Top 7 reporting metrics for ecommerce store owners

Running an online store can be hard work. You spend so much time working out how to get traffic to your site and then watch the numbers dwindle down with low conversion rates, cart abandonment etc. But for this reason it’s crucial to keep an eye on a number of key measures to stay up to date with how your business is doing.

Metrics

1.  Revenue and profit

The first thing to look at is revenue and profit. For any business online or not the lifeblood is cash-flow and revenue and profit should be monitored regularly. Pretty much every ecommerce platform will give you easy access to monthly revenue stats. Costs are harder to monitor and for that reason I like to use an online accounting platform like Xero or Wave Accounting so you can get your costs, revenue and full profit figures all in the one place.

2.  Traffic

Getting traffic to your site is the first step in driving sales in an commerce store. You can’t sell anything if you have no customers. Some things in particularly you might to look at are:

• Total traffic comparing month by month.
• Your top traffic sources – both referring sites and search engines.
• Your top 10 keywords to get an idea of whether you are effectively utilising SEO to bring more new customers (not just people searching for your business name or brand).
• What traffic is coming through deliberate campaigns you are running.
• Your % of new visits vs returning users – can do this by looking at customers manually as well.

You can easily get access to all of these measures in Google Analytics and some shopping cart platforms also give you some of this data in their reporting dashboards.

3.  Conversions

Conversions are probably the biggest stat regularly viewed by ecommerce store owners. Small improvements in conversion rates can have a huge impact on revenue particularly if you have a high volume.

Depending on your platform of choice there are a few ways to do this.

• If the ecommerce platform you use supports this directly you can check out your dashboard and get direct access to your conversion rate.
• If not (and even if so) you might want to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics. You can either create a goal of ‘a purchase’ and track the conversions to that goal or better still you can set up ecommerce tracking so you can measure financially how much your conversions are worth.

They don’t always tell the whole story because the lifetime value of a customer might be a lot higher than just a one off sale but it’s still a great thing to keep an eye on. Particularly as you make changes to the site, you can easily see which changes you are making are having an impact on your conversion rates.

You can even take it a step further by using Google’s new content experiments feature in Analytics where you can serve up different versions of a page to different users and measure which ones convert better.

4.  Repeat customers and retention time

In almost all businesses, it is much easier to sell to existing customers than it is to find and sell to new ones. Recurring businesses are a very attractive model so it’s worth looking at how many of your customers are coming back and how long it takes them to come back.

This way you can build your procedures around this. For example if they generally come back after 3 months, why is that? If they aren’t coming back, are you engaging them effectively enough.

Quite often something as simple as an automated post purchase email or follow-up will be effective at getting people (who have bought in the past) back to your site. And those people are much more likely to buy again than someone who’s come straight from a search engine for example.

5.  Top products

Following the 80 / 20 rule roughly 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your products. This is of course very general but the principle is that focusing in on the products that sell more than others, or the products that have much higher margins than others can give you the maximum return on your time and money.

Your ecommerce platform should be able to tell you your top selling products. In addition, sometimes your search queries can provide good insight into this as well, if you are getting lots of visitors and higher conversions for certain product-specific search terms it could be worth focusing on these.

6.  Cart abandonment

One of the more frustrating things as an ecommerce store owner, is going to the effort to get people to your site, having them go ahead with a purchase only to make it half way through the check out and then abandon their cart.

Making small tweaks to the checkout and the process (i.e. adding an abandonment email) can have a big impact on your abandonment rate.

To look at abandon rates, you are generally going to be looking at your ecommerce platform itself and the steps will vary from platform to platform.

7.  Opt ins

A lot of the time when someone goes to a website for the first time they won’t be in a position to buy right away. I like to think about the process as being one of Consuming, Connecting then Converting.

The first step is getting people to engage with your content (consuming), the second is getting some sort of opt-in either via social media or email sign-up etc (connecting), then the final step is making a sale (converting). Some people will of course buy right away but most won’t so you have to do a good job at the consuming and connecting part and keep an eye on how many people are doing this.

• You can measure consumption by keeping an eye on how long people are spending on your site (gives you an idea of whether they are reading your content) and looking at the bounce rate (how many leave after seeing just 1 page).
• Ways to measure connection are email opt-ins, Facebook likes, Twitter followers, RSS feed subscriptions etc. You can set up things like email opt ins as Google Analytics goals as well to give you more information on who is connecting.
• If you are using ways of engaging with your visitors like email newsletters and social media I’d also keep an eye on stats from those platforms (for example email opt-ins, opens, unsubscribes and clicks etc).

