How to define ecommerce success
Different web sites will have different success criteria. Even
within a company, different departments might attribute success
differently.
For the marketing department, driving more traffic to the site
might count as success, even if sales don't increase. For the
copywriter, success will come if the content is easy to
understand and helps the customer find out more about the
company and its products.
For the sales department, increasing the sales conversion per
site visitor could be a good measure of success. In summary,
there are many ways to measure the success of a site, and all
these factors combined will give the truest and most accurate
overall measure of success.
Traffic
One of the most obvious measures of success is traffic. The more
visitors to the site, the higher the profile, the more people
will know about your site, and the more opportunities you have
to build a customer relationship. However, if no visitors buy
from your site or view more than one page, then traffic alone
isn't enough for success...
Sales Ratio This is how many visitors you need to get one
sale. For instance if 1 in 100 visitors purchases from the site,
then you have a sales ratio of 1%. One key aspect of success is
to try and drive up conversion rates - if selling a product - so
that more and more prospects are turned into customers.
Repeat Visits The more repeat visits you have, the more
chance you get to build a customer relationship, build loyalty
and ultimately increase sales. Therefore measuring repeat visits
is a good measure of success: if people come back and back again
then clearly you are fulfilling a need of theirs.
Total Sales For many people, the total sales is the
figure that they look for - how many products were bought
through a site in month x? Even though this figure may slightly
misguide as to the overall success of a site, it is of course
still an important overall measure.