Survive, Adapt, Thrive: How to measure eCommerce success

Welcome to the final post on our blog series; Survive, Adapt, Thrive!

In the first post, we introduced the ‘Survive Adapt, Thrive’ model, and talked about the importance of setting a business goal for your eCommerce business to get you out of that ‘survival’ mindset and into a ‘thrive’ mindset.

In the second post, we uncovered case studies from other eCommerce businesses who were actively ‘adapting’ to current customer needs during the pandemic in order to reach their own business goals.

In this post, we’re going to talk about how you can actually thrive. You can’t actually be certain whether you are thriving or not unless you’re actively measuring your KPI’s. But it’s integral to the success of your business to understand if you’re moving in the right direction.

So, consider these questions;

When was the last time your eCommerce business solved a challenge?
How did you measure the success of the solution you implemented to solve said challenge?

You solve one problem, another arises!

Growing an eCommerce business comes not without its challenges. Sometimes there are issues around site performance, sometimes they’re problems surrounding customer experience, and other times challenges arise due to lack of clarity and shared vision within the business.

Whatever your challenges may be right now, you need to find ways in which to solve them. A good eCommerce agency can help you solve these challenges. But a great agency will help you solve them in uncommon yet clever ways – whilst also measuring the success in doing so – to ensure you’re on track to achieve your business goals.

Clever Problem Solving

Here’s an excellent example of clever problem solving, and how to measure it:

Challenge: Retail X’s biggest challenge during 2020 was a huge increase in ticket volume for customer enquiries. This also appeared to be linked to the increase in cart abandonment rates.

Measurements:

Percentage increase in customer enquiries
Percentage increase in cart abandonment
Percentage of resolved tickets vs unresolved tickets
Common themes of unresolved tickets vs common themes of resolved
Total estimated value of abandoned carts on unresolved tickets

Step 1 – Address Challenge: After digging deeper, Retailer X discovered that the common themes surrounding unresolved tickets were customer enquiries on sizing and product specifications.

Step 2 – Solving the challenge: To ensure these were being answered more effectively, a stakeholder at Retail X suggested putting their furloughed sales assistants into customer support and diverting the tickets that involved questions about products to them. Sales assistants should know products inside out, and have the skills to answer in a human-centric way when questioned on sizing and product specs.

Step 3 – Measuring Success (Between 1-12 months):

Total cost of re-structure within customer support team
Percentage decrease of unresolved tickets
Percentage decrease of cart abandonment rate
Total value of orders on resolved tickets

This is just one example of creative problem solving within eCommerce strategy, but it’s quite possible that you have several challenges to address at any one time.

If you are juggling problems, it’s really important that you have the ability to prioritise, addressing issues that will save the most in wasted revenue, or increase the most amount in sales first and foremost.

This brings us back to our original point of this blog: you can’t solve challenges without measuring the success of your solutions!

Join our workshop?

If you’d like to learn more about the tools and techniques we use to help our clients plan their business strategies and growth models, we’re running a series of invitation-only workshop events. Email jamie@wearejh.com to request a space and date.