What did I miss?

Let me know if there are other important measures that you keen an eye on and what I missed.

Dan Norris is the founder of Web Control Room a free tool that enables website owners to understand their data and make better decisions. By talking to the sources you love (MailChimp, Xero, Analytics, PayPal etc) it provides a scannable 1 page chart showing what is going well and what isn’t.

3 Reasons to Build Google+ Followers

First it was MySpace, later came Facebook and now it is Google+. Social Networks have their period to play their role. Though Facebook is no less, Google+ has significant importance. Google+ has several benefits that other social networks lack. Moreover, the number of Google+ users has increased considerably in the past one year.

There are numerous reasons to build followers list around Google+. However, I shall emphasize on 3 of the most crucial reasons to use Google+.

Building Followers like Mail lists:

G+ (Google+) has the ability to segregate your followers. For instance, you have 24k followers. Out of that, 12k are related to your marketing site while 5k are and 7k are related to personal blog and forex site respectively. Suppose you wish to post status related to your marketing site. Just segregate your 12k marketing followers under any category of your own. Yes, you can customize the category. Similarly, the personal blog and forex site followers can be categorized. Such categorization is helpful in ensuring that your followers receive the status update related to their interest. Moreover, all your followers stay intact in one network.

If a need arises to send message to all your followers irrespective of their interests then just post the status as pubic. This is just like creating a mailing list, which no other social network provides at present.

Conducting webinar (Hangout);

Today, webinar has become synonymous with marketing. Webinar provides value and can boost sales to sky high. Interestingly G+ provides the facility to conduct webinars. However, at G+ it is known as Hangouts. Through Hangouts, interaction with your followers in real time is possible.

Let us consider you run a blog, which provides advice on blogging. After two years of expertise, you write a book. So how are you going to promote it? Either run PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign for promotion or conduct a webinar. Of course, for webinar you will be providing real blogging strategies. Finally, at the end just 30 seconds of your book’s promotion will suffice and do the trick.

Note: Luring followers or others to your Webinars is easy. Tell them you are providing some genuine strategies or advice free. However, ensure to plan well before for the news of your Webinar to spread.

Google’s personalization:

Google rolled its personalization two months ago. Personalization allows users to view web pages created by people with whom they are related. For instance, if Selena is searching for Beauty tips and Samantha had written on the topic (provided they are within each other’s circle in G+) then Samantha’s web pages will be shown first to Selena.

Here is the catch for marketers. Assume you are running a niche site within health.  After accruing large number of followers through Google+ you start another niche within finance. Now suppose your health related followers search on finance topic your web pages will be shown to them. That is the beauty of G+. Apart from increasing your traffic through search engine for health related niche, the finance niche also benefits without any further investment in terms of time, money, or work.

Richie Richardson is an Internet Marketer. He also writes on forex. Topics like forex trading system, no deposit forex bonus, forex bonus, forex signal software etc. are discussed on his blog.

Flippa Guide – How To Sell On Flippa The Right Way

Finally the ebook – How to Sell on Flippa the Right Way! is out!! It has taken me some times to finish writing. I hope you will love the ebook. Please keep in mind that this is not a get rich quick ebook, but a sharing and tips from me on Flippa.

What is Flippa?? Flippa is a marketplace online for you to sell or buy websites. There are thounsands of people making money online selling or buying websites on Flippa. Flippa is just like the eBay for websites.

If you want to learn how you can make the most out of Flippa, you should download this ebook now. Again, this is another FREE ebook from me after the RM1000 Per Day System.

One of my Websites Sold for $14K

I am always giving out FREE stuff, but this time I am asking for one favour from you – to LIKE my eBook here. That is the Max I ever ask from you. Please LIKE to download the ebook now!

Making Money Now!

To view this post content please Like it on Facebook!

Hope Flippa will be an add on to your online business portfolio!

Short Interview With Borneo Post

Justin from Borneo Post rang me up 2 weeks ago wanted to arrange for an interview on my internet business venture. Of course I happily acceptted the interview invitation. The short interview was featured on the front page of Borneo Post Business section on Valentine’s Day. The online version can be found here at Borneo Post website.

Do NOT forget to check back the blog in a week time for the free ebook on Make Money Online with Flippa!!

How To Make A Living Selling Websites – 6 Figures Income !

I know I have not updated the blog for a while because I have been busy setting up my Engineering Consulting firm. But I promise I will be giving you a big Red Packet or Bonus in a week or two time. I will be sharing with you how you can make your living selling websites online at Flippa!

Make sure you check back in a week time and I can assure you that it will be a good new year gift for anyone who download it! Most important it is FREE for my readers. Check out one of my sales last year:

So remember to check back the blog in a week time for the ebook !!

5 Stars Ecommerce Site FREE for You

For those of you who are into e-commerce and don’t know about SolidShops yet, it is time for you to look at it seriously! SolidShops is an extremely user friendly hosted e-commerce platform for web designers and their clients. Individual who is keen to build their own site using SolidShops, this is one of the best platform you should check out.

Way too often, open source software like Magento or OScommerce disappoints when it comes to user friendliness, not to mention creating themes. On top of that you’re stuck for hours uploading and patching files to finally realize you still have to take care of backups and encrypted payments. One important features of SolidShops is that it is very easy to manage your product.

With SolidShops you can have a secure store up and running in just minutes, even on Facebook. That’s right: SolidShops also supports building out unique Facebook stores which can be customized to your liking by using custom HTML and CSS.

SolidShops is also optimised for your mobile phone. You can check orders on the go, anytime, anywhere. Never miss an order anymore!

Popular payment methods like PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, Ogone and others can be set up in no time.

SolidShops is giving away 5 one year licenses to their platform for free, exclusively to AddyKho readers.

To enter this contest, write down why you want a SolidShops store by posting a comment on https://www.facebook.com/solidshops (mentioning you are reader of AddyKho). Want to beef up your chances of winning? Then upload a short creative video explaining why you want a SolidShops store. Upload the video on www.facebook.com/solidshops. SolidShops wi’ll pick out the winners by November 31 2011.

So DO NOT wait! Go and grab yourself a 1 year FREE ecommerce site now! 1 Year FREE with SolidShops for 5 readers of Addy Kho!!

SaleHoo Launches SaleHoo Stores: Quick, Clean Stores that Get Results!

The team at SaleHoo.com, the same people behind the wholesale supplier directory with over 8,000 verified suppliers, have just released SaleHoo Stores, their new e-Commerce solution that can get you up and running on your own website in just minutes.

If you are looking to expand your online selling ventures beyond eBay, or have ever thought about selling on your own website, then here are three reasons why you should give it a try:

1. It’s quick to setup. With SaleHoo Stores, there is no time wasted spent fussing over technical details. You can setup your store in just minutes and get your products online and ready for buyers in no time.

I understand that A LOT of e-Commerce solution providers say the exact same thing, but the guys at SaleHoo actually mean it. To prove just how fast it is, they have made this short 5 minute video on setting up your SaleHoo Store.

Take a look at it below:

2. SaleHoo Stores are clean and modern. Forget ugly e-Commerce websites with unsightly fonts and difficult navigation. SaleHoo Stores were built by web usability experts who study how web users interact with websites, then create websites and web stores that mimic that behavior.

This results in websites that are more intuitive and natural for users, which makes them stay on your site longer, and purchase more items from you.

Another great thing about SaleHoo Stores is that you can choose from a number of Store themes to make your Store stand out and attract the right audience. Here are a couple of examples of themes you can use:

Best of all, changing your SaleHoo Store’s theme and color variations is fast and easy. With just two clicks of a mouse, you can instantly update your Store with no technical knowledge required.

3. SaleHoo Stores get results! For all website owners, getting sufficient traffic to your site is a crucial determining factor in whether or not your store will be a success. With this in mind, SaleHoo Stores come optimized for search engines with their search-engine-friendly development and page order.

What’s more, setting your on-page optimization is easy. There is no fussy HTML coding involved – it’s as easy as writing an eBay listing title!

Right now, when you sign up to SaleHoo Stores, you will get a FREE video training course on search engine optimization called SaleHoo Stores Traffic Training. This course has been crafted by SEO expert Mark Ling who shows you everything you need to know, with step-by-step instructions, how to get your website ranking on the first page of Google and turbo boost your sales!

Special limited time offer!

In addition to your free copy of SaleHoo Stores Traffic Training, right now you can also get your hands on a free one-year membership to SaleHoo! Your SaleHoo membership gives you instant, unlimited access to their directory of over 8,000 verified, legitimate suppliers as well as the SaleHoo Research Lab, a market research tool that allows you to unearth hot selling markets. A SaleHoo membership normally costs $67 per year, but it’s yours free, for a limited time, when you purchase sign up to SaleHoo Stores.

