Below are the FIVE most common reasons why E-commerce Data has become a major pain in the Back-End, and steps you can take to minimize their impact
1 – The tools that made developing your shop easy are the same tools that make reporting difficult
With Shopify, and its ability to integrate with dozens of applications, putting together your e-commerce shop has never been so easy – great – but who has time to manually set up a direct mailing campaign, manage subscriptions, advertising, and financials?
While all the plugins and add-on apps make for a quick and easy shop management experience, they make for an absolute nightmare when it comes to accurate reporting. Shopify’s attempts at consolidating data from these various third-party applications end up looking like a pair of earphones that have spent the day in your pocket.
2 – You want real-time data, but you also want it to adjust with time
Two beers are the exact amount of time it takes an accountant to go into a rant about the absolute dread of month-end adjustments. Basically, after a month has ended, manual adjustments are made to your balance sheet, to make it balance, Duh! What this means is that if you look at the same data on the first day of the month, and then again a few days later, you will see two different data sets.
The same thing works with e-commerce, daily snapshots of your sales are great until you examine the refunds that were processed in the following weeks.
With 42% of US online shoppers have returned an item they bought online in the last six months (Narvar.) you can only achieve accurate ROI and LTV by ensuring you are updating your data retroactively.
3 – There are cut-off points for how far you can report historically
Remember the time you took all of the orders from your shop, and migrated them to your new shop? Or the time you renamed a quarter of your SKUs? We do, and we’re going to ask you to dig deep into your archives to find that mapping. With e-commerce data, things become more complicated the farther you look back in time, and this is not a bad thing. E-commerce businesses evolve rapidly and most times it’s for the better. Without a close examination of the changes that took place, the surface data is not right.
4 – Your shop and your partners are not in agreement about your sales
Your Facebook ads account, Google Analytics, and Shopify seem to disagree about your sales, average order value, and lifetime value of your customers. This is because your tools use different business policies and attribution rules to slice and dice your sales. It’s important to understand why these differences exist, and how to interpret results in each of the platforms.
We can be very interesting at times, Ads captivate us, but check-out pages scare us, only for us to come back two weeks later to complete our purchase. The average global cart abandonment rate in Q3 of 2018 was 76.9%. (SaleCycle.) Without running through all the various what-ifs, your Data at the surface level won’t tell you how to attribute your sales.
5 – You do not own your Data
Shopify and your other platforms do a stellar job of storing all of your shop data, inventory, financials, marketing, and customer lists, but you will often find that your data is scattered across multiple platforms that do not communicate. Your ability to make new sales is often contingent on the relationships you’ve built with your customers, and as an e-commerce business, your data is your most valuable asset.
Without a fully integrated warehousing solution, your data will remain scattered across an array of platforms, only accessible to you through one-size-fits-all dashboards. Your business is a single ecosystem and should be treated as such
The Essence of it is that…
E-Commerce data can be messy. With time and with the right guidance, it might just become the monstrosity that you love and adore, and with even more time, it will start talking back to you. Having data that is not very useful can be an absolute pain, but the silver lining is that it is never too late to start.