How to measure your eCommerce Website
With all of the information that is available from measuring websites with tools like Google Analytics, it’s easy to get distracted. A typical eCommerce website has it’s own unique set of KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and conversion rates. These conversion rates will tell you where you can gain quick and profitable improvements from your eCommerce website.
So start with the basics. The touchstone metrics of your eCommerce website are the number of:
- Visits to your eCommerce website
- Shopping carts created
- Orders placed, paid, sealed and delivered.
From these figures you work out your conversion rates.
Visit to Cart Conversion Rate
Visits / Carts created = %
Cart to Order Conversion Rate
Carts / Orders = %
(or subtract this figure from 100 to determine your cart abandonment rate).
IMPORTANT: The conversion rates tell you where to look for the answers.
For instance, if you have 1000 visits to your site and yet only 5 people created a shopping cart (0.5% visit to cart conversion rate), then you will want to look carefully at the process that people have to go through to create shopping cart on your website.
If you were finding on the other hand that out of the 1000 visits to your website 500 shopping carts were created (50% visit to cart conversion rate), but only 5 placed an order (10% cart to order conversion, a.k.a. 90% cart abandonment rate), then you would need to carefully analyse your ordering process.
From these stats you might launch into your Google Analytics stats to find out what’s going on. From the clues that you find you could formulate a Google Website Optimiser test to prove your assumptions.
The rewards in this sort of work are high. While traffic may be getting harder to generate with increased competition, your conversion rates are likely to be an easy to reach and untapped gold mine.

From the author: If you run an eCommerce website then you might wonder, “How do I know if I’m getting as many orders as I could be through my website?” The answer to that question is in your website’s
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