Businesses in the ecommerce space have to juggle many concerns simultaneously to keep their operations running smoothly. From providing top-notch customer support to ensuring peak website performance, seamless order fulfillment, prompt delivery, and responsive service, tracking these moving parts is challenging.
Electronic data interchange (EDI), originally developed in the 1960s to help businesses share information, is often seen as a go-to solution. However, legacy EDI software struggles to manage all metrics essential for today’s ecommerce companies.
The solution is an order dashboard tool that provides a centralized, streamlined platform to empower your ecommerce venture with valuable insights and enhanced collaboration. It lets you make informed decisions that drive growth and success.
Read on to learn more about order dashboards and how integrating with an iPaaS (integration platform as a service) solution could optimize your business operations.
What Is an eCommerce Dashboard?
An ecommerce dashboard is a visual space where you can see all the Key Performance Indicators (KPI), EDI-related information, and other metrics you need to manage your online business.
It pulls together data from customer databases, marketing tools, and other connected systems. Then, it displays that information using easy-to-interpret charts, graphs, and numbers.
Why Is an eCommerce Dashboard Needed?
Running a busy ecommerce site means dealing with the torrents of data flooding from different sources into various business platforms, which can quickly become overwhelming and cause major headaches. Without an efficient way to aggregate and process raw data and EDI-related information, defining clear KPIs or accurately measuring performance is challenging.
Valuable information can also end up locked in data silos in specific departments or software, out of reach of your broader organization. Analyzing and interpreting vast quantities of data scattered across different platforms requires significant investments of time and energy.
The Benefits of an eCommerce Dashboard
Dashboards for ecommerce can address the pain of struggling with excessive, scattered, or siloed data. An ecommerce dashboard puts the essential information right in front of you – how many sales you’re making, where orders are in the shipping process, what customers are doing on your site, and how well your marketing is paying off.
So, on a single screen, you can get a complete overview of your ecommerce operations without blind spots, allowing you to make smarter decisions knowing you have the whole picture.
Here are some of the key benefits of implementing an ecommerce dashboard:
Better Visibility
Dashboards provide clear insights into ordering trends, potential delivery issues, and detailed transaction information. This comprehensive view offers a 360-degree understanding of your customers and their behavior.
Improved Searchability
In the past, finding all the necessary information to address an urgent request was challenging. Dashboards allow you to quickly search and filter data using criteria like purchase order numbers or dates, enabling faster access to the required details.
Increased Security
By aligning customer data across different systems, dashboards minimize the risk of accidental data changes. This ensures data integrity and security, fostering trust in the information.
Accurate Forecasting
With real-time data from multiple sources, ecommerce dashboards help set precise KPIs and share accurate results backed by factual evidence. Customer journey mapping leverages this data to uncover valuable insights into customer behavior and areas for improvement.
Improved Operations
Dashboards let you identify and address issues promptly. Whether it’s a website outage, order fulfillment problems, or any other operational challenge, you’ll see them on the dashboard. The Customer 360 view enables informed decision-making and operational optimization.
More Automation
Dashboards automate tasks like updating order statuses. This customer service automation frees up resources and allows employees to focus efforts on other areas, improving efficiency.
Daylight Transport used Boomi’s B2B/EDI solution to help reduce its customer service workload by one full-time employee, cut the volume of emails and phone calls by 40 to 50 percent, improve customer retention, and generate an additional $800 – $1,000 per day in revenue.
Key Metrics for eCommerce Dashboards
While each business is unique, some metrics are must-haves for most ecommerce companies.
They include the following:
Sales Performance
Keeping tabs on revenue, orders, and sales trends is vital. This metric reveals top sellers, successful marketing, and areas needing attention. Optimizing quote-to-cash streamlines order fulfillment for a sales boost.
Website Traffic
Monitoring site traffic offers a window into marketing impact and user engagement. Unique visitors, page views, bounce rates, traffic sources – these metrics guide enhancements like fine-tuning landing pages or enhancing user experience.
Average Order Value (AOV)
AOV tracks average customer spend per order. Monitoring AOV helps evaluate upselling and cross-selling tactics to increase order sizes and revenue per transaction.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of site visitors completing desired actions (purchases, signups, etc.) is critical for assessing marketing campaigns, site designs, and total customer experience.
Customer Demographics
Understanding basics like age, gender, location, and buying habits allows for more personalized experiences. Integrating customer data across sources creates complete profiles for personalized outreach.
Inventory Management
Effective stock tracking ensures availability while optimizing supply chains. This includes monitoring inventory levels, reorder points, and turnover rates to guide restocking, forecasting, and optimization decisions.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
This shows the average price of acquiring new customers or leads via marketing channels. Tracking this metric evaluates marketing ROI and cost-effective acquisition strategies.
When woven into well-designed dashboards, these vital measurements shed light on operations and customer behaviors. This enhanced visibility drives data-backed decisions for growth and success.
Ekol Logistics chose Boomi’s integration and B2B/EDI Management solutions and sped up customer onboarding from weeks to days, scaled operations, and reduced server usage by 60%, all without increasing IT headcount.
Types of eCommerce Dashboards
Companies can select from diverse dashboard setups tailored to managing specific operations.
Standard dashboard varieties include those focused on the following:
1. Orders and Shipping
These dashboards focus on order fulfillment, from purchase to delivery. Key metrics that appear are orders received, processed, shipped, delivery speed, and shipping costs.
2. Marketing Performance and Customer Sources
These dashboards scrutinize campaign effectiveness across email, social, search, and affiliates. They unveil metrics like traffic sources, conversion rates, cost per new customer, and return on investment. This focus allows for capitalizing on high-performers. Underperforming campaigns can be rapidly adapted and improved upon.
3. Incoming Inventory / Vendor Performance and Costs
On the supply side, dashboards monitor vendor reliability, incoming stock levels, product expenses, and logistical expenditures. Insights into supplier performance, order accuracy, and total landed costs enable smarter inventory decisions. Companies can anticipate problems like stockouts, as well as optimize vendor management and control overhead.
4. Customer Issues, Support Time, and Satisfaction
Exemplary service is crucial for ecommerce success. These dashboards surface customer complaints, support ticket volumes, response times, and satisfaction scores. This visibility allows prompt identification of emerging issues. Companies can allocate sufficient service resources to enhance the customer experience. For example, Riverbed Technology’s choice of Boomi for B2B/EDI management reduced the total cost of ownership for licensing, in-house infrastructure, and technical debt, improved data reliability, and accelerated partner onboarding and business process speed.
Using Boomi’s B2B EDI Dashboard
The use of ecommerce dashboards empowers data-driven decisions by consolidating information across systems. With unified visibility into orders, marketing, inventory, vendors, and customer service, businesses can continuously refine processes. This drives exceptional customer experiences and accelerated growth.
However, achieving seamless integration requires the right technology. Boomi’s powerful B2B EDI Dashboard emerges as a game-changing asset thanks to the following features:
- Rapid Response: Instead of lengthy delays, a Boomi dashboard provides direct self-service access to EDI data for teams like finance, operations, and customer support. This accelerates issue diagnosis and resolution, boosting satisfaction.
- Insightful Visibility: EDI data harbors a wealth of business insights into trends, potential delivery hiccups, and more. The dashboard surfaces this intelligence in an intuitive, readable format tailored for business users.
- Robust Security: Controlling access to user profiles and document types minimizes the risk of unintended changes and fosters trust in the integrity of processes and data.
- End-to-End Tracking: The dashboard monitors the complete purchase order lifecycle from partner handoffs to shipping and customer support – in one unified view.
- Human-Readable Format: Extracting structured EDI data into an easily understandable business context enables rapid comprehension of transactions and processes.
Learn more about how Boomi’s iPaaS enables supply chain visibility, and find out how to leverage innovative technology to empower your business. Read the eBook.