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How do you increase ecommerce sales without adding another channel, tool or tactic to the list? You stop treating your store as a hundred problems and see it as one equation: traffic × conversion × average order value × purchase frequency = revenue, minus what it costs = profit. In the first episode of Ecom by the Numbers, Melia Moore walks through the five ecommerce metrics that actually run your store.
A worked example shows what one lever does. Lift conversion from 2% to 3% on the same thousand visitors and a $1,000 month becomes a $1,500 month, without finding a single new customer. Then the filter this whole series runs on: almost every growth tactic you get pitched is one of those four levers in a costume. Ask which number it moves and whether it's the cheapest way to move it. If it moves none of them, it's a nice-to-have, not the main event.
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Episode page: https://ecomprofitably.com/podcast/how-to-increase-ecommerce-sales/
Ecom by the Numbers is brought to you by ecomprofitably: https://ecomprofitably.com/
An ecommerce podcast for small business and Shopify store owners who are making sales but flying blind on the money. Host Melia Moore shows you how to see your whole business as one equation: traffic × conversion × average order value × frequency = revenue, minus what it costs = profit. Every episode kills a shiny object and hands you the honest math, from the four growth levers to margin, customer acquisition cost, the P&L and cash, so you can run your store like an owner instead of an operator. Mathy, but not accounting. A show from ecomprofitably.
You're listening to E-comm by the Numbers. Episode One. Somewhere in your business right now, there is a list. Maybe it's written down, maybe it just lives in your head, but it's there. Post more on the one platform everyone swears you have to be on. Fix the thing on the product page you've been meaning to fix for a month. Try the email tool, the ad idea, the influencer, the new sales channel some guy in a video promised would change everything.
It is a very long list, and it never gets shorter, because every single day the internet hands you three more things you're apparently failing to do. I want to tell you something that should make that list a lot less frightening. You don't have a hundred problems. You have five numbers. And I'd bet you've never really looked at four of them. That is what this whole show is about.
I'm Melia Moore. This is E-comm by the Numbers, a show we make at e-comm profitably for the store owner who is making sales but flying a little blind on the money. You're doing real revenue. You're busy, genuinely busy. But if I asked you, right now, whether your business actually makes money, and how, and where, I think you'd have to guess. That is not a criticism.
It's the most common situation in ecommerce, and it's the exact thing we are going to fix, one number at a time. So let me show you the five numbers. Here is your entire business, on one line. Traffic, times conversion, times average order value, times how often a customer comes back. That gives you your revenue. Then you subtract what it all costs.
And what's left is profit. That's it. That's the whole machine. Let me say the four revenue numbers again, slower, because these four are the levers you actually pull. The first is traffic. How many people show up.
The second is conversion. What percentage of them actually buy, instead of looking around and leaving. The third is average order value. How much they spend when they do buy. And the fourth is frequency. How often they come back and do it again.
Multiply those four together, and you have your revenue. It's not a mystery. It's a multiplication problem. Let me make that real with actual numbers, because this show is going to live in actual numbers. Say a thousand people come to your store this month. Two percent of them buy.
That's twenty orders. They spend fifty dollars each. That's a thousand dollars in revenue. And say you never get a single one of them to come back, so your frequency is just one. That's the business. A thousand dollars, out of a thousand visitors, once.
Now watch what happens when I touch one lever, and only one. Leave the traffic exactly where it is. A thousand visitors, same as before. But nudge your conversion from two percent to three percent. That's now thirty orders instead of twenty. Fifteen hundred dollars.
You did not find one new customer. You just stopped losing the ones you already had. That is the kind of thing you can only see when the business is an equation instead of a to-do list. And there's a fifth number, the one that decides whether any of this was worth doing. Your costs. Revenue minus costs is profit, and profit is the only number that has ever actually paid anybody.
Now, here is why I am starting the entire series here, with something this simple. Because once you can see the equation, something happens to that terrifying list. Every single thing on it, every tactic, every tool, every shiny object, is just an attempt to move one of those four levers. That is all any of them are. That new sales channel someone pitched you. That's a bet on traffic.
The site redesign you keep almost starting. That's conversion. The bundle, the upsell, the free shipping bar in the cart. That's average order value. The loyalty program, the email flow, the little thank-you card in the box. That's frequency.
Almost anything you get pitched as growth is one of these four numbers wearing a costume. And the moment you see that, you get to ask a very different question about everything that lands on your list. Not, what should I do next. But, which of these four numbers does this actually move, and is this the cheapest way to move it. And here is the part I most want you to hold onto. Sometimes the honest answer is that it moves none of them.
That is not a reason to panic. It's useful information. Because now you know that thing is a nice to have, or a small boost to how it feels to buy from you, and you can treat it like exactly that. I am not telling you to never do those things. A cleaner logo, a nicer thank-you page, a smoother unboxing, those can all be worth doing. I'm telling you to stop treating them like the main event, when they belong in the background.
The levers are how you tune out the noise, so that most of your time, and your money, and your attention goes to the handful of decisions that actually move the business. That one question, which lever does this move, is the entire difference between an owner and an operator, and it's where we're headed next episode. Okay, so let me sit with why this reframe matters so much, because it's easy to hear it as a tidy little diagram and miss the actual point. The reason most store owners feel overwhelmed is not that they're doing too little. It's that they are treating a hundred tactics as a hundred separate problems, when they are really four problems in a thousand disguises. When you can't see the equation, every new idea feels equally urgent, because you have no way to compare them.
A new social strategy, and a checkout fix, and a new supplier all just feel like things a good owner should probably be doing. So you do a little of all of them, badly, forever. That is the trap. But when you can see the equation, they stop being equal. Now you can look at an idea and say, that moves conversion, and my conversion is already fine, so that is not my problem right now. Or, that moves frequency, and I have never once gotten a customer to buy twice, so that might be the single most valuable thing I could touch.
You are not working harder. You are just aiming. And there is one more thing the equation does, quietly, that I don't want you to miss. It puts profit back in the center. Because notice that revenue is only four of the five numbers. The whole industry is built to make you obsess over those four.
Over growth, over the top line, over the number you would say out loud at a dinner party. Almost nobody talks about the fifth number, your costs, which is strange, because the fifth number is the one that decides whether you actually get to keep any of it. It's the number we spend most of our time on at e-comm profitably. And it's most of what makes this show different from every growth podcast you have ever heard. So here is what the rest of the series looks like, so you know where we are going. First, we are going to take those four levers, one at a time.
Traffic, then conversion, then average order value, then frequency. For each one, I'm going to show you the shiny object version, the thing everyone tells you to do, and then the real math underneath it. Then we are going to go somewhere most owners never willingly go, which is into the money. Your real margins. The costs hiding in places you are not looking. Why the number your Amazon dashboard shows you is, I'm sorry to say, mostly fiction.
And how to read your own profit and loss statement without your stomach dropping. And by the end, you are going to be able to look at your own store, this store you have been running a little blind, and know exactly which number to touch, and why. That is the promise. Not more tactics. Fewer, better decisions, made on purpose, from numbers you can finally trust. For now, I just want you to hold onto the shape of it.
Five numbers. Four that make your revenue, one that decides what you keep. Everything you have been anxious about is just one of them, in a costume. If that is a relief, and it should be, then follow the show, because we are going to build this all the way up, one number at a time. I'm Melia Moore. This was E-comm by the Numbers.
Your business was never a hundred problems. It was five numbers, waiting for you to look. I'll see you next time.