Retailing is essentially all about making the goods available to the consumer on a direct basis
Several big names have tried their luck in this field and extracted huge volumes, both in terms of reputation and financial drawings.
However, the act asks for being extremely cautious about treading on "performance evaluation" route. This situation can be handled in a pretty thoughtful manner by having "BSC" (Balanced Scorecard) on their side. This tool is a suitable way for getting all the useful metrics at one place and using those for future references.
To start with, one can make use of metrics like "conversion rate", "conversion cost borne", "mean size of order" and "campaign specific conversion rate" to have "conversion perspective". For having financial perspective, one can make use of metrics like "rise in sales on yearly basis", "revenue gathered on per visit basis", "off-line sales boost" and "sales on per hour basis".
Further, indicators such as "response time", "new: returning visitors", "buyers: searchers ratio" and "stickiness index" are useful for assessing the online platform. Eventually, parameters like "recency degree", "inventory turnover", "mean time spent on website" and "rise in customer base" can be used for performance assessment.
By having such or a similar "following instrument", it will be possible for the users to keep an account of how things have been working at the place. Some of the significant issues like "logistics" can be easily aligned in a meaningful manner for making sure that translocation of stuff occurs appropriately. Moving on, another hurdle that stands in the way of handling online retail business is "competition". Though this aspect enters almost every field, the pace at which online retailing has been growing adds to the size of this problem. Thus, creating and maintaining a niche for oneself becomes a tough struggle that needs to be given its share of attention.
Further, some of the other difficulties that need to be weighed are "less immediate customer visibility", "need to harbor websites", "the much needed fast adaptation according to surroundings", "gaining customer trust", "loss of focus" etc. These domains should be considered thoughtfully and wisely if a successful online retail has to be managed.
In some places, where the online mode of shopping has not picked up, one might face issues in arousing interest in people to switch to this route instead of continuing with the usual path. Also, in cases where the nature of products is such that the quality has "time" as one of the major factors, the user is required to adopt a cautious attitude towards management.
Such an analysis shows that if one really wishes to make online retail a success, efforts need to be done on consistent basis for achieving the results. Thus, taking care of all the areas and making sure that those are pulled together gets essential and difficult, both at the same time. BSC comes across as a useful strategy for doing justice to all these factors.