And as if that wasn’t exceptional value enough, SaleHoo is currently offering a Premium Store package at the price of a Standard SaleHoo package, making now the best time possible to get started.

Your SaleHoo Store also comes with a full 60-day money back guarantee, so you can try SaleHoo Stores with no risk. If you are not completely satisfied, you can get a full refund, with no questions asked.

Head over to SaleHoo Stores now to make the most of this amazing offer!

P.S Remember you get the SaleHoo Stores Traffic Training video course FREE along with a free membership to SaleHoo and the supplier directory!

P.P.S The 60 day money back guarantee makes SaleHoo Stores the low-risk option for getting your very own store setup!

How Selling on Your Own Website Can Increase Online Drop Shipping Sales

Drop shipping is every eBay seller’s dream! If you aren’t familiar with the process of drop shipping, it involves the supplier (wholesaler or manufacturer, for example) shipping the item directly to your buyer.  This bypasses you having to purchase or store items you wish to sell.

The major benefit here is the risk that drop shipping eliminates: Sellers who drop ship items to their buyers do not have to risk buying a bulk lot of items from a supplier and hope that they will sell.

Instead, you will only pay for what you actually sell and side-step the risk associated with buying items in bulk which may or may not sell.

Why drop shipping on eBay and other marketplaces is hard-hitting

The drop shipping dream can be a tough reality on eBay. In a marketplace where price is everything, unless you are the only seller offering the product(s) you are drop shipping, you will have a tough time selling them.

This is simply because when you drop ship, you can’t get the best rock-bottom wholesale prices that your competitors can. In order for suppliers to cover the cost of drop shipping, processing individual orders and shipping them to buyers, they have to add $2-$5 on to the cost of every item.

This means when you drop ship items, you will find it difficult to compete with other sellers who are buying the same items, but are buying in huge bulk which gets them rock-bottom prices, undercutting the drop shipping model.

Another issue that you might face when drop shipping on eBay is slack performance from the supplier. Your buyer might have to wait 2 weeks for their item to be delivered by the supplier which is unacceptable by eBay standards.

The problem here is that it’s not your supplier who takes the blame for the slow delivery – it’s you.

In many cases, eBay sellers have received negative feedback as a result of suppliers not delivering items in a reasonable timeframe. If you get too many negative feedback scores, your listings won’t rank as well in search results, your sales will plummet and you could even have your account closed by eBay.

Can drop shipping items on your own website offset these drawback of using a drop shipper? Yes!

How selling on your own website can increase your drop shipping sales

While drop shipping on eBay is not a viable option for many sellers, due to the heavy competition there, drop shipping from your own website is a surefire way to increase sales, and your overall margins, on each sale. Here’s how:

The elimination of customer’s price-checking

When you sell on your own website, it’s a lot harder for buyers to do price checking like they do when they buy on eBay, where they can flick between different listings instantly and find the cheapest deal.

On your own website, however, you can increase your prices by a few dollars and still see consistent sales because so few buyers will perform price checks and hunt out the best deal by comparing your prices to products available elsewhere.

The end of negative feedback

Customer service standards on eBay are extremely strict. eBay’s push towards providing buyers with a hassle-free retail experience has put a lot of pressure on sellers. And when, as mentioned above, suppliers deliver items late, sellers suffer with negative feedback ratings.

When you sell on your own website, there are no feedback systems and complicated DSR scorings. Instead, you can choose your own delivery times and service standards and, as long as you are open about these, your buyers will be happy.

While many eBay sellers believe that building your own website is difficult and time-consuming, this isn’t the case. There are many affordable options for store builders and e-Commerce software now that require no HTML or programming knowledge in order for you to build your own online store fast and without a huge investment.

Do you drop ship items on eBay? What has your experience been and do you think selling on your own site would be beneficial? Share your thoughts below!

About the Author: Alice Delore is an education specialist for SaleHoo.com, an online community of over 95,000 online sellers and retailers. Their product range consists of an online selling course, ecommerce software and their flagship product, a wholesale directory.

Check out SaleHoo Now!

Looking for Air Swimmers in Malaysia or Singapore or at Your very Own Country?

You and I are probably looking for the same gadget – Air Swimmers after coming across the Air Swimmers Youtube video recently.

