Essential Ecommerce KPIs to Track (2026)

An ecommerce key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurement tied directly to a business goal, like conversion rate for a sales target or customer acquisition cost for a growth target. Store owners use KPIs to track business performance, catch problems early, and make informed decisions on what to do next.

Shopify’s Q4 2025 Survey of Store Owners found that 77% of store owners track sales or total revenue,* making it the most commonly tracked metric. Less than half track profit margin, traffic, average order value, or conversion rate, which are all KPIs that explain why revenue moved. A store tracking revenue alone can see when a good month happens, but won’t know what caused it.

This guide covers what a KPI is, with more than 70 examples across sales, marketing, customer service, and operations. Plus, current benchmarks by category, how to choose the right KPIs for your goals, and how to track them in Shopify Analytics.

What is a key performance indicator?

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a specific, measurable data point that shows whether a business is progressing toward a defined goal. For an ecommerce store, that might mean looking at your conversion rate as part of your sales goals, or your customer acquisition cost as part of your business growth goals.

Many business owners use the terms “KPI” and “metric” interchangeably, but there’s a key difference to remember. A metric is any data point you can measure. A KPI is the smaller set of metrics tied directly to a specific goal. For example, page views is a metric. It only becomes a KPI once it’s attached to a goal, like growing organic traffic 20% this quarter. 

KPIs also split into leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators, like site traffic or cart adds, help to predict future performance. Lagging indicators, like revenue or churn rate, give insights into what already happened. Tracking both gives you a more educated peek into your overall performance.

A 2025 Shopify survey found that the most commonly tracked metric is sales or total revenue, with 77% of store owners monitoring it.* However, other important metrics include profit margin, traffic, average order value, or conversion rate, and less than half of all store owners are tracking them. Those four KPIs help explain a change in revenue, so tracking them is key to understanding why revenue or sales might be fluctuating.

Why are KPIs important?

KPIs give you a consistent way to measure whether a change, campaign, or new product is working instead of relying on gut instinct or assumptions. 

If your business isn’t tracking its KPIs, you can’t make informed decisions based on actual data from your performance. When you need to know whether you should increase or reduce your ad spend or buy more of a product, you want tangible data to help you make a decision that’s going to improve your business’s sales and performance.

Types of key performance indicators

There are different types of key performance indicators, all of which sit at one of four stages of the buyer funnel:

• Acquisition. Marketing KPIs like traffic, traffic source, and customer acquisition cost tell you how shoppers are finding your store and what it costs to bring them in.
• Conversion. Sales KPIs like conversion rate, average order value, and cart abandonment rate tell you how well those visits turn into orders.
• Retention. Customer service KPIs like customer satisfaction score, plus sales KPIs like repeat purchase rate and customer lifetime value, tell you whether customers are coming back.
• Fulfillment. Operations KPIs, including manufacturing and project management metrics, tell you how efficiently orders get produced, managed, and shipped once they’re placed.

Once you know which stage of the funnel needs attention, the next step is picking the specific KPIs that measure it.

70+ key performance indicators for ecommerce

The KPIs fall into four main groups:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Customer service
• Manufacturing and project management

The sales and marketing KPIs specifically map to the different stages of the buyer’s funnel. Marketing KPIs track acquisition, while sales KPIs track conversion and retention.

Start with a small set of KPIs tied to your current goal, be it conversion rate, average order value, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, or cart abandonment rate. Add more specialized KPIs as your store grows.

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.

Sales KPIs

Sales KPIs measure conversions and revenue. Break them down by channel, time period, team, or employee to inform business decisions. Find these in the Analytics dashboard of your Shopify admin.

Examples of important ecommerce metrics and KPIs for sales include:

• Sales: Track total sales by the hour, day, week, month, quarter, or year.
• Average order size: Also called the average market basket, this tells you how much a customer spends on a single order. Average order size = Total revenue / Number of orders.
• Gross profit: This refers to the profit your business brings in after deducting any costs to buy or develop products. Gross profit = Total sales − Cost of goods sold.
• Average margin: Average margin, or profit margin, is your profit as a percentage of sales over a period of time. Average margin = (Total sales − Cost of goods sold) / Total sales x 100.
• Average order value (AOV): The average value of an order from your customers. AOV = Total revenue / Number of orders.
• Customer retention rate: The percentage of customers a company retains over a specific period, indicating loyalty and satisfaction.
• Repeat purchase rate: The share of customers who buy from you more than once. This often gives you a better look at customer loyalty than looking only at new and returning orders, since it shows whether the same customers keep coming back over time. Repeat purchase rate = Number of repeat customers / Total number of customers x 100.
• Number of transactions: The total number of transactions. Track this alongside revenue and AOV, since transaction count alone doesn’t show profitability.
• Conversion rate: The rate at which visitors to your ecommerce site complete a purchase. Conversion rate = (Total conversions / Total visitors) x 100.
• Shopping cart abandonment rate: How many shoppers add products to their cart but don’t check out. Benchmark this by device, traffic source, and checkout flow before making changes, since a high rate often points to friction in checkout. Cart abandonment rate = 1 − (Completed purchases / Carts created), then x 100.
• Cost of goods sold (COGS): How much you’re spending to sell a product, including manufacturing, employee wages, and overhead costs.
• Market share: Your business’s sales as a portion of total sales in your market, which shows how you’re growing relative to competitors.
• Product affinity: Which products are purchased together, useful for cross-promotion strategies.
• Product relationship: Which products are viewed consecutively, useful for cross-selling tactics.
• Inventory levels: How much stock is on hand, how long product is sitting, and how quickly it’s selling. For omnichannel brands, custom reporting can show inventory and sales performance across locations and channels in one place.
• Competitive pricing: Monitor competitors’ pricing strategies against your own to gauge growth.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV): How much a customer is worth to your business over the course of their relationship with your brand. CLV = Average order value x Purchase frequency x Average customer lifespan.
• Revenue per visitor (RPV): An average of how much revenue you earn per site visitor. RPV = Total revenue / Total site visitors.
• Churn rate: How quickly customers are leaving your brand or failing to renew a subscription. Churn rate = Customers lost during a period / Customers at the start of that period x 100.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): How much your company spends on acquiring a new customer. CAC = Total sales and marketing spend / Number of new customers acquired.

For stores that sell to other businesses, account-level KPIs matter more than individual-order metrics. B2B and wholesale sellers track reorder rate (the share of accounts that place a repeat order), revenue per account, and average order value per account. A single wholesale account often represents recurring revenue closer to a subscription customer than a one-time shopper. 

Shopify’s B2B tools support company-level reporting, so wholesale sellers can segment these KPIs by account rather than by individual order.

Marketing KPIs

Marketing KPIs tell you how well you’re doing against your marketing and advertising goals, and they feed directly into sales KPIs. Use them to understand which products are selling, who’s buying them, and why. This can help you optimize your product descriptions, future product development, and which marketing campaigns to prioritize.

Melissa Nelson, owner at Starlight Knitting Society, says, “Tracking where our sales are coming from and understanding which types of promotions and advertisements actually bring in sales has changed the way I have been ordering inventory. We can better accommodate what our customers are looking for.”

Some store owners pair that kind of data with qualitative community insight. Comics and collectibles shop Revenge Of cofounder Jeff Eiser says, “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.”

Examples of KPIs you can use to track your store’s marketing performance include:

