Let's learn 'e-commerce'
E-commerce now accounts for most transactions. Let's look at how platforms and online stores are structured and operated.
Learning e-commerce serves two main purposes.
1) Build a frame, an eye for e-commerce.
By understanding the components of commerce and what each is for, you can analyze a site from a more professional point of view.
This happens in the process of learning the basic principles and terminology of commerce.
2) Learn the general patterns in commerce data.
Identify the many kinds of data collected and used while running an e-commerce business, and learn what level of data is close to the industry standard today.
Learn enough data to take the lead in a conversation with someone who has only ever belonged to one brand.
The basic units of e-commerce data
It can vary by analysis method, but e-commerce data is fundamentally collected and managed in the following units.
- Action (Hit): a specific behavior such as a scroll, click or view
- Visit (Session): a metric for the occurrence of a specific visit
- Visitor (Browser): a metric for the actual individual user who visited and took actions
For convenience of analysis and operations, e-commerce marketers primarily track and manage things around Visit to action.
Basic e-commerce site terminology (with GPT)
Let's go over the terms for the basic page types and UI elements that make up a site.
🏠 1. Top-level structure: the skeleton of the whole site
1.1 Homepage (Home / Landing Page)
- Provides the first impression
- Access to key promotions, recommended products, categories
- Acts as the hub for navigating the whole site
1.2 Main navigation (Header Navigation / GNB)
- Category menu (Product Categories)
- Brand menu
- Links to events/special exhibitions
- Login/sign-up
- Cart/My Page
🛍️ 2. Product discovery and information pages
2.1 Category page (Category Listing Page)
- List of products in a specific category
- Filtering (price, brand, color, etc.)
- Sort options (popularity, newest, etc.)
2.2 Search results page (Search Results Page)
- Keyword-based results
- Includes similar filter/sort functions
2.3 Product detail page (Product Detail Page, PDP)
- Product images and description
- Price, stock, option selection
- Includes reviews, ratings, recommended products, etc.
- Includes purchase button and social sharing
🧾 3. Purchase-related pages
3.1 Cart page (Cart Page)
- List of added items
- Edit quantities, remove items
- Check estimated payment amount
3.2 Order/payment page (Checkout Page)
- Enter shipping address
- Select payment method
- Apply coupons/points
3.3 Order complete/confirmation page (Order Confirmation Page)
- Order summary
- Order number issued
- Customer service information
Let's talk like 'e-commerce' people
Put the two parts above together and you can talk like the people who build and run e-commerce.
Take order conversion rate, for example. To express it precisely, you have to make good use of the session and action concepts.
"About 5 out of every 100 people who come in buy something, so the order conversion rate is 5%" (X)
"Sessions that viewed the 'order complete page' make up 5% of all sessions" (O)
Applying these concepts to decision-making strips away the vagueness and produces clearer TODOs.
Case A: How should we use our best reviews?
- Marketer: If we carefully pick the best reviews each week and feature them on the home landing page, wouldn't that build goodwill and lead to order conversions?
- Commerce consultant: Only 0.1% of all sessions land on the home page, scroll three or more times, and view the best reviews section. With the current order conversion rate at around 2.5%, it doesn't look like a great return on effort.
- Marketer: Then I'll make Reels ad creative instead, use it to drive CDP traffic, and check whether that leads to cart conversions or order conversions.
Case B: Discovery shopping vs. exploratory shopping
- Store manager: I'm not sure it's really efficient to keep maintaining our PC view. Can't we just unify everything on the mobile view?
- Commerce consultant: Right now, PC view makes up 30% of all sessions for this brand, which is far higher than usual, and it also outperforms mobile view on conversion rate. This looks like a brand preferred by users with an exploratory shopping style, so it would be better to build the site to suit them.
Current baseline data trends in e-commerce
- Increasing time on site used to be a good strategy, but these days it's the opposite. Reducing it often raises conversion rates instead.
- The more actions required before conversion, the lower the conversion rate.
- Even when you acquire traffic the same way, conversion rate drops as scale increases. The exact reason is unclear, but my guess is...
- Ads: Increasing the budget brings more traffic, but the number of customers ready to buy right away doesn't grow in proportion
- SEO: High-volume keywords (short-tail) often have low conversion rates, while keywords with low volume but clear purchase intent (long-tail) have the advantage on conversion.
