Interview with Evgenii Kuralov: Which Metrics to Use in E-commerce and How Product Card Content Affects Sales

Recently I interviewed Evgenii Kuralov, one of the leading e-commerce experts, to find out the best metrics e-commerce businesses need to track, how COVID-19 changed the industry, what lies ahead for e-commerce, and how to create good product cards.

Evgenii, where are your strengths in e-commerce, and what is the most interesting thing you could highlight from your experience?

Frankly speaking, I never thought I would do this kind of job. Initially, I used to work in classical retail. It was a company that sells household appliances. When I moved to Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, I got a job in the Ukrainian company Foxmart as a sales assistant. Although I already had managerial experience, it was hard to start as a manager. Still, this position has been my first impulse for me.?

After about half a year of work at Foxmart in Moldova, I passed an internal contest and was appointed to the position of manager in the online store. In spite, I had absolutely no background and hadn't been involved in e-commerce before, my curiosity about technology, development in general, and my knowledge about e-commerce helped me to get that position. On top of that, I got a great team of guys from Kyiv who helped me to improve my skills and gain experience, which opened doors to the e-commerce world.?

Having realized that I like working in this field, I decided to pursue this career. The market was just beginning to develop actively and rapidly at that time. So, in Moldova, in 2010, this niche was non-competitive. When I was in my sales director position at Foxmart, I performed a market analysis and found only 8 target home appliances online stores and additionally 4 stores that were indirectly related to the sales of home appliances. Six months later, I did a follow-up re-survey and found 36 target competitor stores that were focused on the appliance market. The market was just forming then, and it was very interesting, because we didn't rely on any Western canons, but did everything solely based on our own experience.?

The e-commerce market is so wide now that it's hard to manage it just by having superficial competence and general knowledge of digital marketing.

You mentioned Foxmart as the first store you worked at. Can you tell more about the e-commerce projects you encountered and how you witnessed them evolve after that time?

After I quit my work as an online sales director at Foxmart, I was invited to another Moldovan e-commerce project, which was smaller and suited my experience. Here I had some difficulties because before that I worked in a big, powerful company where all the logistics, procurement processes, and other things were already set up. But here, I started in a company with only 10 people, and it was a pure e-commerce project with no offline stores. This was my first case where an online store existed without being connected to a big business. This experience showed me how working on a small project and budget, but big ambitions can be fruitful and successful. After I left, the project existed for about 3 more years.

This experience showed me how working on a small project and budget, but big ambitions can be fruitful and successful.

After that, I worked in different companies on e-commerce projects. I was working as a marketer and tried to find ways how to improve website conversion and direct more quality traffic through marketing channels.?

When I was working as marketing director with my Ukrainian colleagues on a chain of household appliance stores project, I got an offer from Azerbaijan. Initially, the contractors were looking for someone who would manage the sales process remotely on the updated front end in terms of improving the user experience. They needed to work on the UI/UX component of the site and relaunch it. Then I realized that their sales and the whole online store issue wouldn't be resolved just by restarting the front-end part. It required a comprehensive management approach. At that time team didn't have enough knowledge for good expertise. For a while, I was taking over the digital marketer position using my knowledge and previous work experience in e-commerce.?

In six months we managed to optimize the budget by nearly two times, and the conversion quality went up by four times.

When a retailer starts to get serious about its digital channel, what metrics would you advise paying attention to?

The simplest metric that I advise to be taken as a basis, is growth. I always rely on this metric and often talk about it.

In addition to this, to calculate the internal indicators of the company you will need ROI or ROMI. These indicators contain commercial information that you don't always want to disclose to external partners. So, internally, these two indicators should be calculated.?

And at the external partners - marketing agencies' level the best indicator will be ROAS as it is very simple and will be clear for both internal and external parties. ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) is a cool marketing metric that shows what percentage of sales you got for $1.?

Also, there are three principles that I follow in my approach to using metrics and indicators:

1. Everything that can be measured must be measured. If something can't be measured, you must figure out how to measure it and start doing it.
2. Indicators of any metric should be in 3 different forms:

1. Past indicators - this is your experience, and there is no difference if this metric has bad or good indicators. You should analyze them carefully, accept them, draw conclusions and keep working (you must save all indicators to take them into account in the future in the analysis)
2. Current indicators - these are your today's results and they show you the quality of yesterday’s work. You can always correlate today's data with yesterday's or with data from the last month or year to understand what is the quality of today’s performance.
3. The indicators of the future - this is your forecast for tomorrow. The more accurate it turns out to be, the more expertise you have about both the process you are measuring and the area you are operating in.
4. The team must have employees responsible for each of the metrics. The employees' KPIs must contain these metrics and thus they will be constantly thinking about how to influence performance and will try to do it.

As you understand, there can be many metrics at all stages of the project and not all companies need to have the same ones. There are important and common top-level metrics for the main processes. Also, there are lower-level metrics that you can display for yourself to better understand the dynamics of the process that you are currently building or optimizing. You will need the detailed metrics only at certain moments. And further, you would rather leave 2 or 3 ones that you will apply to ensure everything is ok or when there is an “anomaly” in the top-level metrics and you want to realize what it causes.

Every e-commerce project can be divided into several stages in terms of the client's way to the completion of the order and its delivery.?

The first stage is website traffic generation. Here I advise you to derive the “session value” metric. For that, you need to divide the number of sales by the number of sessions, and that way you will understand how much income your site generates in one session. It would help if you tracked the dynamics of this metric. If the dynamics start to deteriorate, it means that either you are getting low-quality traffic from the marketing channels or the conversion of your site has dipped for some reason.

The second stage is conversion. To get an understanding of why it can change, pay attention to the conversions between the stages that the client went through on the site. This data could be found in Google Analytics in the "Buying behavior” report. If there is an anomaly with adding the goods to the cart at the level of sessions, it indicates that either the customers don't find what they need or the price is higher than the rest of the market offers. Also, if the metrics of sessions with transactions have dipped, pay attention to the checkout page. The issues often occur due to an inconvenient or incomprehensible checkout form.

The third stage is delivery. This stage can include many different metrics, but all of them should indicate how fast you deliver the order to the client. It is crucial to know about the speed at each stage and understand peak loads and operating production of staff to determine in time either to connect third-party delivery services or increase the operating capacity of your logistics.

I always recommend highlighting the top metrics such as:

• Daily number of orders,
• Daily sales amount,
• Daily average bill,
• Daily number of sessions,
• Daily conversion rate
• Daily delivery rate

You should compare these metrics with the metrics of yesterday, last month, and the averages of the previous 3 months. Such an approach always gives an objective understanding of today's metrics. And in case I notice anomalies in some of them, I turn to the lower-level metrics to understand why the top-level metric showed an anomaly.

Also, I would like to note that all the indicators of life metrics of your project should fit one dashboard, and ideally on one screen of a smartphone. Thus you will have good control over your project.

Today, everyone is talking about breaking delivery chains and the fact that only those who manage to create strong delivery chains will remain in the market. So, how can e-commerce avoid ruptures in logistics chains as painlessly as possible in terms of business processes?

In this matter, a lot depends on the market of the country and the kind of goods they have.?

From our experience, we defined several third-party local postal services through which we can send goods without any problems and the client will pick up his goods himself at the branch on the specified date. But there are deliveries of larger items, and it is important to optimize the process of information transfer about the delivery of the order. This is where the technical preparation comes in from my side and the partners' side.?

Let's touch on sales and the marketplace. Do you see the marketplace model as potentially successful for e-commerce? And what is your experience of working with marketplaces?

Talking about the marketplace model in its ideal form, then it will be relevant for any market. The marketplace generates crazy amounts of traffic and its main task is to make sure that your product would be noticed and sold there. However, the marketplace is most interesting for small and medium-sized businesses.?

Evgenii, I am grateful that you shared your work experience. It was nice to learn so many new things about e-commerce. And I think our readers will get a lot of interesting information to emphasize from our dialogue. Thank you for the interview.

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