In the last couple of decades, the retail industry has grown from 3 trillion US dollars in 2000 to 7 trillion dollars in 2022.
And this is not the end. Last year, it saw an increase of more than 500 billion dollars.
While the retail industry is growing at this rate, the data managed by the retailers is increasing multifold.
With every click, purchase, and review, mountains of information are added for them to handle.
Effectively managing this data to make informed decisions is crucial for retailers. This is where the right tools come in, thanks to the latest technological advancements.
One such tool is the retail dashboard, essential for data management.
In this article, we will explore how retail business dashboards can help retailers manage their data effectively.
So stick with us till the end.
Retail Dashboard – Why dashboards are essential for online retail?
A retail business dashboard is an important tool for online retailers.
It arranges the data in graphs or pictorial form to provide a better understanding of their data.
It also helps with:
- Real-time monitoring
A retail analytics dashboard offers real-time insights on different important metrics.
It allows retailers to take timely actions in case of emergency and avoid losses. It also helps in maintaining smooth operations and addressing problems in real time.
- Data visualization
As we stated before, the retail dashboard presents the data in an easy-to-understand form like charts, graphs, or pictorial form.
This makes it easier for retailers to understand the complex information and make the most out of it.
It also allows them to identify any hidden trends or patterns which they can use while making important decisions.
- Informed decisions
A retail sales dashboard compiles data from multiple sources into a single and centralized view.
This helps owners to get a consolidated picture of their entire business. It acts as a guide while making any important decisions.
- Operational efficiency
A retail dashboard also makes managing operations easy, providing everything together in a single place.
It gives fast access to information and reduces time spent on data gathering and analysis.
- Performance tracking
Moreover, such a dashboard enables continuous tracking of metrics.
This helps retailers to measure their performance over a period of time. And measure their progress toward their goals.
By monitoring key metrics via a retail KPI dashboard, retailers can understand the effectiveness of their strategies and make necessary adjustments to improve results.
Common retail dashboard examples
Retail dashboards come in different types, depending on their focus on aspects of business.
Let’s discuss some common retail dashboard examples:
- eCommerce dashboard
As the name suggests, this retail store performance dashboard provides an overview of your online store’s performance.
It includes important metrics like total sales, conversion rates, recurring revenue, average order value, etc.
By monitoring these insights, retailers can optimize their eCommerce business performance and enhance their revenue.
- Inventory dashboard
This type of retail business dashboard helps retailers manage their stock levels efficiently.
It tracks and displays all the important metrics like in-hand stock, stock turnover rates, and out-of-stock items.
Monitoring this information is crucial to maintain optimal inventory levels and reduce holding costs.
Additionally, it ensures that your best-selling products are always in stock.
- Customer segmentation dashboard
This retail dashboard helps you understand more about your customers.
It segments your customer base into various categories based on similar demographics, purchase behavior, or preferences. This includes metrics like customer lifetime value, repeat purchase rates, and demographics.
You can use this information to tailor your marketing efforts and increase ROI. It also helps you boost customer satisfaction and increase repeat purchases.
- Sales dashboard
A retail sales dashboard provides insights into sales performance.
It collects data from different channels and regions to display the overall sales performance of your business. It also tracks metrics, such as total sales, sales by product category, sales growth, targets, etc.
- Financial dashboard
This retail dashboard displays the snapshot of the financial health of your retail business.
It includes all important metrics like revenue, expenses, profit margins, and cash flow.
By monitoring these metrics, retailers can make informed decisions regarding their budgeting, financial planning, or sales forecast.
These were some of the vital retail KPI dashboards. But, is this enough for a retail business to truly succeed?
Let’s find out.
Why is the retail dashboard not enough?
A retail dashboard provides valuable insights for businesses. But, relying solely on these dashboards is not sufficient enough.
Wondering why? Let’s discuss.
- While a retail business dashboard provides an overview of your business, it lacks in-depth information.
- Second, while such dashboards provide historical and real-time data, they lack prediction capabilities. Unlike advanced analytics tools, they don’t forecast future trends or customer behavior.
-
A retail dashboard also lacks contextual insights.
For example, it will simply display changes in data rather than what could be the reason behind such changes.
It makes it hard for retailers to understand the full picture of their business. Also, it doesn’t integrate all types of data sources, leading to inaccurate data analysis.
Different users may interpret data differently, causing inconsistency in decision-making.
Also, as the business grows and data becomes complex, dashboard often struggles to scale with your business and fulfill the demand of a growing business.
To understand and use the real power of data, you need to go beyond traditional measures and adopt advanced data analytics.
Let’s talk about that in our next section.
Putler – Best analytics tool for retailers
Putler is a robust analytics tool, packed with multiple features for retailers.
These features include real-time monitoring and reporting, advanced data visualization, predictive analytics, and detailed customer segmentation.
Putler is an important tool for retailers selling across multiple platforms. It integrates data from 17+ integrations including various eCommerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, etc), payment gateways (PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, etc), and shopping carts (Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc) into a single, unified dashboard.
This comprehensive view allows retailers to effortlessly track sales, customer behavior, and marketing performance all in one place.
Hence, it helps you get a comprehensive business overview for effective decision-making.
Putler presents this vital information in a variety of specialized retail dashboards. Every retail dashboard provides in-depth insights into different aspects of your business.
