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September 23, 2025
Content Manager, Bizrate Insights
Updated 9/25: The following blog is adapted from Bizrate Insights’ past library of white papers and guides that we’ve made publicly available. Enjoy!
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Of all the data you should be tracking for your ecommerce business, key performance indicators (KPIs) should be at the top of your list. Think of these important metrics as the bellwethers for the effectiveness of your strategy.
Choosing the right KPIs to track and selecting the best measurement tools is critical to gaining the insights you need to grow your business and sustain success well into the future.
There is no one-size-fits-all set of KPIs every business should adopt. However, the right KPIs will always add value to your ecommerce strategy by measuring what is and isn’t working.
For example, KPIs can tell you exactly where and when customers leave the sales funnel, what they think of your product or service, how they rate the effectiveness of your customer support, and whether they are recommending your company. You can even leverage KPIs to gain more insight into your financial strategy, like measuring return on investment data and ad spend to see where your budget has the largest impact.
While there are hundreds of KPIs you can track for insight into ecommerce performance, it’s best to start with the ones most likely to yield actionable insights. Depending on your team’s bandwidth, two dozen KPIs should be more than enough to start with. You can always drop or add KPIs as you become comfortable with the tracking process and see which ones deliver the most relevant and actionable information to your team.
1. Website TrafficStart with your website traffic. This KPI is important because it tells you how many consumers are being exposed to your products via your online store. Is traffic steadily growing? Does it seem to go up on certain days or at certain times of day? How does the season affect your traffic? Ideally, you’ll see a steady increase in traffic over time as you scale your business. If you aren’t seeing the numbers climb, look for ways to increase traffic by focusing on your referral sources. 2. Referral TrafficYour referral traffic is important because it tells you where your website visitors are coming from, and shows you what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus efforts for growth. Is your website traffic coming from organic search results, search ads, social media? Figure out what referral sources are most productive so you can allocate resources to high-performing channels. Understanding where your customers are coming from will help you target your outreach in the most effective way possible. |
Understanding where your customers are coming from will help you target your outreach in the most effective way possible. |
Looking at your bounce rate tells you how much of your website traffic is ultimately a write-off. Consumers who leave your site after just a few seconds didn’t find what they were looking for. Backtrack to those referral sources and see where your nonproductive traffic is coming from so you can determine what content they saw that made them want to visit before they left.
Your potential customer made it all the way through the process of adding items to their cart — but never proceeded to checkout. Does this scenario sound familiar? Understanding why starts with tracking customer cart abandonment as a critical ecommerce KPI. This can provide you with information you need to keep others from doing the same, and give you a second chance to draw those customers back to complete their purchase.
Another good KPI to track is repeat visits from the same IP address. Understanding who is intrigued enough to come back over and over even if they never quite click to purchase is a high-value activity.
Each touchpoint gives you another chance to win a customer conversion. Identifying repeat visitors provides an opportunity to present a new offer, deliver an incentive like free shipping, or capture an email address that can be used to provide a discount.
Time to purchase can be tracked in tandem with others, such as repeat visits and conversion rates, to see how many touchpoints are typically needed to get a customer to actually purchase a product. |
6. Conversion RateYour conversion rate is a critical ecommerce performance indicator. How many visitors actually become customers? Average conversion rates vary widely across industries, so compare apples to apples before deciding if your conversion rate is far below or above the industry standard. 7. Time to PurchaseHow long does it take for a customer to hit the checkout button and follow through? This KPI can be tracked in tandem with others, such as repeat visits and conversion rates, to see how many touchpoints are typically needed to get a customer to actually purchase a product.Offering free shipping in a banner on your website or using a pop-up to offer a discount at different stages of the sales funnel can shorten time to purchase. |
How much it costs to attract a new customer is a critical metric that plays into many other ecommerce KPIs. Acquisition is generally counted only in terms of a customer who makes a purchase, unless you segment out both potential leads and actual conversions.
Knowing your average order value can help you determine how to set advantageous shipping prices and also where to try to hike that average by offering discounts or bundling products. As a KPI,the average order value can be tracked over time to see if you are successful in driving it up.
Identifying what customers often buy together can also guide you in choosing products to bundle or cross-sell and up-sell to returning customers. Looking at what customers buy in the same order as well as what’s in their order history can give you valuable insight into which products in your lineup have a natural affinity and which may have potential for artificially induced affinity, such as “impulse buy” products that can be added to an order at checkout to trigger free shipping.
