Most leadership teams can tell you yesterday’s revenue, possibly last month’s conversion rate, and whether the business is up or down year on year.
What they often can’t tell you is why.
That’s not a criticism. It’s simply how e-commerce performance is usually reviewed. Sales numbers feel reassuring. They’re easy to report, easy to compare, and easy to discuss at board level. When they’re moving in the right direction, they create a sense of control.
In many businesses, that reassurance is deserved. The business is profitable. Online is working. Growth feels stable.
And yet, in my experience, this is often the point where confidence quietly starts to outpace understanding.
The comfort of outcomes
Revenue, average order value and conversion rate are outcomes. They tell us what happened.
They’re also neat. They fit neatly into monthly reports and quarterly updates. They give leadership teams something concrete to rally around. But outcomes are usually the end of the story, not the beginning.
Customers can struggle, hesitate, workaround problems or drop out of journeys long before that friction shows up in topline numbers. Strong products, loyal repeat customers or paid acquisition can mask experience issues for a long time. On paper, everything looks fine. Underneath, things are often less clear.
Where confidence becomes assumption
I regularly see ecommerce businesses where leadership has a strong grip on performance metrics, but far less visibility of how customers actually experience the site.
Customer understanding is often reduced to:
- gender
- age
- channel
Everything else is inferred.
Performance reviews become routine. Numbers are shared. Variance is explained. Targets are set. The meeting ends with alignment, but not necessarily insight.
At that point, confidence isn’t coming from understanding behaviour. It’s coming from the absence of obvious problems.
That’s a subtle but important distinction.
Sales numbers don’t explain behaviour
Analytics platforms are often treated as sales reporting tools. They’re used to confirm what we already believe rather than to explore what customers are actually doing.
Used that way, data answers narrow questions. Used differently, it becomes something else entirely.
Behavioural insight shows:
- where customers hesitate
- how much effort journeys require
- which questions go unanswered
- how behaviour changes over time, not just month to month
This is also where leaders sometimes become cautious and often through in, but I don’t trust the data. It’s true, no attribution model is perfect. Privacy changes over the years have added complexity. Platforms rarly match up.
That uncertainty is real – I know I feel its every single day! But dismissing behavioural insight because it isn’t precise often means ignoring reality and the direction of travel – and that’s usually where the value sits.
Trends tell stories. Financial snapshots rarely do.
What changes when behaviour enters the conversation
I’ve been in plenty of conversations just in the last 12 months where the tone shifts, not because revenue is discussed, but because behaviour is.
Seeing repeated hesitation before checkout.
Noticing search patterns that suggest confusion.
Watching customers bounce between pages trying to answer basic questions.
In conversations with business leaders, these are moments without drama. They’re often quiet. But they change the conversation from “how do we sell more?” to “what’s making this harder than it should be?”
Which is awesome – that’s a much more constructive place to start.
What’s a better question for those in leadership?
Instead of asking:
“Why is conversion down?”
A more useful leadership question is often:
“Where are customers having to work harder than they should?”
That shift sounds small, but it changes everything. It changes what teams look for, how insight is gathered, and where effort is applied. Reporting becomes learning. Learning becomes action.
Sales numbers will always matter. They should – but they’re a destination, not a map.
And if most of your business now happens online, understanding the journey matters just as much as measuring the outcome.