Retail and me

How do I improve sales today?

This is a question that eCommerce merchants grapple with on a daily basis. The mantra that I have often recommended is don’t focus on sales but on the underlying lever:

Sales for any product is nothing but (Number of shoppers Seeing the product) times (the likely hood of shoppers buying a product) and the Average order Size. All this subject to Availability of product.

Seems obvious.

The key take away in the context of this post is that, if we want to improve sales, we essentially have the three metrics Visits, Conversion and Basket Size to play with (and of course, we should have inventory to meet the demand).

Key questions:

Visits:

- How can I increase the number of visitors to my product page?

- How can I improve the quality of visitors (relevance) to my product page?

Activities: Changes to home page banners, OA, Affiliates and to a lesser extent email (because you can’t send an email everyday :)

Conversion:

- Why is my conversion low?

—— Is it across all the sources of traffic or only from specific sources?

- Is the conversion at a product level significantly different from other products in its group? Why?

Activities: Pricing of product (versus competitors), time bound promotions (Buy today get $5 off), product content (image, alternate image, description, features, features explained in user friendly terms,  reviews etc.)

Basket Size or Average Order Value:

- Are my shoppers buying related products along with the parent product? (mobile case with mobile, laptop bag with laptop etc.)

- While not truly Basket Size, are my customers of parent products coming back and shopping for related products?

Activities: Making related products visible and easy to buy in the shopping journey, Creating product bundles, Promotions by tagging relevant but lesser popular products with the top sellers.

Availability of Inventory

- Do I have enough inventory to meet my current demand and expected demand from the marketing activities?

——- If not, which alternate product/s should I promote?

This is by no means comprehensive set of questions. It is just the starting point. If we have the answers to these we can then add layers of business-specific questions to improve sales.

For instance,

I have limited space of my home page, which product do I promote?

With my limited Adwords budget, which product / category do I drive traffic to?