Essential Ecommerce KPIs to Track for Growth (2026)

What if you could make faster, smarter decisions simply by tracking the right ecommerce KPIs? The challenge isn’t finding more data—it’s choosing the metrics that actually reflect progress, reveal problems early, and help you take action in Shopify.

Performance should inform business decisions, and KPIs should drive actions.

Ecommerce key performance indicators (KPIs) are milestones on the road to online retail success. Monitoring them will help ecommerce entrepreneurs identify progress toward sales, marketing, and customer service goals.

Your KPIs should be chosen and monitored based on your specific business goals, but having an understanding of as many KPIs as possible can be beneficial. Certain KPIs support some goals but are irrelevant for others.

This guide explains which ecommerce metrics to measure, shows examples of KPIs worth tracking, and explains how to track them in Shopify.

What is a key performance indicator?

Most goals can have many performance indicators—sometimes too many—so people often narrow them down to just two or three impactful data points, known as key performance indicators. For example, if your goal is to increase revenue, key indicators might include Conversion rate, average order value, and customer acquisition cost. KPIs are those measurements that most accurately and succinctly show whether or not a business is progressing toward its goal.

💡 TIP: Use Shopify's built-in reporting and analytics to help you make better decisions, faster. Choose from more than 60 pre-built dashboards and reports or customize your own to spot trends, capitalize on opportunities, and improve decision-making.

We created custom reports that show us exactly how our Charleston store is performing compared to our other sales channels. This visibility helps us monitor sweet spots in store traffic, determine optimal staffing levels, and make data-driven decisions about everything from inventory to store hours.

— Kenny Haisfield, Founder at Kenny Flowers (Source)

Why are KPIs important?

KPIs are important just like strategy and goal setting are important. Without KPIs, it’s difficult to gauge progress over time. You’d be making decisions based on gut instinct, personal preference or belief, or other assumptions that haven’t been tested. KPIs tell you more information about your business and your customers, so you can make informed and strategic decisions.

But KPIs aren’t important on their own. The real value lies in the actionable insights you take away from analyzing the data. You’ll be able to more accurately devise strategies to drive online sales, as well as understand where there may be problems in your business.

Plus, the data related to KPIs can be distributed to the larger team. This can be used to educate your employees and come together for critical problem-solving.

Types of key performance indicators

There are many types of key performance indicators.

• Qualitative
• Quantitative
• Predictive of future performance
• Revealing of past performance

KPIs also touch on various business operations. When it comes to ecommerce, KPIs generally fall into one of the following five categories:

1. Sales
2. Marketing
3. Customer service
4. Manufacturing
5. Project management

70+ key performance indicators for ecommerce

The most useful ecommerce KPIs usually fall into five groups: sales, marketing, customer service, manufacturing, and project management. Start with a small set tied to your current goal, such as conversion rate, average order value, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and cart abandonment rate. As your business grows, you can add more specialized KPIs for channels, teams, and operations.

Note: The performance indicators listed below are in no way an exhaustive list. There are an almost infinite number of KPIs to consider for your ecommerce business.

Use the sections below to jump to the KPI category you need:

• What are KPIs for sales?
• What are KPIs for marketing?
• What are KPIs for customer service?
• What are KPIs for manufacturing?
• What are KPIs for project management?

What are KPIs for sales?

Sales KPIs are measures that tell you how your business is doing in terms of conversions and revenue. You can look at sales KPIs related to a specific channel, time period, team, employee, and more to inform business decisions.

💡 TIP: Go to your Analytics dashboard in Shopify admin to see these sales KPIs and track progress toward your goals.

