Sometimes, the experience a customer has on your eCommerce website is even more important than the product you sell. That’s perfectly visible from the numbers—88% of customers tend to purchase again if their experience with an eCommerce brand was first-rate.
This emphasizes the significance of customer service and efficient measurement of its quality.
Keep reading and explore the ten main eCommerce metrics to track and see how to improve your overall customer experience (CX) and business performance.
How Can Knowing Your eCommerce Metrics Enhance Your Customer Service?
With the help of customer experience metrics, eCommerce businesses evaluate the quality of experience they offer to shoppers.
Understanding the quality of CX your business provides is a big part of success. Let the numbers speak for themselves:
- 80% of companies intend to boost their investments in enhancing CX in 2024.
- 80% of customers say that they equally appreciate the experience an eCommerce brand provides and the products or services it offers.
- 75% of customers recommend a business to others because they had a great CX.
- 73% of customers would rather do business with a competitor in cases where they had at least one negative experience.
Knowing your customer service metrics can allow you to understand better your buyer’s behavior, preferences, and service satisfaction. This, in turn, will enable you to finetune your offerings to better meet clients′ expectations.
10 Important eCommerce Metrics to Track
Let’s get to the point and review the main eCommerce metrics to monitor and measure for excellent customer service.
1. Net Promoter Score
NPS helps you understand whether your clients will recommend your brand to friends, relatives, and acquaintances.
To measure NPS, you can ask your shoppers a simple question like:
“How likely are you to recommend Brand X on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is ‘not likely at all’ and 10 is ‘extremely likely′”?
Based on the scores, you can categorize your customers into Promoters, Passives, and Detractors.
Promoters (scores (9 – 10) are delighted shoppers who enjoy your product and will likely recommend it to others. Passives (7 – 8) are generally satisfied buyers who are not eager to advertise your product actively. They can also be vulnerable to competitors’ offerings. Detractors (0 – 6) are typically unsatisfied clients who are unlikely to recommend your product to others.
Then, subtract the percentage of Detractors from Promoters, and you get the NPS. The score may range from -100 to +100.
Getting a positive score means clients are generally satisfied with the experience you provide. But if you get a negative score, the CX you provide is probably poor and needs to be investigated more.
2. Customer Effort Score
The Customer Effort Score (CES) indicates how simple users can navigate your website, order a product, and cope with arising issues.
You can quickly determine CES by asking your clients to answer several survey questions or rate a certain experience right after completion.
It can be done through the following dialogue windows:
1. Emoticon survey questions
2. Numbered survey questions
3. Likert survey questions
The answer will show you whether your brand is performing well in terms of CX, or if there are areas that need your attention and specific improvements.
Tip: While CES surveys can provide valuable insights for eCommerce business owners, it’s also essential to strike a balance and avoid making shoppers fill in too many details, as this can tire and frustrate them, thus negatively impacting overall CX.
3. Website Traffic
Though it might not be obvious from the start, knowing your website traffic can help immensely in assessing the quality of CX.
Understanding website traffic can show patterns in your customers’ behavior, ensuring you provide service that meets their needs.
You can check site traffic using dedicated tools like the Website Traffic Checker from SE Ranking. It gives you insights such as the number of visitors on your eCommerce website, geography, keywords that bring visitors to your site, traffic sources (paid or organic), and more. Once you know these details, you can tailor your customer service in a way that allows your website visitors to get the best experience and turn into customers.
4. Conversion Rate
Conversion Rate shows how many of your website visitors become buyers. You can determine it by using this formula:An average eCommerce Conversion Rate is about 2% as of June 2024. If your conversion rate is lower than the industry average, you should look for options to improve the CX you provide. If it’s higher than the industry average, chances are you’re doing well.
5. Repeat Customer Rate
The Repeat Customer Rate (RCR) indicates the ratio between the buyers who bought something on your site more than once and the total number of clients.
This index reflects your clients’ loyalty and shows the effectiveness of your efforts to retain customers.
Determine RCR by this formula:
The higher the RCR, the better CX you provide to your clients, making them stay with your brand for a long time and come back again and again. A low RCR may indicate a need to improve customer satisfaction through promotions like coupons or personalized free shipping.
6. Customer Satisfaction Score
The CSAT measures customer satisfaction with products, services, post-purchase communication, and overall shopping experience.
Business owners typically gauge this score through surveys, feedback forms, and ratings, asking customers to evaluate their satisfaction with their shopping experience. Customers can rate satisfaction from “Not Satisfied” to “Extremely Satisfied” or with a simple “Yes” or “No” response.
Customer satisfaction score also depends on how you handle returns, not only purchases. For instance, when using dedicated tools such as ReturnGO’s automation, you ensure your client gets automated updates at every step of the return process. This enhances transparency, potentially increases your buyer’s loyalty, and can result in a higher CSAT.
Fact: The US customer satisfaction with online retail reached 80 points out of 100 in 2024.
7. Customer Lifetime Value
The Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) estimates the potential total income a specific buyer can bring throughout your entire customer-seller relationship.
Knowing this metric helps you allocate the budget you need to spend on client acquisition and avoid marketing overspending on products that might be losing your money. Additionally, CLV speaks about client loyalty.
This is how you determine CLV:
8. Customer Churn Rate
The Customer Churn Rate indicates the percentage of clients who stop buying at your online store.
It is one of the key eCommerce metrics since it helps understand your customer retention and loyalty, which the quality of customer service can most likely impact.
The reasons for customer churn vary, from dissatisfaction with products to poor customer service and difficulties with site navigation.
You can estimate the Customer Churn Rate by using this formula:
A high churn rate implies there are a large proportion of clients who are not returning to your website. On the contrary, a low churn rate suggests that your business efficiently retains customers.
Typically, a churn rate of 5% is considered a success for the eCommerce sector. However, it strictly depends on a specific case. For some companies, 10% might also be a good churn rate.
One of the ways to improve Customer Churn Rate could be understanding your clients’ return patterns with tools like ReturnGO. By knowing why shoppers return products at your store, you can react proactively and retain users, decreasing the Churn Rate.
9. Cart Abandonment Rate
The Cart Abandonment Rate refers to the percentage of customers who add items to their online shopping cart but do not finish the transaction.
The reasons clients leave your website without making a purchase might be different. There may be too many steps in the checkout process, or some may be difficult or time-consuming. Overall, this metric can highlight issues with CX quality.
Business owners typically use this formula for the calculation of the Cart Abandonment Rate:
Fact: The global Cart Abandonment Rate in eCommerce has been growing progressively since 2014 and has now reached 70.19%.
10. Average Order Value
The AOV measures how much each given buyer spends on a single purchase in your store.
It helps understand buyers’ purchase habits and the average amount they spend. These insights give a business an opportunity to improve the overall CX so that clients are more satisfied with the service and thus willing to spend more.
This is a simple formula for estimating AOV:
Final Words
Tracking key eCommerce metrics helps business owners understand the customer satisfaction level, giving them a sense of how their store is doing overall.
This provides brands with an opportunity to act proactively and improve their online businesses to meet shoppers’ expectations and needs, increase client loyalty, and, thus, improve sales.
Use the key eCommerce metrics from this article to track the quality of your CX and seize the opportunity to grow.