I am always attracted easily by interesting big boy gadgets. I believe this lovely Air Swimmers will just amaze anyone, be it adult or small kid. But what really caught my attention or trigger my brain cell  is the way how business should be done – make good use of online media or means to market your product. If you are from Malaysia or Singapore, you can also purchase this wonder toy from Flying Fish Malaysia.

The youtube videos created by Air Swimmers have generated a tsunami online. Within a short 1 month plus, the video has already been viewed nearly 3 mil times. The youtube video has helped bringing tons of visitors to the Air Swimmers site. At one point, the traffic just basically overloaded the server and crashed the site! So if you have a bit of business sense, you should know that the money is rolling in to their bank account!

The video has created a buzz online and therefore generated a lots of visitors (money) to their site. If you are running a business online or offline, video marketing is something you should consider investing in. Guess what… I already starting to think of what the keywords ‘Air Swimmers in Malaysia‘ or ‘Air Swimmers in Singapore‘ can do for me

One last thing, if you want to make more money, your brain has to move fast: Angry Bird Air Swimmer!!  Check out the soon to be released Angry Bird Air Swimmer below:

Top 5 SEO Smartphone Apps

Recently a glut of smartphone apps have appeared that are designed to help SEO specialists work more efficiently. Five apps stand above the crowd in terms of ease of use and functionality: Analytics App, Website SEO Audit, SEM Calculator, SEO Pro, and Ego.

Analytics App

Analytics App, by Inblosam LLC, is intended to provide detailed information from Google Analytics in a format that is natural for the iPhone. Unlike the other apps on the list, it supports Google Analytics’s Advanced Segmentation features. This allows users to quickly sort through huge sets of analytical data to understand what’s really important to them. It can generate 55 different reports, displaying up to 100 rows of data at a time. It also includes a “Dashboard Report” feature that provides an overall view of the Google Analytics information for a given site, as well as a “Today” report that only takes into account the information Google collected for that day. Analytics App allows the user to register multiple logins and accounts on the same iOS device. It creates a secure connection directly to Google that ensures the data stays safe. It connects to Google using either WiFi, a good mobile broadband connection, or Edge. Inblosam claims their Analytics App is easier than looking the information up in a desktop browser, and many times they are correct.

Website SEO Audit

Unlike Analytics App, Website SEO Audit is not meant just to measure current SEO performance, but to explain it. It analyzes a given website for a number of SEO-related factors: its Google® PageRank, the number of backlinks and indexed pages it includes, the relevancy of its meta tags, and how long it takes to load each page. It even analyzes the HTML’s heading tags and image alt tags for their relevancy to the website’s purpose. It includes some Google Analytics data as well, although not nearly as extensively as Inblosam’s Analytics App. Data created from Website SEO Audit can be saved within the app for later.

SEM Calculator

The SEM Calculator from By E-String Technologies Inc. is intended to help plan SEO and web advertising operations. It features multiple calculators for equations SEO specialists commonly use. For example, it can calculate whether a CPM or CPA ad purchase would be more effective under given website use circumstances. For SEO specialists who also advertise through Google Adwords, Yahoo!, or MSN, this is a convenient and dependable way to plan advertising based on information provided by Analytics App.

SEO Pro

SEO Pro by Benjamin Spiegel combines several SEO functionalities into one package. First, it can monitor the page rank of any website on several different engines: it supports Google PageRank, Alexa Rank, Yahoo Inlinks, Yahoo Indexed, and Compete.com Rank. It also searches Digg to see how many times the site has been posted there. Like Website SEO Audit, it can show a site’s meta tags. It also supports the iPhone 4′s Retina screen, but requires a strong mobile broadband connection.

Ego

Ego, in contrast to the aforementioned apps, is heavily based around analysis of social media sites. It can give website stats on services such as RSS feeds, Mint, Tumblr, Twitter, and Vimeo which is important to have a really good mobile broadband connection. As social media sites become more and more important in managing web presence, Ego’s ability to monitor social media will help SEO specialists plan their SEO strategies. Ego also provides Google Analytics data, as Analytics App and SEO Pro do.

While these apps may not completely change the way one does SEO, they do make things easier when on the go and elsewhere. They provide common SEO functionality in convenient and intuitive packages.

Ruben Corbo is a writer for the website Broadband Expert where you can find internet service providers in your area and compare prices on different deals for your mobile broadband needs.