Two months in, my dashboard shows graphs and numbers I’m not sure how to interpret. Which metrics matter for a new small shop, and which are vanity numbers I can ignore?
For a small shop in the first 6 months, focus on 3 metrics:
1. Revenue (weekly, not daily).
Daily revenue is too noisy for a small shop — Tuesday could be £200, Wednesday £0, doesn’t mean Wednesday was bad. Look at week-over-week trends. Are you growing, flat, or declining over rolling 4-week periods?
2. Conversion rate.
Visitors who came to your shop / orders placed = conversion rate. Industry average for ecommerce is 2-3%. Below 1% suggests your storefront isn’t converting visitors (UX issue, trust issue, pricing issue). Above 4% suggests you’re doing well or your traffic is highly qualified (e.g., coming from a targeted email list rather than random ads).
Don’t obsess over the absolute number; track its trend. Is your conversion rate getting better as you make changes?
3. Repeat customer rate.
Of customers who’ve bought once, what % buy a second time within 90 days? Healthy is 15-25% for one-off products, higher for consumables. This is the single biggest predictor of long-term sustainability — a shop where customers come back is worth more than a shop with the same revenue but no repeat buyers.
What to mostly ignore at your stage:
- Traffic (pageviews, sessions). High traffic without conversion is just bandwidth. Look at conversion-of-traffic, not traffic alone.
- Bounce rate (people who leave after one page). Misleading on small shops — customers often look at a product page and leave to think about it, then come back later via another channel. Bounce rate isn’t a quality signal at small scale.
- Average order value (AOV) — useful but mostly a function of your pricing and product mix. Hard to move materially in the short term.
- Cart abandonment rate — interesting but secondary. Focus on the abandoned-cart recovery flow (other thread on this) rather than the rate itself.
Once you’re past 6 months and £5k+/month revenue, expand to:
- Customer lifetime value (LTV) — total revenue per customer over their relationship with you.
- Cohort retention — how customers acquired in different months behave over time.
- Source-attributed revenue — which marketing channels drove the most revenue.
But those are premature obsessions at your current size.
One non-obvious thing to watch: the dashboard shows recent reviews and customer feedback. Read these. They’re more useful than any aggregate metric — customers tell you exactly what’s working and what isn’t, in their own words.
Spent the first 4 months obsessing over traffic numbers. Felt great when traffic was up, mystified when revenue didn’t follow. Eventually realised my conversion rate was the problem (0.6%) and ‘more traffic’ was just sending more visitors to a not-converting site. Focused on the storefront’s first impressions, conversion went to 2.4%. Revenue followed.
Tip — write down your three numbers each Monday morning. Just three numbers. Tracking the trend over 12 weeks is the most useful thing I’ve done for understanding my business.