Want the secondhand scoop?
How to use analytics to grow your resale shop
Only when you know where you stand can you see where you are going. Inside our membership, we show you how to use analytics and data to position your vintage shop for growth, and provide you with a template to track.
“If it matters, measure it.”
“What gets measured can be managed.”
These two quotes are frequently used by economists and manufacturers, but they apply to every business, including your vintage or pre-loved shop.
If you just want to sell vintage and have no desire to improve or scale your sales or social media presence, you probably don’t need to measure analytics.
But if you do want to grow your shop, this article is for you.
Analytics and insights are fantastic tools to guide your decision-making and your growth — they shine a light on the state of your business.
Why tracking is important
Almost every web-based platform or app you use (Instagram, Etsy, Shopify, eBay, TikTok, Facebook, etc.) these days will provide you with analytics (also called insights), usually in the form of a dashboard or reports.
In fact, there’s so much information available now that it can be overwhelming to figure out what is most relevant to your shop.
So let’s take a look at a few of the goals from our member survey in 2022:
- Increase audience/customer reach
- Get more followers
- Get more people visiting my shop website
- Grow an email list
- Increase sales
In order to achieve any of the above goals, you’ll need to know where you started. In the social media survey we ran around the same time, 65% of respondents said they either don’t track social media insights at all, or they check sometimes/occasionally.
Social media insights are what tell you which posts of yours are working, and which ones aren’t. Website insights tell you which blog posts or products in your e-commerce shop are of interest to shoppers and which ones aren’t.
Knowing which posts and products perform better than others helps you manage your time. Maybe you’re still going to list something that you know will take a long time to move based on the insights data you have — but you’ll know not to spend as much time on that listing as say, a product that shoppers have previously expressed interest in.
Meeting shop goals with analytics
Measuring consistently can feel tedious, but it works to help meet business goals. Consider this goal: “I want to increase my sales 20% this year.”
That’s only half a goal. How are you going to increase your sales? Let’s say it’s by posting more Reels, because you are an Instagram-based business and you make your sales on social media.
“I want to increase my sales 20% this year, and I’m going to do it by posting more Reels on Instagram.”
But you might spend 52 weeks posting more Reels and not increase your sales at all, or only marginally. Why? Because you might be posting things that aren’t attracting the right audience.
How do you know if you’re attracting the right audience?
By tracking who they are, what they like, and their buying and engagement behaviours.
No really, why should I track?
1. To see what is and isn’t working. If you intend to grow your sales, your social media presence or your operational capacity, you need to measure your efforts and results consistently over time — only when you know where you’ve come from can you see where you’re at.
2. To determine where your customers are coming from. Notice that you have a 60% open rate on your emails and a 40% click-through rate to your shop URL? Send more emails. Give shop discounts for signing up to your email list.
3. To focus your efforts. This may be which listing platforms to focus on, which listings to spend more time refining, which social media content to create, etc. Running a small business requires you to divide your focus constantly. Tracking over time helps you to double down on what works, and to eliminate what doesn’t, so you don’t waste time.
4. To monitor your growth. Tracking helps you to realize how far you’ve come in a year, at a glance. You can use that information in social media content (“this year we grew our followers by 50%!”, or in your sales and marketing (“98% of our customers have left us a 5-star review!”)
You can do this weekly, but monthly or even quarterly will likely suffice for your vintage shop! Do it as often as you need to make it a quick task.
Tracking takes time, but it ultimately saves time.
Continued below
Get 1:1 help with your shop
Book a consultation
Continued from above
What should I track?
The most important metrics are going to be different for everyone, even within the vintage world, depending on what your business goals are.
