Using time-to-revenue in your store to make short-term decisions easier

Time-to-revenue.

In the early stages of your Shopify store or whenever you're deciding between multiple big decisions, it's useful to use this to influence your decisions.

Looking at only the revenue or sales potential misses how costly time is.

Doubling your sales sounds great.

But if it takes 10 years to do it... not so great.

Time-to-revenue means is focusing on actions that will get you revenue sooner.

e.g. $100 today is better than $101 next month.

It favors the short-term and sure bets, but you'll end up with faster decisions and usually faster results.

And since it's rare that reality is exactly what we planned, these sure bets can really help out.

You could get fancy and compute the NPV and IRR for each decision but those can rely on too many assumptions and get complicated fast.

(Expected Value is a bit better and faster but still has assumption flaws)

Time-to-revenue really shines when you don't have much data. Forecasting is educated guesswork and if you don't have much data to use, it becomes wild ass guess(work).

Consider time-to-revenue next time you have a decision.

You don't have to pick the option with the soonest payoff. You don't have to only consider the short-term.

Just let it factor into your decision-making.

And you could also compliment them with a high-risk, aim-for-the-fences decision for that rare perfect win (i.e. barbell strategy)

One sure-bet strategy is to get your one-time buyers to come back and make a second purchase.

Over and over I see that as the difference between good and great Shopify stores.

In Repeat Customer Insights that turning point is highlighted in the Customer Purchase Latency report along with recommendations on how to improve it.

The app comes with a 14-day free trial so you can see how well it'll work for you.

Eric Davis