Most things can handle one-off spikes of change.
A single hot day might hurt some plants but won't kill all of them.
A stock outage this week from a vendor will lose you some orders, but you'll catch up later in the month.
A flood of orders overnight will cause a busy next day, but won't force you to hire more staff.
The long-term changes are the things that cause a lot of impact though. Even small changes can accumulate enough momentum to unsettle the day-to-day.
Climate change over the years will cause some plants to never thrive in the same area again.
Never getting a stock replenishment will force you to discontinue the merchandise and find replacements.
A never-ending number of orders will require hiring and tooling up before your staff is exhausted.
The problem is there's often no clear line between the one-time and long-term. Is three days of order increases enough to start hiring? Ten days? A month?
Reacting the wrong way, in either direction can be expensive and damaging.
That's why having a good view into trends over the long-term is important. If you can start to see the differences between one-time, cyclic, and permanent events then you'll have better reactions.
Watching how your customers evolve over the months and years is one major sequence of events that I don't see enough Shopify stores watching. This includes watching how many customers shift into becoming loyal, defecting, or to potentially promising. In Repeat Customer Insights I added historic comparisons to Customer Grids to help with this.
But a lot of this requires paying close attention to your metrics and how they change from month-to-month and year-to-year.
Eric Davis
Start noticing seasonal spikes in customer behavior
Cohort reports let you detect seasonal spikes as well as long-term retention cycles. Repeat Customer Insights can automatically create cohorts for your Shopify store, going back to your very first order.