In the increasingly competitive world of eCommerce, making your brand and products stand out is more challenging than ever.
With countless options available to consumers, gaining a competitive edge requires more than just a solid product—it demands data-driven insights that guide smarter decision-making.
This focus on data isn’t just a trend; it's a priority, with 99% of firms investing in data initiatives and 92% accelerating their investment pace.
To sell more effectively, you must understand how your products perform, which products contribute most to revenue, and which need improvement.
Product performance analytics is one of the most essential steps to optimise both sales and strategy.
Let’s dive right in!
What is product analytics & why is it Important?
In eCommerce, product analytics involves collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data on how customer/website visitors interact with your product, offers, checkout processes, etc. on your online storefront.
This involves metrics such as the number of product page views, add-to-cart rates, cart abandonment rates, conversion rates, and customer feedback to get a better understanding of product performance and user behavior.
The importance of product analytics cannot be emphasized enough for eCommerce brands:
1. Understand the product funnel
With eCommerce product analysis, you can understand what the customer/buyer journey actually looks like and visualize it from product discovery to final purchase.
Monitoring product page views, amount of time users stay on the product page and the number of add-to-carts will reveal where customers drop off, enabling you to optimize the funnel to increase conversions.
2. Optimize product offerings
When launching new products, eCommerce businesses can use historical sales data to understand what’s worked and what hasn’t in the past.
This helps you strategize your product mix, concentrate on high-value product lines, and be able to make objective decisions on which new products to promote and which to invest in.
3. Optimizing inventory management
Product analytics provides insights on inventory turnover and sales velocity to analyze the demand dynamics and stock levels.
Monitoring the sales quantity per item and inventory turnover makes demand planning more accurate, stockouts less frequent, and overstocking unlikely. This results in positive cash flow management and savings on warehousing.
4. Identify opportunities to boost revenue
Detailed product analytics reveals opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and product bundling.
By analyzing purchase patterns and product associations, you can create targeted promotions, recommend complementary products, and increase average order value (AOV), ultimately driving revenue for your eCommerce brand.
How to conduct product analysis in eCommerce?
Product analysis is easier said than done. We get it. Hence, we’ve outlined the steps you can take to achieve effective product analysis for your eCommerce business:
1. Define objectives and KPI
Identifying and tracking the right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is crucial for understanding the health of your eCommerce business and making informed strategic decisions.
Defining the right metrics will help define the objectives of eCommerce business. Be it boosting revenue with hero products, allocating more resources to high potential products, reducing focus on low potential or non-performing products with low visibility.
Here are some examples of key objectives and the metrics to track:
a) Boosting revenue with hero products:
GMV: High – Hero products generate substantial gross merchandise value, indicating strong sales performance and revenue contribution
Traffic: High – These products attract a large number of visitors, highlighting their popularity and broad appeal
KPIs: Sales volume, revenue per product, conversion rate
Objective: Identify top-performing products and optimize their visibility and marketing efforts
b) Allocating more resources to high-potential products:
GMV: Moderate to Growing – Products with rising GMV suggest increasing sales momentum, making them strong candidates for additional resources
Traffic: Moderate to High – Growing visitor interest shows that these products have potential to capture a larger market share
KPIs: Growth rate, market demand, profit margin
Objective: Discover products with rising popularity or untapped potential for increased investment
c) Decreasing focus on low-potential and non-performing products:
GMV: Low – Low GMV indicates limited revenue generation, signaling these products are not financially viable
Traffic: Low to Moderate – Limited visitor interest implies that these products may lack appeal or face stiff competition
KPIs: Sales velocity, return rate, customer feedback scores
Objective: Identify underperforming products for potential phase-out or improvement
d) Improving product visibility:
KPIs: Page views, search impressions, click-through rate
Objective: Enhance product discoverability and attract more potential customers
2. Integrate product data across channels
Being present on multiple platforms is a key part of eCommerce success. However, this means data will be fragmented across multiple sales channels and marketplaces - making it difficult for unified product analysis.
Data silos—when information is spread across different departments or groups without a shared platform—can lead to two key challenges
No single source of truth
Poor customer experience
The ability to dig out actionable insights from data is a strategic advantage in every business, more so in eCommerce. Organizations can achieve a holistic perspective, enhancing collaboration and driving more comprehensive, customer-centric strategies.
This could help:
Improve decision-making
Reduce errors
Achieve data democratization
Improve employee efficiency
Increase overall business competitiveness
To unify and integrate all your data for better product analysis, you can follow these steps:
a) Identify all relevant channels:
This could include:
Your eCommerce website
Social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok)
Third-party marketplaces (e.g., Amazon, Lazada, Shopee, Tokopedia, )
Mobile apps
Brick-and-mortar stores (if applicable)
b) Implement tracking and data collection tools:
There’s no point in identifying your sources if you’re not capturing this very valuable data. So, invest in the best tools like:
Google Analytics for website analytics
Marketplace analytics provided by third-party platforms
eCommerce-focused analytics tools like Graas, consolidates your sales data from various sources, including Lazada, Shopee, Shopify, Tokopedia, Amazon, Salesforce, and Flipkart. Eliminating the need to juggle multiple platforms and provides you with a centralized view of your eCommerce performance, allowing you to make informed data-driven decisions.
3. Get data-driven insights to identify strengths and weaknesses
Once your data is flowing in, the next step is to analyze this data to garner insights on what’s really working and what’s not as opposed to mere speculations and intuition.
You can utilize data analytics to identify strengths and weaknesses in your product offerings. By analyzing customer feedback, sales trends, and market performance, you can pinpoint areas for improvement and capitalize on your strengths.
By leveraging data-driven insights, you can:
Capitalize on high-performing products by allocating more resources to them.
Make necessary improvements on product weaknesses through its features, price or marketing.
Identify opportunities for new product development or expansion into new markets.
Optimize your product mix to maximize overall profitability and customer satisfaction
Get detailed product performance analytics with Graas
In eCommerce, profitability depends on data-driven decisions, hence, importance of product analysis cannot be overstated.
But digging through all that data (that is, if you can first collect all that data) may seem daunting especially when it's scattered across platforms.
That’s where Graas comes in.
You can use Graas' Product / SKU Analytics tool to get all your product performance metrics and enhance your eCommerce business strategy.
This powerful platform consolidates all your product performance metrics into one easy-to-use interface, providing actionable insights that can enhance your eCommerce business strategy.
With Graas, you can track key metrics, understand customer behavior, and make data-driven decisions that propel your brand forward.
Graas not only addresses the challenges discussed but also offers actionable recommendations to optimize costs, improve revenue, and drive growth.
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