Is your e-commerce store optimized for success? And, how can you tell? In this post, we’ll take a closer look at how to make data analytics more meaningful with six Shopify KPI’s that are frequently overlooked. When harnessed, these metrics can make a significant impact on startup fashion brands and generate successful sales over time.
1. Volume First, Optimization Later
In the early stages of your small business, the focus is truly to drive traffic to your website and see how people are responding to your product. Part of that is discovering that winning formula for driving the right traffic, and the other part is having a business people will react to.
So, if you’re already driving the right traffic to your site but not seeing sales conversion, there is sure to be a reason why. However, it’s essential to use that “why?” to ask the next question: Do I have enough traffic coming to my site to make an evaluation properly?
As with many aspects of life and business, sometimes we rush into things. When it comes to data analysis, volume matters—and that’s not something you can rush. For startup fashion brands, many of the issues you’re noticing in Shopify may stem from the simple fact that there are not enough site visitors. So, before spending time and resources on optimizing your website, make sure that you’re working with a robust data set.
What’s a good benchmark? Once you’re seeing a marker of 1,000 or more people coming to your site each month, that’s a suitable threshold to perform analysis. With anything less than that, unfortunately, you’ll just be splitting hairs. To truly understand performance, fashion startup brands must first have a large enough sample for analytics to be meaningful.
2. Traffic Matters; But So Does the Channel Source
Once you have the volume of visitors to begin analyzing your Shopify site, start by understanding where your traffic is coming from. This KPI can give clothing startups insight into marketing efforts in a unique way, especially by looking at budgets and which channels of marketing have a high investment strategy.
For example, if your business puts a sizeable financial investment behind Instagram marketing, do you see the respective traffic from that channel? If you’re getting more sales from Pinterest, perhaps that’s where you should spend more time exploring further opportunities.
Seeing where traffic is coming from by channel source—and more importantly, where conversion is coming from—can be very revealing. So, ask yourself: Are you investing resources in alignment with channels of incoming revenue?
One of the biggest mistakes young startup clothing brands make is to try to be in too many places at once, which means they’re not actually in any one place in a very significant way. By looking at where those channels of traffic are coming from, it can help to double down on financial investment but also time resources. Wouldn’t we all like to know where we’re spending the most time and energy?
3. Do Sweat the Small Stuff: Weeks of Supply & Sell-Through
One area that startup clothing brands can easily overlook is Weeks of Supply. Many businesses tend to focus on their top sellers and high sell-through products. However, the flip side to that is the bottom, high-inventory products with high supply.
Performing a weekly analysis of your top sellers is a great practice, but startup clothing brands should also track the products that need an extra push and are not moving on their own. Taking a look at this KPI can reveal a great deal and put you on the path towards understanding your business.
Why does this matter? By identifying items that have not been selling at the desired rate, clothing startups have the opportunity to discount strategically, rather than just saying “Well, let’s discount everything” when a sale period rolls along.
How? Well, to start, these low-performing products would be great candidates for inclusion in a newsletter, or to be promoted on social media. Perhaps some gifting around those items would generate buzz among influencers and promote sales.
4. Export, Export, & Away: Make Shopify Work for You
For startup fashion brands and small businesses, Shopify is a great place to begin when it comes to data analytics, but it only offers clothing startups a basic set of tools. In particular, Shopify does not provide much internally when it comes to Weeks of Supply and Sell-Through reporting. So, the level of business intelligence you’ll gain relies on exporting the data and working through it.
To maximize the information available to you, make sure to take the extra time to export your data as an Excel spreadsheet and create a document from that—the results will be well worth it.
Find yourself wanting more? You can always consider upgrading to Shopify Plus, which brands like Warby Parker and Doen use, which will provide you with a more robust data toolkit.
5. Lost in Translation: Missed Conversions
It’s easy enough for startup clothing brands to focus on landing pages or the top pages for traffic, which let you know what areas are attracting the most attention and are ripe for optimization. What about the product pages that people are frequenting, but are not converting? What are the pages people are going to, but not shopping from? What happened?
By looking closely at this metric, you’ll see that customers were initially attracted to a product (maybe because there was a promo, or perhaps the images are especially appealing), but once they arrived, something happened and they did not convert. This is a valuable metric and a great indicator of where you need to optimize and spend more time, and a unique opportunity to analyze the pages people are exploring but not buying from.
6. Abandoned Cart, Recovered Data
Similar to missed conversions, looking at the cart abandonment rate in Shopify is a useful metric for growth and an excellent opportunity for testing. Abandoned cart describes when a customer adds a product to their cart and leaves the site. But, what many clothing startups don’t realize is that email sequences actually trigger it.
If a customer shops and then leaves the site, you still have their contact information—and the opportunity to remarket to them. As you’re building this list of individuals, this is a great time to take advantage of A/B split testing on your abandoned cart messaging. Then, as some customers return and others don’t, you have a unique opportunity to identify the messaging that did get them to convert. You can run these sorts of experiments and tests with the abandoned cart KPI. And, you can look at who your customers are that are abandoning their carts—are there any noticeable trends?
When thinking about analytics, sometimes clothing startups forget that Shopify goes hand in hand with Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.—the fact is, it’s not the only tool out there, and startup clothing brands shouldn’t overly rely on just one system. All of these data sets and points are designed to help you understand your business, so startup fashion brands will be most successful by using a combination of the many plugins and analytic tools out there.
So, while there is a wide range of Shopify KPI’s to keep track of, don’t let your business miss out on these analytic opportunities:
- Sometimes, we over-inflate the value of understanding the things that are selling and forget to look at what’s not selling.
- Start with a big enough sample for your analytics to be meaningful. If you don’t have the volume, first focus on traffic.
- Be sure that you’re aware of the channel sources for your primary traffic and conversions.
- Seize the opportunity to analyze the pages where people are exploring but not buying.
- Harness your abandoned cart metric to test for optimal copy and messaging.
In conclusion, before clothing startups invest serious time and money into website optimization, it’s wise to consider an audit and ask some fundamental questions: Is this working? Does my website look good? Would a professional think so?
Looking for more information on this topic? Read our article The 7 KPIs to Measure Your Shopify E-Commerce Store for a detailed look at the metrics available to you in Shopify.
Looking for expert guidance to grow, establish, or audit your business? We’ve helped clients double and triple their sales. Call us at 310-957-5264 to schedule a consultation session or email hello@scalingretail.com. One-on-one support from seasoned industry professionals awaits!