Benchmarks to Grow your Web Business

Posted on | January 1, 2008  
Writen by | Ian Griffith

Story by Ian Griffith on 1/1/2008
With our exposure to wine stores of all shapes and sizes who are selling online, store owners often ask how their website is performing compared to other stores. While we typically have an intuitive sense of how a store is managing and the challenges they face, this year-end we worked up a benchmark of metrics to give our customers feedback on how they compare with our other sites. The following are some insights that should give you a sense of the strengths of your own website and some areas where you might concentrate to improve your performance next year.

The following metrics come from an analysis of server traffic logs from this past November as a lens to view the performance of our customers. Certainly November is not a typically month and we plan to compare any assumptions from this data with a broader sample before making any recommendations.

Traffic metrics
There was a wide spread to the Visitor and Pageview statistics as some sites recently launched while others have hit a healthy stride and have been advertising aggressively for the holidays. Stores averaged 400 visitors per day in November, and pageviews per visit ranged from 2.3 to almost 7 averaging 4.19.

Encouraging your visitors to view more pages on your site is certainly a productive activity; however this metric shouldn’t be viewed in isolation and needs to be compared with your conversion rate. Even if your conversion rate is above average you can probably increase your conversions by increasing your average pageviews. If your pageviews are sitting around 3 you might examine your landing pages to see where visitors “bounce”. You want to limit the instances where people leave the site directly from the landing page. Are you providing enough opportunities for a visitor to find what she is looking for?

Sales
The success of a business is clear by its healthy sales and with an average over $45,000 for the month these sites are performing well as a group. True success emerges where stores are able to push the Average Order Size over $500 $217 overall and Conversion Rates over 3% where 1.2% is the norm. Ironically, it could be that performing very well in this category might indicate the store isn’t doing enough to reach out to new customers.

Our sample month coincided with the release of the Wine Spectator’s Top 100 wines, a frenzied hunt which can lead to a peak in cancelled orders. It was satisfying to note that stores that work with virtual inventory fared pretty well on cancelled orders typically coming in under 10%, while some stores that rely on their in-stock inventory got caught with 4 cases orders for items like Le Vieux Donjon.

The next step in a review of your website would be to target the conversion rates for internal site searches and to research abandoned shopping cart factors. Also, a review of conversion rates for the store’s traffic sources; Direct Traffic, Organic Search, Paid Search, Wine Directories and Email Campaigns will help you focus on how to motivate potential customers. For stores with a larger customer base the goal of segmenting customer promotions is a great opportunity for generating repeat buyers and increasing conversion rates on email campaigns.

To learn more about how the Beverage Media can help you Sell Wine Online with a website for your store, contact Ian Griffith at 212 571-3232 x318.
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