Early Stage Growth Tips
Apr 28, 2023
TLDR
Maintaining technical aspects is vital for a successful ecommerce business. Danny Miles, CTO of Dollar Shave Club, uses a daily 10-minute checklist to prevent issues from spreading. He looks at metrics related to site reliability, application-level, system-level, user behavior, upper marketing funnel, post-funnel, and business performance to catch and address technical issues before they impact the business.
Technical considerations may not be the most exciting aspects to building an ecommerce business, but it is of crucial underlying value. Danny Miles, CTO of the Dollar Shave Club, has a daily 10 minute checklist which he goes through to ensure the technical aspects of running an ecommerce store goes smoothly.
Miles views the various metrics in terms of 'rings', where any issues get significantly amplified through the outer rings. He believes it is especially important to solve technical issues at the core, before they impact other parts of the business.
Here's what he looks at:
Site reliability and performance
Issues with website reliability and performance can cost you more than you imagine—from jeopardizing the on-site sales funnel, hurting conversions, affecting organic traffic and wasting ad spend. Some metrics also may be indicators of fraud or security breaches.
Application-level metrics
Active sessions
Carts created
Orders processed
Logins per day
Payment declines
Changes to account
System-level Metrics
Uptime
Requests & traffic (Rate limits, Unique users on site, Cache hits vs. cache misses)
Latency (Response time, Page load time)
Errors
On-site user behavior metrics
Staying on top of these metrics helps you with pulling the right levers through tests, design, content, and features to increase AOV and conversion rates.
Time on site
Bounce rate
No. of pages visited
Product/content views
Cart adds/removals
Time to conversion
Abandonment rate
A/B testing groups
Upper marketing funnel metrics
Maintaining these aspects is important to avoid disruptions in reporting back to ad platforms like Meta, Google, and TikTok.
Misfiring pixels
Misconfigured pages
Referrer tracking
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Post-funnel metrics
After conversion, it is necessary to ensure a proper handoff to fulfillment, and check that payments are processed without issues, especially for credit cards.
Orders sent to warehouse (expected & actual)
Payments processed (expected & actual)
Business performance metrics
These metrics are lagging indicators of technology issues, so it's best to detect and fix any technology issues before they materially affect the business.
Average order value (AOV)
Order rate/ship rate (orders per hour/day)
Conversion rate (highly contextual)
Churn/cancellation rate
Return rate