Examples of important ecommerce metrics and KPIs for sales include:

• Sales: Ecommerce retailers can monitor total sales by the hour, day, week, month, quarter, or year.
• Average order size: Sometimes called the average market basket, the average order size tells you how much a customer typically spends on a single order. Average order size = total revenue ÷ number of orders.
• Gross profit: Calculate this KPI by subtracting the total cost of goods sold from total sales. Gross profit = total sales - cost of goods sold.
• Average margin: Average margin, or average profit margin, is a percentage that represents your profit margin over a period of time.
• Average order value (AOV): The average value of an order from your customers.
• Customer retention rate: Measures the percentage of customers a company retains over a specific period, indicating customer loyalty and satisfaction.
• Number of transactions: This is the total number of transactions. Track this alongside revenue and average order value, since transaction count alone doesn’t show profitability.
• Conversion rate: The conversion rate, also a percentage, is the rate at which users on your ecommerce site are converting (or buying). This is calculated by dividing the total number of conversions by the total number of visitors, then multiplying by 100.
• Shopping cart abandonment rate: The shopping cart abandonment rate tells you how many users are adding products to their shopping cart but not checking out. A lower cart abandonment rate is generally better, but benchmark it by device, traffic source, and checkout flow before making changes. If your cart abandonment rate is high, there may be too much friction in the checkout process.
• New customer orders versus returning customer orders: This ecommerce metric shows a comparison between new and repeat customers. Many business owners focus only on customer acquisition, but customer retention can also drive loyalty, word of mouth marketing, and higher order values.
• Cost of goods sold (COGS): COGS tells you how much you’re spending to sell a product. This includes manufacturing, employee wages, and overhead costs.
• Market share: This KPI shows your business’s sales as a portion of total sales in your market. Tracking market share can help you understand how your business is growing relative to competitors. For a basic overview of how market share is measured, see Investopedia’s market share definition.
• Product affinity: This KPI tells you which products are purchased together. This can and should inform cross-promotion strategies.
• Product relationship: This is which products are viewed consecutively. Again, use this KPI to formulate effective cross-selling tactics.
• Inventory levels: This KPI could tell you how much stock is on hand, how long product is sitting, how quickly product is selling, and more. For omnichannel brands, custom reporting can make this more useful by showing inventory and sales performance across locations and channels in one place, which helps with forecasting and staffing decisions.
• Competitive pricing: It’s important to gauge your success and business growth against yourself and against your competitors. Monitor your competitors’ pricing strategies and compare them to your own.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): The CLV tells you how much a customer is worth to your business over the course of their relationship with your brand. You want to increase this number over time through strengthening relationships and focusing on customer loyalty.
• Revenue per visitor (RPV): RPV gives you an average of how much revenue you earn per site visitor. RPV = total revenue ÷ total site visitors.
• Churn rate: For an online retailer, the churn rate tells you how quickly customers are leaving your brand or canceling or failing to renew a subscription with your brand.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): CAC tells you how much your company spends on acquiring a new customer. This is measured by looking at your marketing spend and how it breaks down per individual customer.

Read more: What Is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)? How To Get Started

What are KPIs for marketing?

KPIs for marketing tell you how well you’re doing in relation to your marketing and advertising goals. These also impact your sales KPIs.

If you run an ecommerce store, you can use marketing KPIs to understand which products are selling, who’s buying them, how they’re buying them, and why they’re buying them. This can help you market more strategically in the future, write better product descriptions, and inform product development.

Some merchants also use qualitative community insight alongside marketing data. As Revenge Of co-founder Jeff Eiser explained, understanding what customers are into in-store helped shape ecommerce merchandising decisions and led to strong online results.

We are very in touch with our community and kind of what they're into and what they're reading. If we take that and apply it then to our ecom, we've seen a lot of great results.

— Jeff Eiser, Co-founder at Revenge Of (Source)

💡 TIP: Go to your Analytics dashboard in Shopify admin to track marketing KPIs and ensure you’re hitting your objectives.