This KPI is a long-term one to track and will give you a deeper understanding into the value of customer retention. Depending on what your ecommerce store offers, CLV can vary widely — if you only sell one or two high-ticket items, CLV may be consistent but repeat business unlikely. However, knowing CLV can help you determine where your break-even is on customer acquisition.
The repurchase rate can be a helpful KPI, especially if you sell anything that a customer can set up a recurring order process for or that is consumable. Knowing which customers come back again and again can help you both identify patterns in their demographics and more effectively retarget those who don’t.
Figuring out the average repurchase rate and comparing it to your optimal rate gives you a benchmark and a target. You can also track the annual repurchase rate that is useful for comparing how many customers repeatedly repurchase compared to those who don’t.
Figuring out the average repurchase rate and comparing it to your optimal rate gives you a benchmark and a target. You can also track the annual repurchase rate that is useful for comparing how many customers repeatedly repurchase compared to those who don’t.
Do you know how many customers you lose for good every month? These can be customers who abandon you for a competitor or those who abandon their purchasing habits in the vertical altogether.Churn can often be identified by customers who unsubscribe from email lists. This KPI can be leveraged to figure out when and why customers are churning and to develop ways to head off churn before it happens.
If you don’t carefully track ROI metrics, you’ll have no way of knowing if you can improve in your decision making. |
15. Total SalesYour total sales is an obvious KPI to track. Knowing how much gross revenue is coming in the door is a requisite for many financial and accounting processes. This KPI can alert you to unexplained slumps or unexpected peaks so you can rectify or leverage such changes. 16. Total ProfitsThe total profit from your ecommerce store is critical from many standpoints. Total profits can be balanced against costs and will help determine your profit margins, helping you strategize for future product development and marketing efforts. |
Your return on investment is crucial to measuring the success and growth of yourentire ecommerce endeavor, from choosing products and engaging in R&D to selecting target marketing channels and allocating advertising budgets. If you don’t carefully track ROI metrics, you’ll have no way of knowing if you can improve in your decision-making.
Understanding ROAS in particular is vital to continued success in the ecommerce sector. This KPI can be overarching and split into separate channels and tracked by ad format or audience to help narrow down where the largest returns are coming from.
Product reviews are like a microcosm of word-of-mouth. Good ones improve the standing of your ecommerce company, but bad ones stick out like a sore thumb.Knowing how to measure the value of product reviews is as important as knowing how to generate them via contact with satisfied customers. This KPI can act as a pulsepoint, letting you know which direction public perception of your product and customer service is swinging.
How your customer service process works will make or break your ecommerce operation. This KPI can be segmented to show a variety of metrics, including how quickly a query is answered, the length of the session, and how often sessions deliver resolutions on first contact. There is almost always room for improvement when it comes to customer service, so this KPI should be diligently tracked and analyzed.
The Net Promoter Score focuses specifically on customer loyalty and the likelihood of a shopper becoming a direct or indirect ambassador for your brand. It’s simple to deploy: Customers are asked how likely they are to recommend a company then given the option to select a number on a scale from one to 10.
A higher NPS means a customer is more likely to recommend your business. The rating system for each individual goes like this: Anything zero to six is a detractor, seven or eight is neutral, and nine or 10 is considered a promoter. Calculate your overall NPS by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
Satisfaction is a vital KPI to track so that you can ensure customers are being given everything they need — hopefully before they even realize they need it. |
22. Likelihood to RecommendThis KPI is the raw data arrived at before the NPS score is calculated and shows you the number of people likely to make a recommendation at all, without the added aspect of perceived value attached. It can be helpful in showing how active your customer base 23. Likelihood of Customer Buying AgainSimilar to Likelihood to Recommend, this KPI simply shows you what percentage of customers might be enticed into becoming a repeat customer. It’s helpful if you’re trying to assess the overall experience interacting with your brand and can be combined with surveys asking specific questions about the customer experience. |
Satisfaction is a vital KPI to track so that you can ensure customers are being given everything they need — hopefully before they even realize they need it. Understanding what customers see as most important when dealing with a company will help you define this metric and develop ways to draw deeper insights about how you
can stand out from your competition.
Bizrate Insights’ free voice-of-customer (VoC) survey solution collects comments and ratings from verified shoppers. With data analysis included, comments and ratings collected from your customers are automatically formulated into KPIs that can be benchmarked and tracked over time — giving you a 360-degree assessment of your performance.
Take your ecommerce strategy to the next level and get all the tools you need to build a best-in-class customer experience. Take a quick walkthrough of the Online Buyer Survey with a member of our team today.
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