7 Benefits of a Financial Performance Dashboard for eCommerce

If you are like many eCommerce entrepreneurs, your business's financial data is spread across a number of places, from Shopify and Amazon Seller Central to your cloud accounting software and various spreadsheets.

This means that every time you want to consult the data before making a decision, you are going on a scavenger hunt. This is not only time-consuming, it is also a recipe for not having confidence in your numbers.

A better solution is to use a financial performance dashboard: one screen that pulls the numbers from every source and shows the KPIs that drive your bottom line. It has seven benefits, from a bird's eye view of your business to faster decisions. In this post, we examine all seven, the metrics worth putting on the dashboard, and the three most common dashboard mistakes.

What a financial performance dashboard is

A financial eCommerce dashboard gives you deeper insight and clarity around the core KPIs in your business. You and your team can see how different initiatives contribute after a few minutes of looking at the dashboard, instead of spending hours building custom reports in Excel Hell.

Let's use average order value as an example. As the owner, you might want to know that you are not leaving money on the table with each order. Your marketing team will want to know if the new bundle deal they launched is leading to larger checkout orders. And your CFO or controller might want to see how this new bundle deal affects not only average order value but gross margin.

Three people, three questions, one dashboard. That is the whole idea.

The top 7 benefits of using dashboards

1. Get a bird's eye view of all key performance indicators

This is the biggest advantage of using dashboards over spreadsheets and custom reports. All of your most important metrics sit at the top of your dashboard, front and center. You see how the business is doing as a whole before you drill into any one number.

Why it matters: a single metric viewed alone can mislead. Revenue up and margin down is a very different week from revenue up and margin up, and only a view of both at once shows the difference.

2. Save time

One of the biggest time sucks is having to go to multiple sources, be it Shopify, Amazon Seller Central, Google Analytics or Xero, just to get the individual pieces of data you need to make a decision.

For example, if you want to know if sales increased in Q2, you might need to pull revenue numbers from Shopify, Amazon, wholesale orders and so on.

Instead, you can sync all of your data feeds directly to your eCommerce dashboard. It pulls the information in automatically, so all of the important data is in one place and up to date.

3. Monitor sales numbers

Another advantage is that you never have to guess what your sales numbers are. Many eCommerce business owners make a habit of checking their sales dashboard to start each work day.

This allows them to work "on" the business instead of "in" it, while still staying close to the numbers.

You don't necessarily have to check your financial dashboard daily, but it is a great idea to check it at least weekly.

4. Increase profitability

In addition to sales numbers, we recommend tracking profit in a dashboard, both for your company as a whole and for individual product lines or SKUs.

When you look at it on a regular basis, you can see if you are on track. You can make adjustments faster if you see that you are veering away from your target profitability range. A best-selling SKU with a thin margin, or a promotion that lifts revenue while it erodes gross profit, shows up in weeks rather than at the end of the financial year.

5. Keep your team motivated and accountable

We recommend making at least one of your financial performance dashboards accessible to your team.

You can decide how much you want to share, but there are many advantages to sharing at least some of it:

• When they see the dashboard, they can see how the work they are doing directly contributes to the bottom line.
• They will feel more motivated to do great work and may even feel a sense of ownership in the company.
• They will be more likely to suggest new ideas that could further improve the bottom line.
• They always have an idea of where they stand. They can see if they are crushing it, or if their manager might soon reach out to have a talk about their performance.

6. Reduce the time spent putting together detailed reports

Do you know what's worse than reading a 30-page financial report? Having to spend the time creating the 30-page report instead of, you know, focusing on growing the business.

Dashboards solve this problem. You spend the time mapping out your dashboard and deciding which metrics you want to track upfront, and then you don't have to do it again unless you change a metric.

7. Eliminate analysis paralysis

As a founder, you make a lot of decisions every day. Decision fatigue is real, and anything you can do to eliminate or simplify a decision goes a long way. A dashboard helps you make faster decisions because you have all of the important eCommerce KPIs in one place, and they are up to date.

Why it matters: when the numbers are already on the screen, the discussion moves from "what are the numbers?" to "what do we do about them?", which is the only discussion that grows the business.

Which metrics to put on a financial dashboard

The right list depends on your business model, but most eCommerce stores start from the same core. The table shows what each metric tells you and how to read it.

Two of these are simple formulas worth showing on the dashboard itself, so nobody argues about the definition:

• Average order value = revenue ÷ number of orders. A store with $50,000 in monthly revenue from 1,000 orders has an average order value of $50.
• Gross margin = (revenue − cost of goods sold) ÷ revenue × 100. If that same $50,000 in revenue cost $30,000 in goods, gross margin is ($50,000 − $30,000) ÷ $50,000 × 100 = 40%.

For a deeper look at acquisition cost, see our guide on how to optimize customer acquisition cost.

Avoid these 3 common rookie dashboard mistakes

Now that you are sold on creating an eCommerce financial dashboard, here are the three most common mistakes we see businesses make, and how to avoid each one.

Mistake 1: Building it by hand instead of using dashboard software

Many people try to DIY their first dashboard or two. They grab all of the data and build it in Excel or Google Sheets. That's all fine and good until you have to import the data each week, or something in your custom dashboard breaks. The dashboard that is supposed to save you time on reporting is now creating even more work for you.

This is totally unnecessary, considering how many great free and paid dashboard software options are available. Save yourself the headaches and build your first dashboard using software that connects directly to your store, your marketplaces and your accounting software.

Mistake 2: Building before you know your goals

Another common mistake is getting so excited to build the dashboard that you literally throw the kitchen sink in it. The result is a cluttered mess, with dozens of charts, graphs and tables crammed on the screen.

The dashboard becomes so overwhelming that you need a magnifying glass and a shot of whiskey before you dive in.

Instead, we recommend spending the time upfront to choose the top metrics you care about:

1. Write down the decisions the dashboard must support

   For example: how much to spend on ads next month, which products to reorder, whether a promotion paid off.
2. Pick the few metrics that answer those decisions

   Usually five or six from the list above. If a metric does not change a decision, it does not go at the top.
3. Put those metrics front and center, above the fold

   Anything else you include is a "nice-to-have" and goes below them.
4. Connect the data sources

   Store, marketplaces, accounting software and ad platforms, synced automatically rather than imported by hand.
5. Review it on a fixed rhythm

   At least weekly. Remove any metric nobody has looked at for a month.

Mistake 3: Obsessing over style instead of substance

It is great to spend time on the dashboard design. However, the design should be secondary to the actual data and metrics you are tracking. Any design element you include should make it easier to see what's happening on your dashboard, not distract from it.

From product profit to customer profit

Once your financial dashboard is in place, a new question usually follows: which customers are behind the profit? Two stores with the same revenue and the same margin can be in very different positions if one earns most of its profit from loyal repeat buyers and the other from one-off discount shoppers.

That is a customer question, not a product question. RFM segmentation groups customers by how recently they bought, how often and how much they spend, and customer lifetime value shows what each group is worth over time. Nexus by Omniconvert builds both from your order data, and pushes the segments directly to Meta Ads, Google Ads and Klaviyo, so the spend in your dashboard goes to the customers most worth keeping.

Frequently Asked Questions