What retail metrics should you care about?

Amazon is a data-driven company. If you aren’t tracking and optimizing your approach based on the data, you are falling behind both competitors who lean into that mindset and Amazon themselves given their “hands off the wheel” algorithmic approach to eCommerce.

So what KPIs and metrics should you care about?

The more obvious:

OPS

Topline sales determines overall performance on the site. Tracking your performance, particularly relative to the category or other channels, is pivotal to make adjustments and augment your potential on the platform.

Traffic

You can’t sell products if they don’t have customers seeing them. Paying attention to your traffic metrics helps determine your existing reach and identify opportunities for improvement (ex. optimize content on high traffic listings, run campaigns to low traffic listings, or run A/B tests for mobile customers).

Conversion

You can’t sell products if customers don’t buy when they reach your pages. Paying attention to your conversion metrics helps gauge listing quality and identify opportunities for improvement (ex. refresh image stacks for low converting pages or drive more traffic to high converting pages).

Inventory

You can’t sell products if they’re out of stock or not distributed optimally. Micro-management of inventory at a SKU level is required to properly scale.

Buy Box Rate

Your products won’t sell if they aren’t consistently the featured offer. Tracking not only your buy box rates by SKU, but also which sellers or channels are disrupting your buy box metrics, informs overall pricing and channel management strategy.

The less obvious:

Profitability

This might seem obvious, but profitability on marketplaces is difficult to back into. Beyond just tracking topline sales vs. product costs, a full P&L layering in all fees, deductions, and payments is pivotal to see a clear picture of channel profitability, drive resource allocations, and catch erroneously charged funds.

Click-Through Rate

This metric isn’t always directly provided, so backing into this via separate sources is often required. However, tracking CTR helps layer strategy onto the Traffic, Conversion, and Content stories and helps influence optimizations around imagery, branding, and media.

Share of Voice

Share of Voice data provides valuable insights across key competitors and visibility within a category. Tracking your SOV helps gauge competition, informs new selection opportunities, and can support cross/upsell strategies.

Account Health / IPI Score

Account and inventory management issues have a detrimental impact on your ability to efficiently run a business and scale. Micromanaging your compliance and inventory processes catered to specific requirements and operational KPI’s ensure a clear undisrupted runway.

Product/Keyword Ranking

The higher a SKU ranks, the better it sells and more visible it is. This also serves as a proxy to competitor and category trends and sales, gauges incremental impact of pricing/promotions, and quantifies efficacy of content and SEO efforts to drive overall strategy.

There are dozens of other metrics and KPIs that are of importance, but these are some of the key ones that need to be mastered and tracked not only to have the right foundation for success, but also unlock the right opportunities and strategies for growth on marketplace platforms. 

Ready to unlock better marketplace performance? Reach out today.