Pre Made eCommerce Sites - How to track your success?

If you've taken the path of many of today's merchants, then you may have been wise to use ecommerce templates as your template. Pre made online shops are a god-sent to merchants. It allows them to set up shop and to sell online almost immediately.

It is also pretty easy to customize these pre made ecommerce sites to make them more apt for your own branding efforts. First, you can start by changing the logo to one that is made for you. After all, your logo is the graphical representation of your brand and should just be as unique. Second, choose the colors that best represent the store that you own - from the overall look and feel, to the type of products that you sell. You should also choose your categories well, representing the products as they should. Finally, change your content and give it that spin that's more you, more personal. Not to mention, having freshly written content can help improve your search engine rankings.

The advantages of working with pre made ecommerce sites also play in the merchant's favor when it comes to conversions. These sites are often designed by professionals with years of retail experience. As such, they already use the industry's best practices and are more likely to convert better than custom-made stores that you have designed by people who may not be so familiar with the industry.

With all these going for ready made websites, merchants can expect them to perform better than average. What's important for the online seller then is to set the right key performance indicators to check on the performance of the online store.

The most basic, of course, is the number of visitors to your site. This gauges interest in your products and your store in general. It is difficult to say what a good number is when it comes to your online store. It would be best to benchmark the performance first. Track the first three months from the time it goes live, and average the monthly number of visitors. Work your way up from there, trending the numbers based on actual performance with a projection into six months. This is a good way to track any metric for your online store.

A good analytics program - like Google Analytics - should also let you track further goals. The more involved you get with your store and the more it starts to show potential, the better you need to get at tracking. You could certainly spend time looking at other performance measures such as bounce rates, exit rates, time on site and other factors that you think may affect conversion. Other mini-conversion indicators include activities within your product pages (ie how many click on the Add to Cart button) as well as within the online shopping cart itself.

But the mother lode of all performance indicators is really the number of sales you have. You can track this by itself, comparing among the different traffic sources, versus your clicks, versus your total visitor and so forth. Make it a habit to look at your numbers to understand just how much your pre-made ecommerce sites are growing.