eCommerce Reporting and Analytics
The Volo Lever Framework
The Volo Lever framework puts ecommerce analytics at the centre of a strategic checklist of 10 levers that directly impact sales growth and efficiency improvements. The Volo levers diagram below shows a ‘super’ lever, reporting and analysis, which sits in the middle and is your window into exactly how you’re doing across the levers.
Two factors are central to being able to report on and analyse your sales performance. The first is the accuracy of the data itself. Most systems and software applications are only as good as the underlying data. In a dynamic business like an ecommerce business, that data is in a constant state of change, so the more up-to-date your data, the more accurate your window on what’s happening. The second factor is how the data is structured so that it’s surfaced in formats and reports that are meaningful and relevant to you. You want to be able to slice and dice your data in a number of ways, and well- structured data and flexible reporting allow you to do that, whereas poorly structured data and rigid reports don’t.
There’s also a ‘reality gap’. We’re pretty sure that in theory everyone embraces the idea of analysing performance regularly to inform our buying and selling decisions. In practice, however, we’ve a business to run and we get sucked into the day-to-day grind, so our analysis tends to be reactive, sporadic and infrequent. We also experience a difference between the data we’d like to see and the data we can actually extract and report on. This is the gap, and it can be a frustrating gap to bridge.
eCommerce Reporting and Analytics for Growth
Volo’s work with our multichannel customers helped us identify and frame the 5 levers of ecommerce growth. You can pull (or at least consider pulling) each of these levers to accelerate and maintain your sales, and becoming great at all 5 levers can have dramatic and lasting effects on your top line revenues. Good reporting and analysis gives you visibility into how you can improve in each of these areas.
Listing Quality
The better your products and their supporting data, the more likely they’ll be found by buyers. Good reporting allows you to look at your ecommerce order and sales data to determine how well your items are selling, by product, by supplier, over different time-frames, across regions and channels. Analysis enables you to focus on the areas where you can improve your listings, or indeed other determinants of success like price or shipping, but also on those items that are not selling well due to inferior or inaccurate accompanying information.
Inventory Breadth
The more inventory you have, and the more variations you can offer, the more you can sell. Good reporting allows you to balance your stock and your sales, sliced across a range of criteria, like marketplace or channel, region, SKU and supplier. You could use a master-sub/variation SKU report to break down sales by variation for a selected time period. Using a SKU sales velocity report identifies risers and fallers and helps you make decisions on pricing and re-ordering. What’s more, a stockout report shows you how long each item was out of stock for, combined with supplier lead times, to figure out your total elapsed time without stock.
Channel coverage and International/Cross-border
Your ecommerce channel coverage strategy and international strategy encompass your webstore or webstores, the various different marketplaces around the world and other channels like price comparison sites, daily deal aggregators, and commerce from social platforms. The more places you can offer the same stock, the more potential customers see your listings and the more sales you can make. Being able to analyse the performance of your products across the different channels, countries and regions – over different time periods and perhaps also by supplier or shipper – lets you see where the growth and profitable areas are, as well as the areas for improvement.
Promotions eCommerce Analytics
The more promotions you do, the more you increase your sales. Analysing your sales performance allows you to identify what the best promotions are and what products suit promotions better than others. When you’re great at reporting and analysis, you can spot trends, opportunities and challenges, thereby increasing your sales.
Using a fully featured analytics environment, with visual reports to provide easy at-a-glance figures and trends as well the detail behind the numbers, should give you the full picture.
eCommerce Reporting and Analytics for Efficiency
As with the growth levers, the better you are at managing the levers of efficiency, the more profitable your business. You can only get better at managing them when you have easy access to the right data about how they’re performing. There are various ways reporting analysis can help you improve ecommerce efficiency.
Inventory and Stock Control
Getting your inventory and stock levels right requires a fine balance of time and quantity. It’s also directly linked to how good you are at purchasing. Good reporting will allow you to balance your stock and your sales, sliced across a range of criteria, like marketplace or channel, region, SKU and supplier. For example, dead stock is a drain on your profitability. Being able to see what stock has had no sales over the last 7, 30 or 60 days, for example, allows you to identify poorly selling items and see what the stock value is of those SKUs.
Warehousing and Operations
The better your productivity, the more efficient your operations, whereas every mistake in warehouse allocation eats directly into your hard- earned margins from the original sale. Accurate reporting lets you judge the relative performance of your warehouse staff in processing supplier deliveries. Another critical area for reducing costs is looking at your credits and refunds, since they impact both your customer service and purchasing areas.
Being able to slice and dice your credit and refund data in lots of ways gives you the detail you need to identify and eradicate the excess time and costs spent on the worst offenders.
Fulfilment and Shipping
Mistakes in picking, packing and dispatching directly impact your profitability and strain your relationships with your customers. Great reporting and analysis allows you to improve problem areas in pack and pack, since you assess how good your staff members are at processing customer orders. You can also see your courier spend across parcel types to different regions or countries. When you can report easily on courier usage you’re able to evaluate other courier options based on current and forecast volumes.
Customer Service
You can take the same approach when you look at your customer service centre and their service load. Being able to see the minority of products that takes up a disproportionate amount of customer service effort helps you make informed decisions on what you need to fix. Similarly, if you can analyse and report on the type of customer questions that crop up the most often, thereby taking up most service time, you can work to introduce more automated information and more answers to frequently asked questions to reduce the service overhead and the need for manual intervention.
Purchasing eCommerce Analytics
The best sellers get the best prices from their suppliers and derive the highest gross margin. If you can see your stock value by supplier and your sales by supplier, this allows you to match supply and demand more efficiently. Once you’ve set up your key performance indicators and targets across the important areas of the business, you can sit back and let the reporting and analysis system and notifications provide the insight. For Volo customers, having easy visibility into the performance of their business and seeing where they best move the efficiency levers is a strong advantage.
Further reading on ecommerce reporting and analytics
How Reporting and Analysis Drives the 10 Levers of eCommerce Growth and Efficiency
The Silver Bullet – Data analytics and reporting across multiple marketplaces and web stores
Know Your Data – A guide to the insights you need from the different areas of your business
Contact us to discuss your eCommerce Reporting and Analytics requirements.
