Read your numbers once a week

Nobody gets to a hundred orders by guessing harder. They get there by changing one thing a week and checking whether a number moved. This lesson is the fifteen-minute habit of reading the numbers already in your dashboard.

What the dashboard already shows

The Home tab is the morning check: today's orders, how many need action, revenue for the last 30 days with its order count, and your all-time totals. Enough to run the store; not enough to grow it, because it says what sold and not who looked and left. See Tour your store dashboard.

The Analytics tab answers the second question. Over 7, 30 or 90 days it shows page views and visitors; orders, revenue and conversion joined to that traffic; a funnel of Visitors → Viewed a product → Purchased; busiest hours; cities; devices; the most viewed products; and the websites that sent people to you. Part of the Starter plan and up. Visits are counted from day one, so the history is there when you upgrade.

The Monday four

Open Home and, if you have it, Analytics on the 7-day view. Write down four things:

1. 1Orders this week, against last week. The direction matters more than the number. Three weeks down in a row is a signal; one quiet week is weather.
2. 2Which product sold. In Orders, which product appears most; in Analytics, Top products — which is most viewed. A product viewed a lot and never bought has a price, photo or description problem, not a traffic problem. That is your change for the week.
3. 3Where visitors came from. Traffic sources lists the websites that sent people. WhatsApp and Instagram usually strip that information, so a thin list does not mean nobody tapped your link.
4. 4Looked versus bought. A wide gap between Visitors and Viewed a product means the home page is not sending people into the catalogue. A wide gap between Viewed a product and Purchased means the product page is losing them: the price, the delivery charge, a missing review, a trust badge.

Two limits: visitors are counted per day, so a person who browses Monday and buys Friday counts twice; and a WhatsApp order counts even if nobody visited, so conversion is a trend to watch, not a true rate.

One change a week

Pick the weakest of the four and change one thing: a photo, a price, a badge, the free-shipping threshold. One. Leave it a week and look again. Change four things at once and you have learned nothing you can repeat.

Update the pricing sheet

The sheet from Price it right had guessed courier costs. You now have real bills: what the courier charged per parcel, how many COD parcels came back, what the gateway kept. Put the real numbers in and rerun the profit margin calculator. If COD returns are eating the margin, the COD vs prepaid calculator shows whether an extra COD charge or prepaid-only fixes it. A price set on guesses in month one is the most common reason a store with a hundred orders still has no money.

Next

That is the course. A hundred orders is where a store stops being a project and starts being a business, and the habits stay the same: the link everywhere, one offer that clears the floor, honest reviews, a list you write to, and the Monday four. Open your online store covers the parts this course assumed; Start your online business in India is the thinking underneath. When the list outgrows your hands, the AI Co-founder plan on the pricing page is the next step.