Online Retailing - How To Tune Your Store’s Performance

For an online store, the buck doesn’t stop at selling the product only. Being an ecommerce storeowner, you need to monitor the performance of your online shopping cart constantly and that’s critically important! You must always be informed about the status your online business and have a clear idea about the performance. However, it is not so easy measuring the performance of your ecommerce shopping cart. There are so many parameters that you will have to consider; some of these are business or domain specific and some are more generalized in nature.  Here we discuss a few aspects of performance monitoring of your online shopping cart:Keep a tab on your profitsYour revenue depends on various things. You may run a PPC campaign on Google Adwords with a thick daily budget; you are bound to get better sales with bulging revenue. However, this is a return of an additional investment in terms of your PPC expenditure. Similarly, if you lower the price of your products below the market price, you will get sales and expanding revenue figure. Again, you are compromising with your profit margin to register better sales. So, it is important that you constantly monitor your profit PERCENTAGE over a definite period of time and regular plot it on a graph. A uniform upward growth means you are heading for a good time!Distributed salesThe success of an online store business largely depends on your per customer sales. In other words, it is better to have five customers buying a certain quantities of products rather than one customer buying the same. If there are more individual buying sprees in your online store, better chances you have of a good exposure in the market place. So, it is important that you keep a tab on sales vs. no. of customers’ ratio.Faster delivery, increased satisfactionYour customers (and everybody else’s customers) love to get the shipment in time.  If you are committing that the product will be delivered in 2 days, it should be 2 days. If he gets in on the 3rd day, the customer won’t blame the shipping company he will blame you! So, keep a tab on the delivery dates of each consignment. Ask the shipping company to send you a weekly or a fortnightly report of delivery of all consignments and find out the date difference between the order data and the date delivery of each order. If the difference is more than what you are promising for a certain order, find out why the shipment was delayed. If needed, call the customer and say ‘sorry’. If the instances of “missing the delivery date” are frequent, it’s time to change the shipping company.Use Google’s monitoring and analysis toolsGoogle offers a plethora of tools to analyze and monitor the performance of your website. Google Analytics can help you to monitor your traffic on a daily basis with various filters and views. Similarly, Google Web Master Toolkit can help you to monitor your product-keywords and their overall positions on the web.Success in running an ecommerce shopping cart depends on how regular you are in managing your necessary activities. It is not required to spend hours; it’s all about keeping a check on everything that relates to your customers!