Wouldn’t it be great if you could just add a new product to your store front and get measurable feedback in a matter of days? You always need to get feedback on how your product details are helping you sell the product. How can you know that you’ve set the price right? What about the images? Headline? Page title? How does the product page perform in the search engines?

All these questions are very hard to answer by digging up data from your visitor and sales statistics. Using Google Website Optimizer can give you a good idea – but it’s not the easiest thing to install if you haven’t got the technical skills it requires.

I’ve been thinking about a metric that gives you an idea about overall performance of your E-commerce store. This metric (Site Experience Index) is part of what I call The E-commerce Framework, that will be part of an upcoming Milkshake Commerce release. Let me explain what The E-commerce Framework can do.

Ordinary web analytics data does a terrible job at giving you an overview of how visitors use your site. You get loads of details, but at the end of the day it’s about trends and overall performance. If you could get a site level metric that tells you how much value your visitors brought to you today, divided into areas such as category pages, product pages, shopping cart, about pages, FAQs, contact forms, checkout process – you’d easily get an overview of site performance.

So for each area of your site, you get a score. That score will change from time to time. If you just deployed a complete redesign of your site, you could see if your score decreased, or increased. The score is a relative score, meaning that it is abstracted from site traffic which will make you able to compare your own site to other sites – every day of the week with each one another, and you can compare the score after deploying a new design, adding new functionality and such.

This is more than a conversion rate metric. It’s a metric that tells you the overall experience of your site, with the ability to drill down into certain areas of your site.