a glance. It can be considered an analytical tool that can be used to seamlessly track and measure business operations. An e-commerce KPI dashboard generally consolidates crucial information from different aspects of an online business and displays it in numbers, charts, graphs, and tables. In the E-commerce dashboard, you can see EDI-related information, Key Performance Indicators (KPI), and other related metrics to manage your online business.
Why is An E-Commerce Dashboard Needed?
There are many reasons to have an e-commerce business. Some key reasons include:
360° View of the Business
A well-configured dashboard provides integration of marketing, sales, and logistics that generates a big picture outlook of the e-commerce store. It displays business KPIs such as ROI, conversion rate, and more. 360° view ensures that your every action is analyzed for its impact on your e-commerce business’s overall outcomes.
Real-Time Reporting
In this highly competitive marketplace, real-time metrics are the golden key that can open the door to business success. Today’s modern and well-designed dashboard collects processes and displays dynamic data that enables businesses to make decisions for business growth or detect issues before they arise.
Operational Efficiency
Today’s performance metrics dashboard has the capability to automatically collect data and compare it. This reduces manual work and human errors. Your business team can focus on other important tasks, such as predictive analysis, A/B testing, instead of formatting, copying, and pasting data into a spreadsheet. Smart dashboard reduces friction between teams and responds to faster changes. These analytical tools are effective in driving operational efficiency.
Price Optimization
Pricing optimization in e-commerce is like shooting a moving object. You have to constantly adjust it to set the fair price. A precise dashboard can guide businesses in optimizing strategies and ensure that your offers and promotions are based on comprehensive data. With the perfectly crafted dashboard, businesses can understand the psychology behind customer decisions, and therefore, decisions can be made without bias or coercion. Changes in a small price may create a significant impact on the conversion rate.
Inventory Management and Forecasting
Businesses can use KPI to prevent stock-related issues. It helps businesses to effectively manage inventory with no extra effort. Furthermore, they can maintain the right stock balance and protect cash flow. A special dashboard made for managing inventory is a central hub for overseeing the organization’s inventory.
Customer Experience Analysis
With the dashboard metrics like refund rates, product reviews, and NPS, accessibility becomes easy for the department involved in customer experience. When you think customer satisfaction drops, the sales and marketing team can quickly navigate the cause and improve it before it creates unnecessary business problems.
Step-by-Step Approach for Developing a KPI Dashboard
Step 1: Define your business objectives
First and foremost, you have to prioritize e-commerce data points for developing a KPI dashboard. Some of the common data points here can be cart abandonment rates, sales conversion rates, customer retention rates, and more. It empowers you to make a dashboard that looks simple and actionable.
Step 2: Choose the optimal dashboard solution
The next and essential step is to choose the dashboard tool that can integrate with your existing system and increase revenue as your business moves further. There are numerous useful tools available in the market today. Some of them have some great integration capabilities with e-commerce platforms.
Step 3: Collect and integrate your data
After this, you have to connect your existing system to business software and platforms such as CRM, social media sites, and analytics tools. It is good if you select connectors that automatically sync data across different systems.
Step 4: Design your dream dashboard layout
It is crucial that you logically arrange the information on your dashboard. For instance, you can group related data points next to each other. This will not only be easy to find but also make the dashboard look attractive.
Step 5: Build visual components
In this 5th step, you have to build visual components. You have to elevate your dashboard story by using clear trend charts, scorecards, tables, and heatmaps to make data meaningful and understandable.
Step 6: Test and refine your performance dashboard
This is the 6th and important step. Here, you have to test your dashboard with a few people before it is visible to everyone. This habit will enable you to collect their feedback and adjust if needed.
Step 7: Provide training for your staff
Completing step 6 means you are done with creating and testing your dashboard. The next task is to provide training to your team. You have to explain to them how to make use of data to drive business success.
Step 8: Monitor and update on a regular basis
The last 8th step is to monitor and update your innovative dashboard regularly. Ensure that the dashboard, with its latest data sources and analytics, evolves with your business goal. It should be easy to scan.