• Website traffic: The total number of visits to your ecommerce site.
• New visitors versus returning visitors: New visitors are first-time visitors while returning visitors have been to your site before. On its own this metric says little, but it can help gauge how a retargeted ad campaign is performing, since returning visitors should rise.
• Average engagement time: How long users are actively engaged with your website. In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), engagement-focused metrics are often more useful than the older “time on site” framing.
• Bounce rate: In GA4, the percentage of sessions that weren’t engaged. Pair it with engagement rate and average engagement time for a fuller picture.
• Page views per visit: The average number of pages a user views per visit. More pages can mean more engagement, but if it takes too many clicks to find a product, revisit your site design.
• Average session duration: How long a person spends on your site during a single visit. In GA4, average engagement time is often the better indicator of active attention.
• Traffic source: Where visitors are coming from, like organic search, paid ads, or social media.
• Mobile site traffic: The total number of users accessing your store on mobile devices.
• Day part monitoring: When site visitors come, which shows your peak traffic times.
• Newsletter subscribers: How many users have opted into your email marketing list. Also review subscriber demographics to make sure you’re reaching your target audience.
• Texting subscribers: The number of customers on your SMS marketing contact list.
• Subscriber growth rate: How quickly your subscriber list is growing.
• Email open rate: The percentage of subscribers who open your email. Understand that this isn’t always accurate. Things like Apple Mail Privacy Protection and bot activity can inflate opens while email blockers can make rates seem lower. Pair this with click-through rate, conversions, and unsubscribe rate to get a full look at your email performance.
• Email click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of delivered messages or opens that result in a click, depending on how your platform defines it. This is often more useful than open rate, since clicks tie more directly to traffic and conversions.
• Unsubscribes: Track both the total number and the rate of unsubscribes.
• Return rate: The share of sold items that customers send back. A rising return rate can point to inaccurate product descriptions, sizing issues, or a mismatch between an ad’s promise and the product itself. Return rate = Number of items returned / Number of items sold x 100.
• Chat sessions initiated: If you use live chat, such as Shopify Inbox, this tells you how many users engaged with the tool to reach a support agent.
• Social followers and fans: Follower count can indicate audience size, but engagement rate, clicks, and conversions are better indicators of loyalty and business impact.
• Return on ad spend (ROAS): The revenue earned for every dollar spent on advertising on a specific channel, like Google Ads or Meta Ads. ROAS = Revenue from ad campaign / Cost of ad campaign.
• Blended ROAS: How much you spend on ads across all channels, blended into a single view of how efficiently your ad campaigns generate revenue. Blended ROAS = Total revenue / Total ad spend across all channels.
• Cost per click (CPC): How much you spend each time a potential customer clicks one of your paid ads. CPC = Total ad spend / Total clicks.
• Social media engagement: How actively your followers interact with your brand on social media.
• Clicks: The total number of clicks a link gets on your site, social media, email, or display ads.
• Average click-through rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions or delivered messages that result in a click, depending on the channel.
• Average position in Google Search Console: Your average ranking in Google Search results for tracked queries and pages. This appears in Google Search Console performance reports for organic search. Ad platforms use different ranking metrics.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) traffic volume: How much traffic your PPC campaigns send to your site.
• Blog traffic: Create a filtered view in your analytics tool, and compare it to overall site traffic.
• Number and quality of product reviews: Reviews provide social proof, help with SEO, and give you feedback for your business.
• Banner or display advertising CTRs: The percentage of viewers who clicked your banner or display ad, which gives you insight into copy, imagery, and offer performance.
• Affiliate performance rates: If you run affiliate marketing, this shows which channels are most successful.

Track ecommerce marketing analytics in GA4, and use Google Search Console for search performance metrics like clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position. Shopify Analytics is often the better source for store-specific KPIs, like sales, AOV, top products, and returning customer rate, while GA4 covers cross-channel traffic, engagement, and campaign analysis.

Customer service KPIs

Customer service KPIs tell you how effective your support is and whether you’re meeting expectations across your call center, email support, or social support. Measuring and tracking these KPIs will ensure you’re providing a positive customer experience.

Key performance indicators for customer service include:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: Involves asking customers how satisfied they were with their experience, measured on a numbered scale. It can affect virtually every part of your business.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Insight into customer relationships and loyalty based on how likely customers are to recommend your brand.
• First contact resolution rate: The percentage of support issues resolved during the first interaction, without a follow-up.
• Customer service email count: The number of emails your support team receives.
• Customer service phone call count: How frequently your support team is reached by phone.
• Customer service chat count: If you have live chat, the number of support conversations it handles.
• First response time: The average time it takes a customer to receive a first response. Work to reduce this while maintaining resolution quality and satisfaction.
• Average resolution time: The time it takes to resolve a support issue, starting from when the customer reached out.
• Active issues: The total number of queries currently in progress.
• Backlogs: Unresolved support tickets waiting for action. Track by channel and age to spot staffing or process bottlenecks.
• Concern classification: Classifying customer concerns to spot trends and reduce future support queries.
• Service escalation rate: How often a customer asks to be redirected to a supervisor or senior employee. Keep this number low.

Improving customer service KPIs can raise customer lifetime value while lowering customer acquisition cost.

Manufacturing and project management KPIs

Manufacturing and project management KPIs support the operations behind an ecommerce business rather than the storefront itself. These are essential to track if your store is at the point of manufacturing its own products or running projects that need to hit deadlines.

If you’re a reseller or dropshipper, you’ll want to track KPIs like:

• Supplier lead time: Total time from when a customer places an order to when they receive it.
• Fill rate: The percentage of customer orders filled from available stock without any back orders or stockouts. Fill rate = Total orders shipped / Total orders placed x 100.
• Inventory turnover: How many times a business sells and replenishes its inventory within a given time period. Inventory turnover = Cost of goods sold (COGS) / Average inventory.

On the manufacturing side, the KPIs worth tracking first are:

• Cycle time: How long it takes to manufacture a single product from start to finish.
• Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE): How well your equipment is performing.
• First time yield (FTY): The share of units that pass through production successfully on the first attempt. First time yield = Number of defect-free units produced / Total number of units that entered the process x 100.
• Non-compliance events: A failure to follow rules or regulations. Watch these since safety, working conditions, and quality violations carry regulatory risk.

