The majority of questions on our onboarding calls seem to fall into two related categories:
These questions can be tough to answer.
Take for example your new customer 90-day repurchase rate. You know that a higher number is better, but at what point is it worth dedicating significant resources towards improving, and at what point is it already relatively optimized?
If you search around, you may find some general targets for certain metrics. 25% is a number that's often thrown around as a strong repurchase rate. But someone selling subscription vitamins should feel very different about a 25% repurchase rate than someone selling appliances!
A proper benchmark needs to take into account your industry and business model in order to be useful. And that's the idea behind our new Benchmarks tool - to make your metrics more actionable by providing a reasonable basis for comparison.
All it takes is a few short questions to help us categorize your store. From there, we'll gather data on other businesses in your industry and chart your metrics along a distribution curve of industry data.
BASIC, PRO, and PLUS users will receive a general performance score grading overall metrics vs similar companies, plus see how they compare on:
For each metric you'll see where you stand on a bell curve of other companies in your industry. You'll learn what values would place you at the industry median or in the top or bottom quartiles. With net sales, you can also track how your sales compare to median sales in your industry month-to-month.
The first time you access Benchmarks, we'll take you through four quick questions to help us determine which other Shopify stores will work best for comparison. We'll ask you to select:
Note: Depending on your answers, we may not have enough comparable companies to compare against. In that case, we'll wait to calculate your benchmarks until that time, and we'll notify as soon as they're available.
All your data will be completely anonymized. As always, we won't share it with any third party, and it will only be used towards calculating the combined distributions of each metric for your industry.
However, you can still choose not to share your data and keep your Benchmarks disabled. If you change your mind later, you can unlock Benchmarks in your Settings tab at any time (and similarly, you can always disable Benchmarks to stop anonymously sharing your data).
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We're excited for you to try this out! If you have any concerns, questions, or suggestions, about how any of this works, just let us know at hello@lifetimely.io.