Examples of KPIs you can use for marketing include:

• Website traffic: Site traffic refers to the total number of visits to your ecommerce site. More site traffic means more users are hitting your online store.
• New visitors versus returning visitors: New site visitors are first-time visitors to your site. Returning visitors, on the other hand, have been to your site before. While looking at this metric alone won’t reveal much, it can help ecommerce retailers gauge success of digital marketing campaigns. If you’re running a retargeted ad, for example, returning visitors should be higher.
• Average engagement time: This KPI tells you how long users are actively engaged with your website. In GA4, engagement-focused metrics are often more useful than the older Universal Analytics-style “time on site” framing.
• Bounce rate: In GA4, bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged. Many teams now track bounce rate alongside engagement rate and average engagement time for a fuller view.
• Page views per visit: Page views per visit refers to the average number of pages a user will view on your site during each visit. Again, more pages usually means more engagement. However, if it’s taking users too many clicks to find the products they’re looking for, you’ll want to revisit your site design.
• Average session duration: The average amount of time a person spends on your site during a single visit is called the average session duration, but in GA4, average engagement time is often a better indicator of active attention.
• Traffic source: The traffic source KPI tells you where visitors are coming from or how they found your site. This will provide information about which channels are driving the most traffic, such as organic search, paid ads, or social media.
• Mobile site traffic: Monitor the total number of users who use mobile devices to access your store and make sure your site is optimized for mobile.
• Day part monitoring: Looking at when site visitors come can show you your peak traffic times.
• Newsletter subscribers: The number of newsletter subscribers refers to how many users have opted into your email marketing list. If you have more subscribers, you can reach more consumers. However, you’ll also want to look at related data, such as the demographics of your newsletter subscribers, to make sure you’re reaching your target audience.
• Texting subscribers: Newer to digital marketing than email, ecommerce brands can reach consumers through SMS-based marketing. Texting subscribers refers to the number of customers on your text message contact list.
• Subscriber growth rate: This tells you how quickly your subscriber list is growing. Pairing this KPI with the total number of subscribers will give you good insight into this channel.
• Email open rate: This KPI tells you the percentage of subscribers that open your email, but it’s best treated as a directional metric. Privacy protections such as Apple Mail Privacy Protection and bot activity can inflate opens, so pair open rate with click-through rate, conversions, and unsubscribe rate. See Mailchimp’s Apple privacy FAQ for background.
• Email click-through rate (CTR): While the open rate tells you the percentage of subscribers who open an email, the click-through rate tells you the percentage of delivered messages or opens that result in a click, depending on how your email platform defines it. This is often more useful than open rate because clicks are more closely tied to site traffic and conversions.
• Unsubscribes: You can look at both the total number and the rate of unsubscriptions for your email list.
• Chat sessions initiated: If you have live chat functionality on your ecommerce store using a tool like Shopify Inbox, the number of chat sessions initiated tells you how many users engaged with the tool to speak to a support agent.
• Social followers and fans: Whether you’re on Facebook, Instagram, X, Pinterest, or Snapchat (or a combination of a few), follower count can indicate audience size or brand awareness, but engagement rate, clicks, and conversions are better indicators of loyalty and business impact. Many of those social media networks also have tools that ecommerce businesses can use to learn more about their social followers.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): If you’re running ad campaigns, ROAS tells you the amount of revenue earned for every dollar spent on advertising on a specific channel like Google Ads or Meta Ads.
• Blended ROAS: This metric blends how much you spend on ads across all channels to give you a broader view of how efficiently your ad campaigns generate revenue.
• Cost per click (CPC): Also known as pay per click, this KPI tells you how much you spend each time a potential customer clicks on one of your paid ads on Google Ads, Meta Ads, or other channels.
• Social media engagement: Social media engagement tells you how actively your followers and fans are interacting with your brand on social media.
• Clicks: The total number of clicks a link gets. You could measure this KPI almost anywhere: on your website, social media, email, display ads, PPC, and more.
• Average click-through rate (CTR): Average click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of impressions or delivered messages that result in a click, depending on the channel being measured.
• Average position in Google Search Console: Average position in Google Search Console shows your average ranking in Google Search results for tracked queries and pages. This metric appears in Google Search Console performance reports for organic search; ad platforms use different ranking metrics.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) traffic volume: If you’re running PPC campaigns, this tells you how much traffic you’re successfully driving to your site.
• Blog traffic: You can find this KPI simply by creating a filtered view in your analytics tool. It’s also helpful to compare blog traffic to overall site traffic.
• Number and quality of product reviews: Product reviews are great for a number of reasons: They provide social proof, they can help with SEO, and they give you valuable feedback for your business. The quantity and content of product reviews are important KPIs to track for your ecommerce business.
• Banner or display advertising CTRs: The CTRs for your banner and display ads will tell you the percentage of viewers who have clicked on the ad. This KPI will give you insight into your copy, imagery, and offer performance.
• Affiliate performance rates: If you engage in affiliate marketing, this KPI will help you understand which channels are most successful.

