Learn Ecommerce Metrics with Phoebe · course 1 of the ecommerce & growth analytics series

Every ecommerce number, explained on one store

A leader track that teaches you to read a store's numbers without computing anything - what conversion rate actually means (and why two tools report two different ones for the same shop), where the funnel leaks money, how to run the weekly review, and which questions expose a shaky metric. And an analyst track that computes everything on one running store: Mango Lane, a mobile-first fashion app with 240,000 monthly visitors, 360,000 sessions, 9,720 orders, and $660,960 GMV - decomposed completely across eight sessions. The centerpiece is a live driver-tree simulator: edit any lever (PDP penetration, add-to-cart rate, checkout completion, AOV) and GMV recomputes instantly; simulate a drop and trace the coral trail back to the guilty gate. No install, no account, no bill.

14sessions
2tracks
3live driver trees
1store, fully decomposed

The leader track 🤝 · for commercial leaders, category heads & curious minds · 6 x 45 min · no code to write

Reading mode: the GMV equation and who owns each lever, the metric dictionary (which number answers which question), the funnel and where money leaks, the weekly business review as a ritual, honest benchmarks by industry, and the governance that stops two teams reporting two different "conversion rates" - each session ends with questions to ask your data team.

The analyst track 🛠️ · for practitioners · 8 x 45 min · live driver-tree simulator

Computing mode: meet Mango Lane and its event trail (b1), compute UV, CR, AOV, and GMV by hand (b2), wire them into three live driver trees (b3), measure the four funnel gates including PDP penetration (b4), diagnose a simulated drop end to end (b5), cut every metric by channel, device, and customer type (b6), assemble the weekly review pack (b7), and write the metric spec sheet that keeps the whole company honest (b8). Every simulator runs offline in your browser - edit a lever, watch GMV move.

🛍️ Analyst 1 · easy

Meet Mango Lane

The running store, the five-event trail (session_start to purchase), and the counting rules - visitor vs session vs pageview - that wrong numbers come from.

▶ Analysts start here
🧮 Analyst 2 · easy

The core four by hand

UV, session CR, AOV, GMV - computed from raw event counts with no tool in the way, plus the GMV-to-net-revenue ladder every finance team will ask about.

No tool, just math
🌳 Analyst 3 · easy

Build the GMV driver tree

Three live trees: the simple one, the funnel-deep one, and the channel sum - every leaf editable, with the pass-through rule that makes drops readable.

▶ Live simulator
🚪 Analyst 4 · medium

Funnel metrics

The four gates measured precisely: PDP penetration, add-to-cart rate, checkout start, checkout completion - against honest industry benchmarks.

PDP penetration & friends
📉 Analyst 5 · medium

Diagnose the drop

GMV is down and nobody knows why. Run the decomposition workflow on the live tree: find the lever, size the fall, write the one-paragraph finding.

▶ Live simulator
🔪 Analyst 6 · medium

Segment cuts

Channel, device, new vs returning, category: the cuts that turn "CR fell" into "mobile paid CR fell" - plus the mix effect that fools naive averages.

Which slice moved
📋 Analyst 7 · medium

The review pack

From numbers to narrative: assemble Mango Lane's weekly and monthly review pack - scorecard, funnel, channel table, and the story in one paragraph.

Numbers to narrative
📐 Analyst 8 · hands-on

The metric spec sheet

Definitions, owners, denominators, and alert thresholds for every metric in the course - the handoff document that makes your numbers survive without you.

The handoff
easy - everyone medium hands-on hardest

This is the on-ramp of the ecommerce & growth analytics series - no prerequisites at all. It pairs with learn-metric-decomposition-with-phoebe (the driver-tree craft across six industries), learn-sql-with-phoebe (computing these metrics from raw tables), and learn-marketing-attribution-with-phoebe (which channel deserves the credit).

Built from the GA4 ecommerce documentation (purchase journey, checkout journey, sessions and users), Shopify's analytics reports and funnel definitions, Baymard Institute's cart-abandonment research, and IRP Commerce / Dynamic Yield / Littledata industry benchmarks - definitions verified against the platforms' own docs, applied to one store end to end.

Choose your path 🗺️

Two doors, one store. Leaders never compute; analysts never sit through theory they have not just poked in the simulator.

🤝 The leader path (read & review) a1→ a2→ a3→ a4→ a5→ a6
🛠️ The analyst path (compute & diagnose) b1→ b2→ b3→ b4→ b5→ b6→ b7→ b8
🚀 The full journey (read AND compute) a1-a6→ b1-b8

The knowledge map 🧠

Both tracks at a glance - hover a session to spotlight its concepts, click any node to jump in.