You probably already track your sales revenue. Here are some more metrics you may consider tracking:
- Social media engagement (clicks, interactions, comments, followers)
- Paid ads (engagement, impressions, cost-per-click)
- Listings (views/visits, clicks, conversions, product types/categories)
- Shop ratings and reviews
- Website traffic (page views, users, bounce rate [people who leave your site after viewing one page])
- Emails (open rate, open-to-click rate, unsubscribes)
- Conversion rate: Percentage of shop visitors who end up buying
- Cost of acquiring customers (CAC): How much money you spend on advertising, website, etc. to drive people to your shop versus how many purchased from you
- Cart abandonment: If you have a high volume of people leaving their carts during checkout, there may be a piece of your sales funnel that is not working or that is hard for the buyer to understand
- Sell-through rate: Your number of items sold divided by your available inventory x 100. If it’s high, you may want to get more inventory and if it’s low, you may need to brainstorm how to move more product
A note about social media metrics
A lot of emphasis is placed on the number of followers an account has on any given social media platform.
While it’s true that in theory, a larger pool of followers = a larger *potential* customer base, what actually matters is who those potential customers are, not how many there are.
You could have 1,000 followers but 60% of them have bought something from you before (600) and of those 600, 50% will buy again (300). 20% may buy from you (200) and 10% never will (100).
Now consider someone who has 10,000 followers. Sounds good, right? But they may not be the *right* followers. In this case, maybe only 5% have bought something (500), 40% of those 500 will buy again (200), 1.5% may buy at some point (150) and 90% never will (9,000).
Same goes for reach. You might have a piece of social media content that reaches lots of non-followers. That’s great! But look deeper at your social media insights for that week and compare it to the week prior.
Did you get new followers during that week your post went “viral”? Did anyone click on your link in bio that week? Did you make a sale you can attribute to someone seeing that content? Or did people just see the content and then not take action?
Should you spend time making that kind of content again, or should you focus on the things you know for sure will convert into sales? (Marketplace listings! Booking markets! Restocking your booth! Holding a customer appreciation or story sale for your closest customers! Etc.).
Thinking about creating a piece of content on one of your sales channels? Hop into your relevant analytics dashboard and look at your best-performing posts, blog posts, email campaigns etc.
If you had 100 views on a Reel about what you did on a particular day but 2,000 on your Reel about how to clean a pewter dish — you’ll know what kind of content your audience likes interacting with. Do more of that. Appeal to them and your engagement goes up. Hopefully your sales will follow!
The bottom line here: Tracking analytics helps you to do more of what works and to get rid of what doesn’t.
Not sure where to start?
1. Familiarize yourself with your insight dashboards. If you haven’t used them before, here are some how-tos for common ones:
Selling platforms
How to use Etsy stats
How to use Poshmark closet insights
Social media platforms
How to use the Instagram professional dashboard
How to use Page insights for Facebook Business Pages
Website platforms
Google Analytics for Beginners – I recommend taking this free course from Google if you are interested in monitoring Google analytics
Google Analytics for E-Commerce
How to use Shopify analytics
Don’t forget your email client, too!
2. Set up a simple tracking system that works for you. I’m sharing a tracking template with you (link here) as a starting point with some basic metric options. Hope it helps!
3. To avoid this being a task you dread, set up a recurring calendar reminder (or whatever your notification of choice is). Spend 15 minutes tracking insights every month, and plan for quarterly, semi-annual or annual reviews of your results.
4. Enlist help! If you’re running your shop on the side and trying to grow it into your full-time business, tracking will be important to you — but you may not have time to do it with all the other aspects of running your business. Maybe you have a family member or friend who can help you monitor your analytics.
It can be hard to delegate tasks running a solo shop, but this is actually a pretty easy task for someone other than you: give them access to your accounts, and they can check the dashboards and input the information onto your tracking system of choice. Then you just need to review it.
Good luck and if you have questions about tracking, leave a comment!
Thank you for valuing our work!
Want the secondhand scoop?
Support our work to see this page.
You’ve got a good eye, but this gem is only available for members. Register for a plan or upgrade your current one to peek behind this vintage curtain, or log in below.