You can track your ecommerce marketing analytics in Google Analytics 4, and use Google Search Console for search performance metrics like clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position. Shopify analytics is often best for store-specific KPIs such as sales, average order value, top products, and returning customer rate, while GA4 is useful for cross-channel traffic, engagement, and campaign analysis.

What are KPIs for customer service?

Customer service KPIs tell you how effective your customer service is and if you’re meeting expectations. You might ask which KPIs matter most for your call center, email support team, or social support team. Measuring and tracking these KPIs will help you ensure you’re providing a positive customer experience.

Key performance indicators for customer service include:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: The CSAT KPI is typically measured by customer responses to a very common survey question: How satisfied were you with your experience? This is usually answered with a numbered scale. Customer satisfaction is incredibly important to track, as it can impact virtually every part of your business.
• Net promoter score (NPS): Your NPS KPI provides insight into your customer relationships and loyalty by telling you how likely customers are to recommend your brand to someone in their network.
• First contact resolution rate: A standard customer service KPI, first contact resolution rate measures the percentage of support issues resolved during the first interaction, without requiring follow-up.
• Customer service email count: This is the number of emails your customer support team receives.
• Customer service phone call count: Rather than email, this is how frequently your customer support team is reached via phone.
• Customer service chat count: If you have live chat on your ecommerce site, you may have a customer service chat count.
• First response time: First response time is the average amount of time it takes a customer to receive the first response to their query. Aim to reduce first response time while maintaining resolution quality and customer satisfaction.
• Average resolution time: This is the amount of time it takes for a customer support issue to be resolved, starting from the point at which the customer reached out about the problem.
• Active issues: The total number of active issues tells you how many queries are in progress.
• Backlogs: Backlog measures unresolved support tickets waiting for action; track it by channel and age to spot staffing or process bottlenecks.
• Concern classification: Beyond the total number of customer support interactions, look at quantitative data around trends to see if you can be proactive and reduce customer support queries. You’ll classify the customer concerns that will help identify trends and your progress in solving issues.
• Service escalation rate: The service escalation rate KPI tells you how many times a customer has asked a customer service representative to redirect them to a supervisor or other senior employee. You want to keep this number low.

Tracking and working to improve customer service related KPIs can help you increase customer lifetime value, as well as reduce customer acquisition cost.

What are KPIs for manufacturing?

KPIs for manufacturing are, predictably, related to your supply chain and production processes. These may tell you where efficiencies and inefficiencies are, as well as help you understand productivity and expenses.

These KPIs are most relevant if your brand manufactures its own products. If you’re a reseller or dropshipper, supplier lead time, fill rate, and inventory turnover may be more useful than production-floor metrics.

KPIs for manufacturing in ecommerce include:

• Cycle time: The cycle time manufacturing KPI tells you how long it takes to manufacture a single product from start to finish. Monitoring this KPI will give you insight into production efficiency.
• Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE): The OEE KPI provides ecommerce businesses with insight into how well manufacturing equipment is performing.
• Overall labor effectiveness (OLE): Just as you’ll want insight into your equipment, the OLE KPI will tell you how productive the staff operating the machines are.
• Yield: Yield is a straightforward manufacturing KPI. It is the number of products you have manufactured. Consider analyzing the yield variance KPI in manufacturing, too, as that will tell you how much you deviate from your average.
• First time yield (FTY) and first time through (FTT): FTY, also referred to as first pass yield, is a quality-based KPI. It tells you how wasteful your production processes are. To calculate FTY, divide the number of successfully manufactured units by the total number of units that started the process.
• Number of non-compliance events or incidents: In manufacturing, there are several sets of regulations, licenses, and policies businesses must comply with. These are typically related to safety, working conditions, and quality. You’ll want to reduce this number to ensure you’re operating within the mandated guidelines.

