Which KPIs should a store owner check every week?

The 10 ecommerce KPIs that matter — and what each means

Every number below answers one owner question. If a metric answers no question, it does not belong on your sheet:

• Revenue (weekly): the headline — but only meaningful against the same week last month and the same season last year.
• Orders: revenue's honest twin; rising revenue on falling orders means AOV is doing the work, and vice versa.
• Average order value (AOV): revenue ÷ orders. Your shipping and COD costs are fixed per order, so AOV moves margin directly.
• Conversion rate (CVR): orders ÷ sessions. The store's persuasion score — sensitive to traffic quality, page speed and checkout friction.
• Blended MER: total revenue ÷ total marketing spend, all channels and fees included. The truth your ads manager's ROAS approximates and flatters.
• CAC (new customers): marketing spend ÷ new customers acquired. Compare it to first-order profit, not revenue.
• Repeat rate (90-day): share of customers who buy again within 90 days. The single best predictor of whether growth compounds or resets monthly.
• Cart abandonment: carts minus checkouts, as a share of carts. High everywhere — what matters is your trend and your recovery flow.
• COD refusal rate: refused ÷ shipped COD orders. The Gulf-specific leak most dashboards hide entirely.
• Contribution margin per order: what remains after product cost, shipping, fees, returns and marketing. The only number that says whether growth makes money.

What are healthy ranges for a Gulf online store?

Ranges are direction, not law — a store selling 90-riyal abayas and one selling 900-riyal furniture live in different worlds. But as weekly guardrails for a typical Gulf store:

• Conversion rate: roughly 1–3% is the working band; under 1% points at traffic quality or product page, above 3% usually means strong brand or underpriced product.
• Cart abandonment: 60–80% is normal ecommerce reality; the question is whether a WhatsApp recovery flow is winning some of it back.
• COD refusal: under 10% is the managed target; a fifth or more of orders refused means no confirmation flow or slow delivery.
• Blended MER: young stores often run 2–3; the number that matters is your break-even MER computed from margin — above it you may scale, below it something is broken.
• Repeat rate at 90 days: one in five customers returning is respectable for most categories; one in three changes your economics; near zero means you are renting every riyal of revenue.
• AOV: no universal number — track it against your own free-shipping threshold and last quarter. Flat AOV while costs rise is a slow leak.

What is a good AOV and CAC — and how do they decide everything?

AOV and CAC are not two metrics; they are one equation. The rule: CAC must stay below the contribution profit of the first order (AOV minus product cost, shipping, fees and returns) — or below what you can consciously afford to lose on a first order because repeat purchase pays it back. A store with a 150 SAR AOV and 40% contribution margin makes 60 SAR per order; a CAC of 45 works, a CAC of 80 is a countdown timer unless customers return.

This is why 'lower my CAC' and 'raise my AOV' are the same project attacked from two ends. Raising AOV — bundles, a free-shipping threshold set just above the current average, one checkout add-on — is usually faster than lowering CAC, because it needs no algorithm's cooperation. A 20% AOV lift silently makes every campaign you run 20% more affordable.

How do you build the weekly one-page dashboard?

One spreadsheet, ten rows (the KPIs), one column per week. Sources: revenue, orders, AOV, CVR and abandonment from your store platform's analytics; ad spend from each ads manager plus agency and tool fees for the MER row; refusals from your courier's report; margin from your own cost sheet. First build takes about an hour; weekly filling takes fifteen minutes.

Three habits make it work. Same time weekly — Sunday morning suits Gulf trading weeks, capturing the full week including the weekend. Color the cells — green inside range, red outside — so the page reads at a glance. And write one sentence per week at the bottom: what changed, what you did. Six months later that log is the most valuable analytics you own, because it connects numbers to decisions.

Which numbers do you act on — and which do you just watch?

The dashboard's job is not information; it is triggering the right action and preventing the wrong one. Decision rules that keep owners sane: act on a KPI only when it breaks its range two consecutive weeks (one bad week is usually noise, weather, or a delayed courier report); change one thing at a time, then give it two weeks — simultaneous fixes make results unreadable; and follow the diagnostic chain downhill: revenue falls → check orders vs AOV → if orders, check sessions vs CVR → if CVR, check what changed on site, in checkout, or in traffic mix that week.

And know each number's job: MER, contribution margin and repeat rate are your strategy numbers — they say whether the machine deserves more fuel. CVR, abandonment and refusal rate are your mechanic numbers — they say which part to open this week. Confusing the two produces the classic mistake: pouring more ad budget (strategy) onto a leaking checkout (mechanics).