On the project management side, track:

• Budget: How much money you have allocated for the specific project. Keep this realistic. If you’re repeatedly over budget, you need to make some adjustments to your project planning.
• Cost variance: Actual cost against predicted cost. This helps you catch projects that continuously run over budget. Cost variance = Budgeted cost − Actual cost.
• Return on investment (ROI): ROI tells you how much your efforts earned your business. The higher this number, the better. Return on investment = Net profit / Cost of investment x 100.
• Hours worked: Tells you how many hours were spent on the project. It’s useful context, but it’s not an outcome metric, so pair it with delivery or ROI data to get a better understanding of what it means for your project.

Ecommerce KPI benchmarks (what good looks like)

Every benchmark below is a global average, and every ecommerce store’s actual target varies by factors like industry, device, or location. For example, a 2% conversion rate is weak for food and beverage but strong for luxury goods, and mobile shoppers convert and abandon carts at different rates than desktop shoppers in every category. 

Use these as a starting reference point, then compare your own KPIs over time.

These benchmarks are most useful as a starting comparison, rather than a target. A store converting below 3.2% in a high-consideration category like furniture may still be performing well, while the same rate in a low-consideration category like snacks means it’s time to do some optimizing.

How to choose ecommerce KPIs

To choose the right KPIs, first look at your business’s goals. Pinpoint what you’re hoping most to achieve, whether it’s a boost in sales, improvement in marketing efficiency, or reduction in customer service tickets. From there, you can find the right KPIs to track how you’re progressing.

Many stores also pick a single North Star metric, or just a single KPI that best identifies what success means to you. Weekly active shoppers or repeat purchase rate often work well here. Your other KPIs then support that North Star metric instead of competing with it.

Key performance indicator templates

Here are a few KPI templates, with example goals and the KPIs that support them. Go to the Analytics dashboard in your Shopify admin to follow along and track these KPIs.

Goal 1: Boost sales 10% month over month.

KPI examples: 

• Daily sales
• Conversion rate
• Site traffic

Goal 2: Increase conversion rate 5% in 2026.

KPI examples:

• Conversion rate
• Shopping cart abandonment rate
• Competitive pricing

Goal 3: Grow website traffic 50% in 2026.

KPI examples:

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

Goal 4: Reduce customer service calls 50% from July 2026 to December 2026.

KPI examples: 

• Service call classification
• Pages visited immediately before a call

The value of a KPI is tied to the goal it measures. Tracking which page a shopper visited before calling support makes sense for Goal 4, since it can reveal areas of confusion that, once fixed, reduce customer service calls. That same KPI would be useless for Goal 3.

Revenue also affects which KPIs get tracked at all. Shopify’s Q4 2025 Survey of Store Owners* found that high-revenue store owners ($1 million or more in annual sales) track customer acquisition cost at a 30% rate, compared to 5% for low-revenue store owners* (six times the difference). As a store scales past its first KPIs, CAC is often one of the next ones worth adding.

How to track ecommerce KPIs

Once you’ve chosen your KPIs, the next step is building a dashboard where you can track the most important ecommerce KPIs. 

Start in Shopify Analytics. Go to the Analytics dashboard in Shopify admin and choose from more than 60 pre-built reports covering sales, customers, and inventory, or build a custom dashboard with only the KPIs tied to your current goal. Shopify’s overview dashboard is a solid starting point for a first-time setup.

Review high-impact KPIs like sales, conversion rate, and traffic on a daily or weekly cadence, and save strategic KPIs like customer lifetime value and retention rate for a monthly or quarterly review. 

Colleen Echohawk, CEO at Eighth Generation, says checking performance is part of her routine: “Every morning I check the news, and then I check Shopify Analytics because I want to see what happened yesterday. I’m always watching our sales, thinking about what products were the most successful that day and what was most successful that month.”

Shopify Analytics covers most store-specific KPIs on its own. That includes metrics like sales, average order volume, top products, returning customer rate, and conversion rate. 

It has less visibility into what happens before a shopper reaches your store, so bring in GA4 once you need a cross-channel view of performance across ads, email, and social. Google Search Console is also worth setting up to monitor organic search performance so you can see data like average position, impressions, and search click-through rate.

A workable dashboard review doesn’t need every KPI in this guide. Pick the ones relating to your current goal, check them on a set schedule, and use Shopify’s performance tracking tools to monitor your progress. 

As goals shift, swap out KPIs rather than adding new ones on top of an already crowded dashboard, so the reports you review stay tied to what you’re trying to accomplish.

*Based on a 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with two or more years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.