Step 11 of 11 < Prev |
Next >
|
Learn from your success and
grow |
Monitor your performance
As an online business owner you have a great deal of flexibility to
respond to trends, shifts in the marketplace, and changing customer demands. Successful web
businesses know that it's critical to learn from your results so you can evolve and build on
your success.
As you continue to ramp up your business, Yahoo! Merchant
Solutions makes it easy to keep tabs on your sales and traffic, so you can refine your
operations and continue to improve. Here's a quick overview of the reports available to you in
the Store Control Panel:
- Store sales reports and graphs show number of items sold,
orders, revenue, inventory levels and more. Use these reports to view your data over several
different time periods and identify trends.
- Page view reports show what pages people visit on your site and
how much they purchased from those pages. These reports can show you which pages drive the
most revenue and which pages may require some design or merchandising improvements.
- Referring URL reports show how people get to your site and the
sales that are attributable to each referring site. This information can help you evaluate
your search engine listings, advertising programs, and affiliate relationships.
- Repeat customer detector groups together orders that appear to
have been placed by the same customer. Over time you'll recognize your high-value customers
and be able to develop special reward programs or communications to keep them coming back to
your site.
Also, Merchant Standard and Merchant Professional feature the following
enhanced reports:
- Click trail reports show the paths taken by individual
visitors through your site when purchasing a product. These reports offer great insight into
how customers navigate through your site and how you might want to guide visitors to certain
pages to encourage them to make a purchase.
- Search topic reports let you know what people are looking
for on your site. This can shed some light on product areas that interest your customers, or
what products need to be displayed more prominently on your site.
- Shopping search reports show you the most popular search
terms on Yahoo! Shopping. This can help you refine your inventory or make decisions about
terms for key word advertising.
Offer world-class customer service
Finally, as you go forward, be sure to think about offering the best
possible customer service - to keep customers coming back for more. Yahoo! Merchant Solutions
builds in a great deal of ease-of-use to make the shopping experience enjoyable and convenient
for your customers. Yet you and your staff are the frontline for your customers' experience on
your site. Here are additional steps you can take to ensure that customers want to return to
your site and tell other people to buy from you:
- Publish your terms of service, including return policies and
turnaround time for email responses, so customers know what to expect from your business.
- Live up to your terms of service. If you say you'll reply to emails
within 24-hours, be sure that you are staffed to handle that commitment.
- Print your contact information and store domain on your packing
materials so customers can easily get in touch with you if there's a problem with an order.
- Implement automated email status updates using the Shipment Status
Report feature in the Store Control Panel so that customers will know when their product has been
shipped and other key milestones. This will help to cut down customer support calls.
- Remember that excellent service may give you the competitive
advantage.
Continue to learn
Be sure to explore the other help resources that are available from
the Store Control Panel. You will also receive a monthly newsletter with useful tips on running
your online store.
Get more in-depth information
Want to learn more before you start? You can download the full Getting
Started Guide in PDF format for reading offline or in print.
Go to the Getting Started Guide
download page
