eCommerce Vital Signs are the minimal set of weekly metrics needed to forecast an eCommerce or direct-to-consumer business: ad spend, web traffic, conversion rate, average order value, repeat purchase rate, product margin, and gross margin.
The term applies John Zdanowski's 📝Vital Signs, also called Level 1 Metrics, to online retail. Like a doctor taking blood pressure and temperature, the Vital Signs are the few readings that predict the health of the whole business, and they deliberately exclude the many metrics used to run it day to day, which belong lower on the 📝Instrumentation Pyramid. The eCommerce set was studied across direct-to-consumer brands at 📝Assembled Brands.
Together, these metrics describe the full revenue engine: ad spend and traffic measure how many prospective customers arrive, conversion rate and average order value turn visits into revenue, repeat purchase rate shows whether customers come back, and product and gross margin show what each order earns. From them a business can calculate its 📝LTV:CAC ratio and judge its 📝Unit Economics.
Shopify and 📝QuickBooks are the minimum 📝Revenue Generation System applications needed to measure eCommerce Vital Signs and feed them into an 📝Integrated Financial Model (IFM). Detailed breakdowns, such as traffic by source, margin by product, and customer lifetime value by cohort, are Level 2 metrics rather than Vital Signs. A weekly review of the set is described in 📝MMM for Shopify Businesses.