The days as a professional online seller are full of hard work, phonecalls with clients, via email, chat, fulfil the orders, manage the returns, deal with clients in your physical shop… How exhausting!
You should never underestimate at last the only thing that can help us to stay in line: the sales data.
Data are the most relevant resource we have. Thanks to data you can see down in black and white if you are a big seller, mediocre or close to failure.
Outlining the info obtained from your marketplace account, you can come to imagine new strategies to improve online business.
In this post I would like to list any index that I personally retain important to monitor every item category.
Profitability and profit margins. These values are not so difficult to calculate, but do you stop to look at them monthly? Do you know what are the products that are taking you more profits?
Marketplace fees. Do you know for sure how many fees you pay to Amazon or eBay for your sales in a given item category? These fees are brought in line with your profit margins defined for those products?
Best Seller and Worst Seller. Which are the best seller and the worst seller among your products? You can also divide you research for market and nation.
Sell Through. (items put on the market ÷ items sold * 100. This value can be counted both for quantities and for value of products. In this way, you can avoid waste in items not sold but that you have in great quantity and vice versa.
Calendar comparisons. Do you count and compare your sales with other periods in calendar? You should be interested in seeing how was your business going last year, this is fundamental!
Product “coverage”. How many weeks or days it takes to have a product unavailable? Do you achieve in clients satisfaction?
Refund rate. Abolish refund? Barely impossible! Do not surrender. By counting your refund rate you could be aware of the aspects to improve in your business (exhaustive description, clearer photos,...)
If you reply to these questions, you will be able to know exactly your expenses and your incomes. As a consequence, you can do better choices for supply and marketplace management.
Surely you are in need of an automatic tool, in order to do scheduled monitoring. A useful analysis tool is Google Data Studio.
Data Studio was launched to create clear and simple report starting with Google Analytics - which gives not always comprehensible data.
This tool can be embedded with different source data to create graphics and tables with your data. Data Studio can transform your marketplace sales strategy.
eDock, having clear in mind what said unil now, has decided to help its clients by giving them the possibility to transfer the data available in eDock in their Data Studio account. In this way, doing report and graphics will be easier.
The integration is very plain, you can read this article.