When your Shopify store's growth gets you down

In the past two weeks I've talked with two different people about their business growth (actually, the lack of growth).

Both cases were seeing drops and the owners were getting worried.

One has had major supply chain issues, along with all of their competitors.

The other has seen a cooling-off since COVID started with a couple of almost-recoveries, only to drop back down. Same as many of their competitors.

In normal times, measuring growth is easy. Charts Go Up and to the Right (TM)

In down or uncertain times, it gets harder. There are more subtle measurements needed and a lot more variables that can hide the true situation. Often they make things seem worse off than they are.

That's when it's important to compare your performance against competitors and industry figures. No so much in absolute terms like "we have a better AOV than they have", but in relative terms "our AOV dropped 10% while they dropped 15%, so we're shrinking less."

Depending on your industry, these figures might be difficult to find. Repeat Customer Insights has some general ecommerce figures it'll use for comparison, but finding your specific industry is best.

One tip, if you have public companies as competitors the data should be available in their stockholder reports. Find a couple and see how you compare.

There's a chance that your business losses are actually better than others and you just have to stay in business until a full recovery happens. When everyone else is closing up shop, you just hanging in there with flat growth is actually a good situation.

A quick and automatic way to see how you are performing now and in the past is with Repeat Customer Insights. It'll automatically import your Shopify data and run a number of analyses to highlight different customer behavior over different time periods.

Eric Davis