Most Shopify store owners open their dashboard every morning, glance at sessions and revenue, then close the tab feeling like they’ve done their due diligence. They haven’t.
After building performance dashboards for over a hundred online shops, I’ve found the stores that grow are the ones tracking a handful of the right ecommerce metrics rather than drowning in data they never act on.
These are the numbers that tell you whether your store is healthy or quietly falling apart.
Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is the single most honest metric your store produces. Divide completed purchases by total visitors, multiply by 100, and you’ve got a figure that strips away every excuse. A shop pulling 50,000 monthly visitors still has a problem if only 200 of them buy.
Globally, the average sits at 2.7% across all categories, but that number hides enormous variation. Food and drink stores regularly hit 5-6%, whilst luxury and jewellery retailers scrape below 1%. In your Shopify admin, the Analytics > Reports > Sessions by conversion breakdown shows exactly where visitors fall off.
Most stores I audit lose the largest chunk between product page and cart, not between cart and checkout. Falling below 1.5% points to a structural problem. Before you start A/B testing button colours, check whether the add-to-cart button is visible on mobile, whether product pages load in under three seconds, and whether pricing is clear before visitors reach checkout. Sorting those three basics alone has pushed stores from 1.2% to north of 2% with no copy changes at all.
Average Order Value
Conversion rate tells you whether people buy. Average order value tells you how much they spend. Divide total revenue by order count to get your AOV, then compare it against your category. Beauty sits around £50-60 per order, baby products can top £200, and electronics typically falls between the two.
Free shipping thresholds are the lever most store owners overlook. Set yours roughly 20% above your current AOV in Settings > Shipping and delivery and basket sizes tend to creep upward. Across the Shopify sites I’ve audited, shifting the free delivery cutoff by £15-25 typically lifts AOV by 15-30% within weeks.
Bundling through Shopify’s native product bundles or apps like Vitals is another quick win, particularly for consumable products where customers already plan to reorder.
Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate
Seven out of ten shoppers add items to their cart and leave before paying. Baymard Institute has tracked this across 49 separate studies and the average lands at 70.19% every time, barely shifting year on year.
Unexpected costs at checkout account for nearly half of all abandonments. Forced account creation drives away another quarter. Shopify’s checkout does offer guest checkout by default, but plenty of stores have toggled it off or buried it behind account prompts in Settings > Checkout. Check yours.
The checkout design opportunity
Baymard’s own research suggests that better checkout design alone could lift conversions by 35.26% for the average large ecommerce site. Not a full redesign, either. Trimming form fields, showing delivery costs earlier, and displaying trust signals near the payment button is often enough.
Improving ecommerce UX across these touchpoints recovers revenue that’s already in your checkout but never converts.
Customer Retention Rate and Lifetime Value
Winning a new customer feels brilliant. Losing them quietly after one purchase costs far more than most store owners realise. LoyaltyLion’s benchmarks put the average ecommerce retention rate at around 30% across all categories, which means roughly seven out of ten buyers never come back.
Shopify’s Analytics > Reports > Returning customer rate shows you this number at a glance, though you’ll get a sharper picture by segmenting it by acquisition channel in Klaviyo or your email platform. A store moving from 22% to 31% over six months is in far better shape than one stuck at 35% going nowhere.
Customer lifetime value is the metric that reframes your entire marketing budget. Multiply average order value by purchase frequency by average customer lifespan, and you’ve got a CLV figure that should inform every acquisition decision. If your CLV is £120 and you’re spending £45 per customer, the maths is comfortable. Flip those numbers and your paid ads are subsidising losses.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Add up every pound spent on marketing and sales over a period, divide by new customers acquired, and you’ve got your CAC. Simple to calculate, easy to ignore when things feel like they’re ticking along. Most ecommerce brands aim for a CLV-to-CAC ratio of at least 3:1.
At £30 to acquire a customer worth £90 over their lifetime, the sums stack up. At £30 for someone worth £35, you’re running a charity. I’ve seen stores in Manchester and across the North West pouring money into Meta ads with a CAC of £60 whilst their CLV sat at £55, convinced the volume would fix itself. It won’t.
Track this monthly, broken down by channel, and you’ll spot the leaks before they drain the budget.
Return on Ad Spend
A healthy Shopify store should generate at least £4 in revenue for every £1 spent on advertising. That 4:1 ROAS is the benchmark most operators target. Fashion and apparel brands often need to push higher to offset return rates, whilst subscription products with strong retention can afford a lower initial ROAS because the second and third orders carry the profit.
Tracking ROAS as a single blended figure across all channels is where most stores go wrong. Your Google Shopping campaigns might return 6:1 whilst your TikTok spend barely breaks even. Blend them and you get a comfortable 3.5:1 that hides a proper problem.
Set up conversion tracking at the channel level in GA4, and review each platform’s contribution separately. That’s where the real decisions sit.
Refund and Return Rate
Returns eat into margins faster than almost anything else. Retailers lost 16.9% of annual sales to returns in 2024 according to the National Retail Federation. Clothing is the worst offender, with some apparel categories pushing past 25%.
Online purchases get returned at roughly three times the rate of in-store ones. People can’t touch the fabric, try the fit, or judge the colour through a screen. A stricter returns policy won’t fix it. Shoppers abandon retailers who make returns difficult.
Reducing returns through better product pages
Detailed size guides with actual garment measurements rather than S/M/L labels make a measurable difference for clothing stores. Shopify’s product metafields let you add structured sizing data that apps like Kiwi Size Chart can pull into a proper fit guide on the product page.
Multiple product images from different angles, lifestyle shots showing scale, and honest descriptions that flag when items run small all help too. One particular SKU driving a disproportionate chunk of your returns is worth sorting first. A single product page rewrite can solve half the problem.
Traffic, Engagement, and Net Promoter Score
Every metric above assumes people are visiting your store. Thin traffic means none of the conversion or AOV improvements matter. Check your Google Search Console Performance report first: impressions tell you how often your pages appear in search results, whilst click-through rate tells you whether your titles and descriptions convince anyone to visit.
High impressions paired with low clicks usually points to weak meta titles or missing rich results. An ecommerce seo audit will catch those issues quickly. Once traffic lands, watch scroll depth and product page engagement in GA4’s exploration reports. Visitors bouncing before they reach your add-to-cart button tells you the page layout needs rethinking regardless of how good the copy is.
Net Promoter Score captures what transactional metrics miss: how people feel about buying from you. Ask customers to rate their likelihood of recommending your store on a 0-10 scale, subtract detractors from promoters, and you’ve got an NPS. Anything above 50 is cracking. Anything negative needs sorting straightaway.
Where To Start
New to analytics? Start with conversion rate, AOV, and cart abandonment. Those three reveal the most about how your store turns visitors into revenue, and they offer the quickest wins.
Once those are sorted, layer in retention rate and CLV to understand whether customers stick around or drift off after one purchase. Then add ROAS and CAC to check whether your marketing spend generates profit rather than just activity. Building an ecommerce seo strategy around these numbers gives you a proper framework for growth rather than guesswork.
If pulling all of this together feels like a right faff, our ecommerce SEO audit service includes a full performance review alongside the technical recommendations.
