Retail and ecommerce: the six questions for every morning
A short six-question routine that fits between opening the shop and the first customer. What each one reveals, the most common misreading of each, and what to do with the answer.
Retail is a business of daily repetition, so it benefits more from a short routine than from a big report. The six questions below take under five minutes with a connected assistant and cover almost everything that changes a decision today.
The six
- 01How much did we sell yesterday, against the seven-day average and against the same weekday last week. Day of week matters more than the absolute value in retail.
- 02Which product pulled and which stalled. Not the overall ranking, which barely moves: the variation against each product’s own average.
- 03Where yesterday’s sales came from. Ads, search, referral, repeat — and what each cost.
- 04How many customers were new and how many had bought before. Sales counts grow for two very different reasons.
- 05Who abandoned the cart or left the checkout and has not returned. That group has a short shelf life.
- 06What fell outside the expected range. Any number that drifted, without you having to name it.
Question 6 pays the most. It is the only one that finds the problem you were not looking for.
The most common misreadings
| What you see | Hasty reading | What it usually is |
|---|---|---|
| Sales up 20% | The new campaign worked | Repeat purchases or renewals landed in the same bucket |
| Cost per sale dropped | Media got better | More sales to existing customers, which cost less |
| A channel vanished from the report | The channel stopped selling | The source stopped ingesting and nobody was told |
| Average order value fell | Customers are spending less | A cheap-item promotion changed the mix, not behaviour |
The third row deserves special attention: a stalled source is the one error that shows up not as a bad number but as a missing one. Asking "did every source bring data yesterday?" once a day prevents analysing a whole month on top of a hole.
From answer to action
Three of the six naturally end in same-day action: cart abandoners become a remarketing audience, a stalled product becomes a shelf or budget adjustment, and an expensive channel becomes a cut. The other three are context — just as necessary, only not urgent.
The gain of having this in a connected assistant is not the answer itself, it is the sequence: from question to created audience without changing tools and without asking someone else.