What stories are your metrics from last year telling you?

With the start of a New Year, now is the perfect time to finalize how your Shopify store performed last year.

You'll want to review a lot of metrics and measurements. From the regulars like total sales to the advanced like Repeat Purchase Rate. Spend some time exploring them and noting down patterns or oddities you notice.

Then compare them to each other and see if you can find any stories or larger patterns.

Did your order sizes increase while the number of returns increase? Sounds like your customers are buying products on a trial basis.

Finally you'll want to see if those stories are positive and ones you want to keep around this year. Those are ones you want to grow and expand on in the coming months.

Perhaps you like the idea of customers trying out products so you introduce a trial period on all products. This could become a marketing message that separates you from your competitors.

Taking the time to explore your metrics is the first step though. You'll need to steep in the numbers a bit until you spot something odd.

In Repeat Customer Insights the Customer Cohort Report, Order Sequences Analysis, and First Product Analysis are good reports to soak up. They tease out metrics that often get buried in the data. The combination of the three will give you a good coverage of your customer behavior, timing, and product performance.

Eric Davis