Essential Metrics to Track in Your E-Commerce Dashboard
An ideal dashboard should be built around KPIs for assessing a business’s performance and growth. Let’s consider some essential metrics you can monitor, with the metrics categorized by function.
Sales Metrics
Sales data metrics show a business’s direct and indirect ability to generate revenue. It can be useful for creating KPI for your organization.
- Total Revenue: First, you have to measure your total online revenue. Though this is not enough to evaluate your day-to-day activities and your marketing strategies. It will just tell you whether you are on the right track to achieve your sales target or not. If you are not able to track your transaction review, then it is good that you make your clients aware of a new revenue structure. You should track your revenue and costs together so that you can get a clear picture of your business performance. Total revenue can be tracked in Google Analytics only if you have set up e-commerce tracking. Before we move ahead, you should do it as early as possible.
- Number of Transactions: The total number of transactions is one of the most important metrics to measure. Like total revenue, this measure can also be tracked in Google Analytics. This will ensure that your increasing number of transactions in your business is successful in attracting new customers and retaining existing customers.
- Average Order Value: Organizations can track the Average order value to determine the economic worth of a transaction and determine various approaches to motivate their customers to purchase more products. If you find a drop in your AOV, then you have to analyze the causes of this change.
- Average Conversion Rate (ACR): For any business, the ability to convert users into paying customers into valuable competence is necessary. The more businesses improve average customer rate, the more they will concentrate on other marketing strategies.
Digital Marketing Metrics
Digital marketing metrics demonstrate how successful your marketing activities are. If you have an e-commerce store, then you can monitor marketing metrics for evaluating your social media, email, and paid campaigns.
- Total Traffic: Your business income comes from customers. This is possible if traffic is increased to your website. However, you should know that not every traffic is equally valuable. Therefore, you have to treat every new customer as a part of your sales pipeline. For your online business success, considering the total traffic is pivotal.
- Traffic Sources: If you want to understand your marketing efforts, you need to make an extra table in your report that splits traffic into different traffic sources. This has to be done because it helps you to know how much traffic is from PPC and SEO.
- Paid Traffic Acquisition Cost: It’s time to measure your acquisition cost, such as Facebook Ads or Google Ads. You can calculate the paid traffic acquisition cost from the formula below.
Paid Traffic Acquisition Cost = The total cost you have from paid traffic / total sales from paid traffic.
If your paid traffic comes from Google Ads, you have to check the total cost in Google Analytics. For paid traffic that comes from Facebook Ads or any other sources, you have to add those costs.
Organic Keywords: For an e-commerce business, the best traffic comes from organic search on Google. You have to evaluate this organic keyword in the top 3, top 5, or top 10 search results on Google. Therefore, this becomes a perfect way to evaluate your SEO activities.
Customer Satisfaction Metrics
- Net Promoter Score: Your business’s bottom line is highly affected by user experience. That is why it is crucial to monitor the customer satisfaction score. This basically measures your customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Number of Repeat Customers: Several repeat customers mean customers who come back to your website to buy their desired product. Here, you should have an idea about their history and the product they like the most. For simplicity, you can add the number of orders to know whether the customer is a repeat or not.
Common Visuals in E-Commerce Dashboards
Now, we will see some widely used visuals for creating an e-commerce KPI dashboard at a glance.
- Line Chart: Use to show trends over time.
- Bar Chart: Helps to compare categories or segments.
- Pie/Donut Chart: Utilize to show proportions.
- Heatmap: It can highlight intensity or density.
- KPI Cards: Display key metrics at a glance.
- Image + Metrics: It can be used to combine product visuals with performance data
- Scatter Plot: It can show relationships between variables.
Conclusion
This blog focuses on the e-commerce KPI dashboard. We try to understand what an e-commerce KPI dashboard is and its importance. We also followed a step-by-step approach to create a stunning and effective KPI dashboard. By reading this blog, you may have gained knowledge about important metrics to track in your e-commerce dashboard.
Want to simplify e-commerce reporting? iWeb Scraping enables you to bring multiple tools into one professional-looking dashboard. With this tool, you will be able to view how your online store is performing by gathering all your important business metrics into a single KPI dashboard.
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