Business goals for an ecommerce apparel brand

Most lists of ecommerce business goals are lists of good intentions: grow the brand, delight the customer, increase sales. None of those can fail, which is exactly what is wrong with them. A goal steers a business only if there is a month at the end of which you can say it was missed.

That takes three parts: a number, a date, and a person who owns it. Everything below is about choosing the number, because that is where apparel differs from the rest of ecommerce.

Revenue is an output, so set goals on its inputs

Revenue is traffic, times the share of visitors who buy, times what an order is worth. Written out: 10,000 visits at a 2% conversion rate and a 45 pound average order is 9,000 pounds. Every figure in that sentence is an input you can pick, which is the point of writing it out. Doubling revenue is not a goal anyone can act on. Raising one of its three inputs is.

The same arithmetic tells you which input to pick. From that baseline, moving conversion from 2% to 2.5% adds 2,250 pounds, and buying 25% more traffic at the same conversion adds the same 2,250. One of those costs ad spend every month it runs. The other is work done once that keeps paying. Which is right depends on where your store leaks, and that is a measurement question, not a preference.

What apparel changes

Three things make clothing different from selling toasters, and each one belongs in the goal set.

• Returns decide the margin. A sold item that comes back was not sold, it was lent, and it travelled twice at your expense. An apparel revenue goal that ignores the return rate can be hit while the business loses money, so revenue net of returns is the number worth setting, and the return rate deserves a goal of its own.
• Stock has a clock. A season that ends with full racks becomes discounting, and discounting eats the margin the revenue goal was supposed to protect. Sell-through by the end of season is a goal. Units shipped is not.
• The second purchase is the business. Acquiring an apparel customer usually costs more than their first order earns back. Whether they return, and how soon, decides whether the store compounds or just churns spend. Repeat rate over a defined window is the goal that captures it.

Goals that look like goals and are not

One goal per metric at a time

A goal is also a measurement plan, and measurements collide. Ship a checkout change and a price change in the same month and the conversion movement belongs to nobody: you paid for two changes and learned about neither. The discipline that makes goals worth setting is the same one that makes results attributable, and the order of changes matters more than the list of them. That argument is its own article: what an ecommerce roadmap actually decides.

A quarter of goals, worked

What this looks like written down for an imaginary apparel store, with the shape of each goal doing the work.

1. Lift conversion on the product page template from its measured baseline by a named amount, by the end of the quarter, owned by whoever controls the template. One change at a time, so the winner is known.
2. Bring the return rate for the two worst categories down toward the store average, starting from the size guidance on those pages, because size doubt is the return you can actually prevent.
3. Raise the share of orders from returning customers, measured over ninety days, with the post-purchase email as the single lever being tested.
4. End the season above a named sell-through, checked monthly, so the discounting decision is made in week six rather than discovered in week twelve.

Notice what is absent: no revenue target. Hit those four and revenue follows arithmetically. Miss revenue while hitting them and the problem is the plan, which is information a bare revenue goal never gives you.