Last June, Canada Post went on a lengthy strike/lockout, and many ecommerce sites around the world were affected, as were consumers. On my iddy-biddy Etsy site, I saw a significant drop in orders – 30% down from the previous month, and 40% less than the following month. Pop quiz – is this correlation or causation?
Sounds like causation, right? Well, I think it’s safe to say that a carrier strike most definitely prevents sales which negatively impacts revenue. No doubt about it. But is it correct to quantify the strike as having a 30-40% impact on sales?
Nope. There are many other variables that may have impacted my May, June and July sales – June is post-Mother’s Day and gifting attention turns to Dads n’ Grads, for which my product line is less of a fit. Etsy “front page” and email newsletter features that may have occurred during these months have a major impact on traffic and sales and are serendipitous, outside my control. There may have been a change in Etsy’s search algorithm that affected my shop items. I change my merchandising and added a new line of cell phone cases in June – an increase in items for sale should correspond with an increase of sales.
The point is, without considering these variables, I may wrongly conclude that the interruption of postal service was responsible for such a large percentage of sales. Replace “postal service” with “website redesign” or “10% off promotion” or “site outage” and you get the idea – we operate our ecommerce marketing and optimization programs in a vast ecosystem of variables and uncontrollable and unmeasurable events. It’s very, very, very difficult to create an experiment that controls for all the factors that may be influencing our performance metrics.
Source: Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog
