15 Ecommerce KPIs Small Stores Should Check Every Week

You don't need a BI dashboard or a data analyst to run a small ecommerce store well — you need about 15 numbers, checked on the same weekly schedule, so nothing quietly drifts for a month before anyone notices. Below is a practical weekly checklist split into four groups: sales, customer behavior, fulfillment, and reputation. The last group is the one most stores skip, and it's the one that often explains why the first three started slipping in the first place.

Most of these 15 live in your store admin, your analytics tool, or your payment processor already — you're not building anything new, just checking them together, on the same day, instead of letting the sales numbers get a weekly look and the reputation numbers get a quarterly one. Getting orders and reputation on one dashboard is the easiest way to make that single weekly check practical instead of five separate logins every Monday morning.

Sales KPIs

1. Revenue

The obvious one, but check it against the same period last week and last month, not just against your own target. A week-over-week dip of 5% might be noise; the same dip three weeks running is a trend. Breaking it down by new versus returning customers also tells you whether a dip is a traffic problem or a retention problem before you chase the wrong fix.

2. Average order value (AOV)

Total revenue divided by number of orders. Watch it alongside revenue, since a revenue increase driven entirely by more orders at a falling AOV tells a different story than one driven by fewer, bigger orders. If you're actively running AOV tactics — bundles, free-shipping thresholds, checkout upsells — this is the number that tells you whether they're actually working, week to week, rather than waiting for a quarterly review to find out.

3. Conversion rate

Visitors who complete a purchase, divided by total visitors. A falling conversion rate with steady traffic usually points at the product pages or checkout, not at demand — worth checking before assuming you just need more traffic. Segment it by new versus returning visitors if your analytics tool supports it, since the two usually convert at very different rates and a blended number can mask which one actually moved.

4. Cart abandonment rate

Carts started but never completed, divided by carts started. Unexpected shipping costs and a checkout that requires creating an account are the two most common causes worth ruling out first if this number is climbing. A sudden jump after a checkout redesign or a new shipping rate change is usually the fastest clue to what caused it.

5. Traffic by source

Not just total visitors — where they came from. A revenue dip that coincides with a drop in one specific channel (organic search, paid, email) tells you where to look; a dip across every channel at once usually means something seasonal or storewide instead. Watching this weekly also catches a paid channel quietly becoming less efficient before a month of wasted spend goes by unnoticed.

Customer KPIs

6. Repeat purchase rate

The share of orders in a given week placed by customers who've bought before. A store living entirely on first-time buyers is more exposed to rising ad costs than one with a steady base of repeat customers, and this number is the earliest tell for which situation you're actually in. A repeat rate that's quietly falling is also one of the clearest downstream signs that something upstream — product quality, fulfillment, or customer service — isn't landing the way it used to.

7. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Total spend on acquiring new customers for the week, divided by the number of new customers acquired. Doesn't need to be perfectly attributed across every channel to be useful — a rough weekly number that's trending up while AOV stays flat is worth a closer look even before the attribution is exact. The relationship between CAC and AOV matters more than either number alone: a rising CAC is sustainable if AOV is rising to match it, and a warning sign if it isn't.

8. Customer lifetime value trend

You won't get a precise lifetime figure every week, but tracking repeat purchase rate and AOV together over time gives you a directional read on whether the customers you're acquiring now are worth more or less than the ones you acquired a quarter ago.

9. Email or SMS list growth

New subscribers for the week, since this list is usually where repeat purchases and review requests both get driven from. A shrinking or flat list growth rate eventually shows up as a slower repeat purchase rate a few weeks later.

Fulfillment KPIs

10. Return rate

Returns for the week divided by orders for the week, ideally broken down by product rather than just as one storewide number — a storewide average can hide one SKU with a return rate several times higher than everything else you sell. Reviews on that same SKU will often show the reason — sizing, a quality issue, a listing that oversells a feature — before the return paperwork does.

11. Shipping time

Time from order placed to order shipped, and separately, to delivered. Slipping fulfillment times often show up in reviews and cancellation requests before they show up anywhere else, so catching the delay internally first is cheaper than reading about it in a review later. A single slow week during a shipping-carrier disruption is worth noting but not panicking over; three slow weeks running means something in your own process changed.

12. Stockout rate

The share of your catalog that's out of stock in a given week, especially among your top sellers. A bestseller that's been out of stock for two weeks is lost revenue that won't show up in any report except as a gap in what you'd otherwise expect to sell.

13. Order defect rate

Wrong items shipped, missing parts, and damaged-on-arrival reports, divided by total orders. This is the fulfillment-side mirror of your return rate and often moves first, since not every defect results in a formal return.

Reputation KPIs

14. Average rating, by product and storewide

Check the storewide number, but also scan for any single product whose rating has dropped in the last week specifically. A storewide average barely moves when one SKU out of two hundred takes a hit, which is exactly why checking it only at the storewide level misses the problem until it's bigger. Flag products whose rating has dropped by more than a small margin in a week the same way you'd flag a stockout — as something to look into immediately, not something to revisit at month-end.

15. Review volume, recency, and negative-review share

Three numbers in one: how many new reviews came in this week, how recent your most recent reviews are, and what share of this week's reviews were negative. A rating can hold steady while negative-review share quietly climbs underneath it if review volume is also climbing — the average lags behind the trend. The fix isn't to ask only satisfied customers for reviews, which just hides the trend rather than fixing it — it's making sure every buyer gets asked the same way, so the negative-review share you see is an honest read on what's actually happening, not a filtered one.

Why reputation belongs on the same weekly dashboard

Of the four groups above, reputation is the one most small stores check the least often, usually treating it as something to look at only after a customer complains or a bad review gets forwarded around internally. That habit puts the reputation numbers on a slower clock than every other KPI on this list, even though a declining rating on a specific product behaves exactly like any other leading indicator — it moves before the sales numbers do, not after.

A product whose rating has been sliding for three weeks is already telling you something about returns, repeat purchases, and conversion rate before those numbers reflect it. Checking rating and negative-review share alongside revenue and conversion rate — same day, same spreadsheet, same five minutes — is what catches that decline while it's still a handful of reviews on one product, rather than a pattern across your whole catalog that took a quarter to notice.

That's easier when you're not toggling between your store admin and a review platform separately every time you want the full picture. Tailwind's Orders product connects to Shopify or WooCommerce, imports your orders and products, and ties every review to the order and product behind it, so the rating and review-volume numbers above sit next to AOV and conversion in the same weekly check instead of a separate habit you remember to do less often.

A simple weekly routine

You don't need all 15 numbers in a single live dashboard to make this work. A repeatable 15-minute weekly routine does the job:

The point of the routine isn't precision down to the decimal — it's catching the week something changed, on any one of these 15 numbers, close enough to when it actually happened that you can still do something about it.

The routine also works better as a habit than as a project. Trying to build a perfect, fully automated dashboard for all 15 numbers before checking any of them delays the actual benefit, which is simply looking at the same set of numbers on the same day every week. A spreadsheet updated by hand for a few months, while you figure out which numbers actually move for your store and how fast, beats a polished dashboard you build once, forget to maintain, and quietly stop looking at a month later.

Where to start

If you're not tracking all 15 yet, start with the four that cross categories: revenue, conversion rate, return rate, and average rating by product. Together they tell you whether you're selling, whether the checkout is working, whether what you shipped held up, and whether customers are happy with what they got — the four questions every other KPI on this list is really trying to answer in more detail. For a closer look at reading sales and review data together at the product level, see our guide to product performance analysis, and if you're pooling your rating across more platforms than just your store's native reviews widget, Tailwind Score rolls Google, Yelp, and the rest into one number you can check in the same five minutes as everything else.

Each tool on Tailwind is $5 a month, or get everything — including Orders and Score — on the Full plan for $50 a month. The first month is free, no credit card required, and there's no contract.