What's an E-Commerce Dashboard? & Why Does it Matter?

The essential things to know about e-commerce dashboards are:

• An e-commerce dashboard is a real-time visual interface that monitors the most important metrics and KPIs of an e-commerce business.

• E-commerce dashboards can include general data for widespread use or be customized for the use of a single individual, team, or department.

• The benefits of using an e-commerce dashboard include greater efficiency, time savings, and higher profits.

• Conversion rate, bounce rate, cart abandonment rate, average order value, and customer lifetime value are some of the most useful metrics to track in an e-commerce dashboard.

• E-commerce dashboards rely on business intelligence (BI), analytics, and data integration tools in order to deliver the insights that key decision-makers depend on.

Choosing an e-commerce platform like Shopify is just the first step when building an online business. In order to make smarter business decisions and boost your online sales and marketing campaigns, you’ll need information about how your e-commerce site is performing.

That’s exactly what an e-commerce dashboard is designed to accomplish. By uniting all of the most relevant metrics and data points under one roof, e-commerce dashboards give you quick, crucial insights into your business performance, from sales data to email campaigns.

But what is an e-commerce dashboard, exactly, and what are the benefits of an e-commerce dashboard for your business? We’ll answer these questions and more below.

Need a powerful data integration tool to support your e-commerce dashboard? Give Integrate.io a try with our 7-day pilot.

What Is an E-Commerce Dashboard?

An e-commerce dashboard is a real-time visual representation of an e-commerce store’s most valuable metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators). The purpose of e-commerce dashboards is to provide a quick summary of a company’s bottom line at a glance. Along with reports, dashboards are one of the most useful business intelligence and analytics techniques to support executives’ and managers’ decision-making.

The contents of an e-commerce dashboard may include graphs, charts, tables, maps, gauges, and other data visualization methods that help users rapidly understand the underlying data. E-commerce dashboards may be designed for general use across the organization or for a specific use case. For example, individual teams may design custom dashboards to monitor their marketing performance or sales performance.

The Benefits of Using an E-Commerce Dashboard

As you can imagine, there are many e-commerce dashboard benefits for businesses of all sizes. The advantages of using an e-commerce dashboard include:

• Greater efficiency: Unlike other business intelligence methods such as reports and spreadsheets, e-commerce dashboards can be easily interpreted in just a few seconds. Dashboards streamline complex underlying datasets and translate them into a visual format. You can include only those metrics or KPIs that are most important to you, placing them in a prominent position within the dashboard so that they always remain front of mind.

• Saved time: Dashboards simplify the process of obtaining e-commerce analytics. Instead of consulting multiple data sources (Shopify, Google Analytics, etc.) to get the insights you need, e-commerce dashboards present all the relevant findings within a single pane. Over time, this will save users hours of effort, helping them focus on what really matters: interpreting the results and making decisions.

• Avoiding negative outcomes: Many factors go into running a successful e-commerce business: ensuring the website is up, efficiently resolving customer queries and issues, keeping products in stock, delivering orders on time, etc. E-commerce dashboards help you oversee the relevant metrics for each of these factors (e.g., the average support response time or the stock levels for popular products), so that you can avoid negative outcomes that harm customer satisfaction.

• Higher profitability: By paying attention to the right metrics and KPIs (more on that below), your e-commerce business will better understand how to increase profits—both for the company itself and for any products you wish to focus on.

Enjoying the benefits of an e-commerce dashboard is a lot easier when you have the right data integration tool to support it. See for yourself with a 7-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform.

What Metrics Should You Use in Your E-Commerce Dashboard?

There are dozens of metrics and KPIs that e-commerce business owners can keep track of in their e-commerce dashboards, and there’s no “one size fits all” answer for what companies should include. Below are just a few suggestions for key metrics that online retailers may wish to monitor in their e-commerce dashboard:

• Conversion rate: The percentage of visits to your online store that end with a completed purchase. Optimizing your conversion rate is one of the most important functions of an e-commerce dashboard.

• Bounce rate: The percentage of visitors who leave your website immediately without visiting any other pages. Bounce rate is a useful e-commerce KPI because it can be used to measure how engaging your website is or how well your visitors match your intended audience.

• Cart abandonment rate: The percentage of visitors to your e-commerce site who add an item to their shopping cart but then leave the website before buying it. Tracking this metric can help you detect if there is a problem with your checkout process that dissuades customers from making a purchase.

• Average order value (AOV): The average amount (in dollars or another currency) of orders placed by the customers of your e-commerce business. Increasing your AOV is one good way to help offset the costs associated with acquiring new customers.

• Customer lifetime value: The average total revenue that a customer will bring in over the lifetime of their relationship with your business, including purchases, subscriptions, etc. This metric helps you quantify the benefits of focusing on customer retention and lowering churn instead of trying to acquire new customers.

How Integrate.io Can Help With E-Commerce Dashboards

E-commerce dashboards are an incredibly powerful tool for learning more about your business at a glance. In order to have these insights at your fingertips, however, you’ll need to have fast, efficient data integration workflows that can get all this information where it needs to go.

That’s why more and more e-commerce businesses are using data integration solutions like Integrate.io. Integrate.io is a feature-rich yet user-friendly ETL (extract, transform, load) and data integration platform that has been designed from the ground up for the needs of e-commerce businesses.

With more than 140 pre-built connectors and integrations with third-party data sources, Integrate.io has the capabilities your organization needs to start building your own custom data pipelines. Integrate.io’s drag-and-drop, the no-code visual interface makes it simple for anyone, regardless of technical skill, to define their own rich, complex data flows and transformations.

The advantages of Integrate.io don’t stop there. The Integrate.io platform includes a CDC (change data capture) feature so that you only extract the information that has changed since your last data integration job, saving you time and effort. In addition, Integrate.io comes with reverse ETL functionality to transfer information out of a centralized data warehouse and into third-party tools, making it easier for users to access it.

Ready to learn how Integrate.io can benefit your e-commerce business? Get in touch with our team of data experts today to discuss your business goals and requirements, or to start your 7-day pilot of the Integrate.io platform.