– A dashboard is not effective in making important decisions for an ecommerce business, such as product manufacturing, pricing, and marketing strategy.
– The success of an ecommerce company should be measured by factors such as non-compensated great reviews, people talking about the product, and sharing pictures of the website.
– Building a strong brand reputation is crucial for success in ecommerce, and it is important to stand out in the market.Focus on building a strong brand reputation and creating a quality audience rather than relying solely on dashboard metrics to measure success in ecommerce.I’ve never seen an ecommerce business successfully built off a dashboard. A dashboard wasn’t involved when deciding…- what product to manufacture – how to price the product – what materials to use – who would be responsible for what – the go-to-market strategy – the packaging. You see, a dashboard is a crutch for measuring the success of all these activities after you’ve already made these decisions. But truth be told, nine times out of ten, the decisions you make up there have more of an influence on the results that you see in a dashboard later. But they only tell half the story. You see, all of those actions require a market, audience, and people that value your offer. The game is a quality audience game; people just don’t know how to play other than measuring, did they buy? We don’t have a dashboard for “are we attracting the right kind of people for our product offering.” Instead, we use outdated KPIs that guess whether or not people are a good fit or interested based on conversion rates. We’re at the point where people think that everything can be measured by data. I’m a data guy telling you that data only gives you the words on the page; you need to take those words and combine them to build a sentence to tell a story. But you do need the words. Yes, sentence structure matters, just the same as spelling, but at the end of the day, your dashboards are often more distraction and fixation than taking in the larger picture and deciding to make appropriate changes. I like a lot of products that I see; I’m the right audience for a lot of them. I don’t have enough time, money, or space to purchase them all. Does that make me the wrong audience? Why can’t I comment on a product that I see and give it some love? Why is it only did I buy it or not? Want, Need, Desire are the three categories. Sometimes it’s OK to be aspirational; not everyone drives a Ferrari. This can be the same for something as simple as black and gold golf balls. Practical? No. Cool? Yes. What if instead we measured the success of an ecommerce company based on the amount of non-compensated great reviews they got? What if we measured success on the amount of people that talked incessantly about how great their product that they own is? What if we measured success on people resharing pictures of how awesome the website was? None of these things can be or should be measured in a dashboard because it’s all about brand perception. When you’re creating a brand, your clear north star is the reputation of your brand. Hard to build, easy to destroy. Most brands are no where close to this and it shows. The thing is, it really doesn’t take much, most brands are an extension of the founder’s style and those that purchase, see a bit of themselves in that founder, something about them. Standing out in a crowd is as simple as wearing neon yellow at a funeral. Choose where you want to be seen in an environment that allows you to be noticed.#ecommerce #marketing #strategyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco