Step 8: monitor your shop sales activity

If your website includes an ecommerce module (online shop), you can see sales activity information presented as a series of easy to understand charts. Select a year to see monthly sales totals (gross, net and number of orders), or a year and a month to see daily totals. Analysis and calculations are carried out within hundredths of a second of selecting the page, meaning that all the data is bang up-to-date every time you use the tool.

Every delivery address is analysed and the 25 most frequent postcode areas are displayed with the relevant numbers of deliveries. Data for every item sold during the selected period is collated and the 25 most popular products are shown with the total numbers bought. At the point of sale, every customer is asked to select an option (configurable) informing you of how they found out about your website, and the resultant data collected is displayed in descending order of popularity, enabling you to monitor the effectiveness of different advertising campaigns. (With a separate Site System™ tool, PPC advertising campaigns and price comparison site leads can be monitored on a click-per-click basis with IP address and usage analysis to help detect click-fraud.)

Orders are displayed by day of the week, and by hour of the day, enabling you to see what your most profitable days and hours are. Other interesting order details are shown, such as average order values (net and gross) during the selected period; highest value single order; most items sold in a single order etc. Finally, individual order figures during the selected period are grouped together and presented as totals of net sales, delivery charges, VAT collected, and gross sales.