Compared to the advent of the department store in 1838 (in Newcastle of all places) retailing via ecommerce is still very much in nappies.
Everything around doing ecommerce is therefore also in its infancy, the methods, the marketing, the merchandising and, of big interest to me, the KPIs. It sure looks complicated and advanced with all the data and tools out there but I’m confident we will look back in even just 10 years and be astonished by how far we had to go. But that’s what makes it a fun place to work….
I’ve already mentioned how conversion on it’s own isn’t a great KPI due to maths trickery. Now I’ve got my eyes set on availability. Michael Ross has already pointed out that online you have unlimited shelf space so the use of availability to see how efficiently you are using your shop floor space isn’t so useful.
And so a much better KPI, one that addresses the underlying value of availability (i.e Lost Demand) is “Availability by Pageview.” I.e. Michael suggests weighting availability by pageview. This makes sense as if you have 90% availability but no-one is looking at those pages you will be losing a lot of sales. Availability on its own really has very little use.
Implementing that KPI is another challenge, especially using free technology such as Google Analytics but below is as far as I’ve got using the custom variables functionality.
1. Create two page level custom variables
- The first should identify those pages which are product pages. So we have product / category / etc
- The second should identify whether a product is in stock or out of stock.
2. Create a customer report:
- Metric is pageview
- First dimension is the key value of your first custom variable (product / category / etc)
- Drill down dimension is then custom variable value of your second custom variable (In Stock / Out of Stock)
- Final drill down to page title.
This should show you which products have been viewed the most that are out of stock. This is not the ultimate goal of availability by pageview but, like I say, were still at early ecommerce days. I suspect this would be possible in other (paid) analytics software but not in GA as custom variables are on visits not on content.
This can be automatically produced in a weekly report to merchandising to prioritise replenishment or change a previous decision to discontinue a line.
There are obviously challenges in faster moving goods such as fashion or if the product is like our most viewed out of stock product the Pad-Dock iPhone to Tablet Converter – IWOOT
This is so incredibly important and one of my (dare I say) daily frustrations with some clients business processes. With SEO, you can’t always help that the inventory isn’t all there, but the thousands of wasted pounds (£’s) spent on PPC, coupled with frustrated users and negative brand impact on not having the required item is incredible.
Throw into this that a lot of pages with no products then become 404’s which is a complete waste of resource makes for a serious amount of wastage that monitoring this metric can definitely rectify. great Work!
Nikki Rae