What are KPIs for project management?

KPIs for project management give you insight into how well your teams are performing and completing specific tasks, which is critically important when running an ecommerce store.

Each project or initiative within your ecommerce business has different goals, and must be managed with different processes and workflows. Project management KPIs tell you how well each team is working to achieve their respective goals and how well their processes are working to help them achieve those goals.

KPIs for project management include:

• Hours worked: The total hours worked tells you how much time a team put into a project. This is an input metric, not an outcome metric, so pair it with delivery, budget, or ROI metrics to avoid rewarding time spent over results. Project managers should also assess the variance in estimated versus actual hours worked to better predict and resource future projects.
• Budget: The budget indicates how much money you have allocated for the specific project. Project managers and ecommerce business owners will want to make sure that the budget is realistic; if you’re repeatedly over budget, some adjustments to your project planning need to be made.
• Return on investment (ROI): The ROI KPI for project management tells you how much your efforts earned your business. The higher this number, the better. The ROI accounts for all of your expenses and earnings related to a project.
• Cost variance: Just as it’s helpful to compare real versus predicted timing and hours, you should examine the total cost against the predicted cost. This will help you understand where you need to reel it in and where you may want to invest more.
• Cost performance index (CPI): The CPI for project management, like ROI, tells you how much your resource investment is worth. The CPI is calculated by dividing the earned value by the actual costs. If your CPI is less than 1, there’s room for improvement.

Once you know which category matters most right now, the next step is turning those ecommerce KPIs into a practical tracking plan.

How to create a KPI

Selecting your KPIs begins with clearly stating your goals and understanding which areas of business impact those goals. Of course, KPIs for ecommerce can and should differ for each of your goals, whether they’re related to boosting sales, streamlining marketing, or improving customer service.

Key performance indicator templates

Here are a few key performance indicator templates, with examples of goals and the associated KPIs.

💡 TIP: Go to your Analytics dashboard in Shopify admin to follow along and track these KPIs.

Goal 1: Boost sales 10% in Q3 2026.

KPI examples:

• Daily sales
• Conversion rate
• Site traffic

As your store matures, your review cadence may change too. Revenge Of co-founder Jeff Eiser said the business initially focused on getting profitable and increasing daily revenue, then later shifted toward monthly and quarterly views as online volume grew to 80 to 90 sales per day. That’s a useful reminder to match KPI cadence to your stage of growth, not just your dashboard’s default settings.

Goal 2: Increase conversion rate 2% in 2026.

KPI examples:

• Conversion rate
• Shopping cart abandonment rate
• Competitive pricing

Goal 3: Grow site traffic 20% in 2026.

KPI examples:

• Site traffic
• Traffic sources
• Promotional click-through rates
• Social shares
• Bounce rates

Goal 4: Reduce customer service calls by 50% over the next six months, from July 2026 to December 2026.

KPI examples:

• Service call classification
• Pages visited immediately before call

There are many performance indicators and the value of those indicators is directly tied to the goal measured. Monitoring which page someone visited before initiating a customer service call makes sense as a KPI for Goal 4, since it could help identify areas of confusion that, when corrected, would reduce customer service calls. But that same performance indicator would be useless for Goal 3.

Once you have set goals and selected KPIs, monitoring those indicators should become an everyday exercise. Most importantly: Performance should inform business decisions and you should use KPIs to drive actions.

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Track the right ecommerce KPIs and take action

The right ecommerce KPIs help you focus on what actually moves your business: stronger conversion performance, healthier customer economics, and clearer visibility into marketing and operations. When you tie each KPI to a specific goal, it becomes easier to prioritize work, spot issues sooner, and make better decisions with confidence.

Start by choosing one business objective, select a small set of supporting metrics, and review them regularly in Shopify analytics. Then refine your dashboard, share insights with your team, and turn what you learn into action—start your free Shopify trial today and build a measurement system that grows with your store.

Once you’ve chosen your KPIs, Shopify analytics can help you monitor them in one place.

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