Let’s talk about them in detail and find out how they can benefit retailers.
Home dashboard
The Home dashboard offers a quick snapshot of the overall business performance.
It is the central hub of the Putler. Here you can view all the key metrics like total sales revenue, top customers, recent transactions, real-time business activity, etc.
In simple words, it provides you with a glance at whatever is happening in your business.
This specialized retail dashboard can help you get an instant understanding of a business’s health without driving into much detail.
Here is a list of things you can find on the Home dashboard:
- Critical sales KPIs
- Sales analytics graphs
- Business analytics graphs
- Transaction activity
- Customer leaderboard
- Top performing products
Sales dashboard
As the name suggests, the retail sales dashboard of Putler displays all the metrics related to sales performance and activity.
It provides deep insights into your sales data, identifies revenue trends and volume, and tracks performance over your preferred timeframe.
Moreover, you can process refunds directly from this dashboard instantly, without visiting your payment platforms and facing a slow process.
It also helps you to track and analyze safe patterns which you can use to customize various strategies.
Here’s what you can find in this specialized retail sales dashboard:
- Predefined filters
- Important sales metrics and activity
- Sales chart
- Sales breakdown
- Sales Heatmap
- SaaS sales metrics
- Order list
- Sales breakdown chart
- Option to process instant refunds
Products dashboard
The Product dashboard provides you with quick insights about your product performance.
Here you can find various metrics related to your product performance, such as net sales, daily average order, average revenue, etc.
It also provides in-depth information about individual product performance.
Besides that, you can also find the best-selling product and slowest-moving product in your business.
Here is the list of things you can find on the product dashboard:
- Predefined filters
- Product metrics
- Product breakdown chart
- Key product metrics (fastest-moving, slowest-moving product)
- Product list view
- Product in-depth cards
Everything over a selected time period.
Customers dashboard
The Customer dashboard provides a detailed analysis of your customer base.
It helps you understand your customer demographics, their buying behavior, lifetime value, and more.
It also helps you to segment your customers into different groups based on criteria like similar buying behavior, demographic regions, products purchased, revenue contribution, etc.
Here you will find in this dashboard for your preferred time period:
- Predefined filters
- Customer metrics
- Customer breakdown chart
- RFM analysis
- SaaS customer metrics
- Customer list
- In-depth customer cards
Insights dashboard
The Insights dashboard uses advanced analytics to provide you with actionable business insights.
Here you can compare your holiday season performance and analyze what offers/plans worked for you previously. This will help you devise the next year’s plan accordingly.
It also helps you understand your eCommerce analytics and see which pages perform better.
Apart from that, you can also use another tab of this dashboard to compare your business performance for different time periods of your choice.
Audience dashboard
The Audience dashboard gives you a comprehensive view of your website visitors. It helps to understand who your customers are and how they interact with your website.
To use this dashboard, you need to connect it with your Google Analytics account.
Yes, this specialized retail dashboard fetches data from Google Analytics and Search Console to help retailers track and analyze key metrics and co-relate them with the revenue data for informed decision-making.
Web Analytics dashboard
The Web Analytics dashboard provides a centralized view of all key metrics of your business website. It offers real-time insights with an easy-to-use interface.
It saves you time by providing every vital website data in one place so you don’t need to keep visiting multiple pages to check the important analytics.
In this comprehensive dashboard, you can see all the necessary data like top-performing pages, demographics, traffic sources, etc.
And, the best part is, this web analytics dashboard is not dependent on your GA integration and works independently, providing you with a privacy-focused simple view of your business.
Time Machine dashboard
The Time Machine dashboard is a unique feature of Putler. It provides a forecast of the future performance of your business.
It is divided into 3 parts:
- Revenue forecast: This provides insight into your projected monthly revenue for the upcoming year. To calculate this, it considers the current revenue monthly growth rate and revenue churn.
- Customer forecast: It provides insights on the future customer number at the end of the 12 months.
- 10x forecast: The 10x forecast helps you to know how much growth you need to achieve to grow by 10x. It inputs the current status of your business & your target to forecast 10x the growth of your business.
The numbers that you get from 10x help you to set a realistic business goal to plan your marketing efforts & outreach efforts.
Transactions dashboard
The Transactions dashboard provides complete information on all transactions happening in your business.
It helps you track and manage sales, refunds, disputes, and other financial activities.
In simple words, it gives you a comprehensive picture of a financial operation and helps in improving financial management.
Subscriptions dashboard
The Subscriptions dashboard is specifically for subscription-based businesses.
It provides all the insights related to a SaaS/subscription business, for example, monthly recurring revenue, churn rate, active subscription, new subscription, churned subscription, etc.
Conclusion
Utilizing a dashboard in retail business is important.
It helps you gain actionable insights into your business operation. It also helps track key metrics, understand customer behavior, manage inventory better, and optimize supply chains.
But don’t limit yourself to a mere dashboard. Instead, opt for advanced analytics tools like Putler.
Putler stands out as a powerful tool for retailers. It provides a different dashboard specifically tailored to provide insights into different aspects of your business.
It is loaded with advanced features like real-time tracking, predictive analytics, customer segmentation, etc. Overall, Putler helps retailers to make informed decisions backed by data to ensure growth.
Try out Putler now to explore its capabilities firsthand.