Ecommerce growth creates the opportunity for your business to operate more efficiently. If you scale effectively, then your revenue will grow faster than your costs and your workload. But that only happens when your processes evolve as order volume and operational complexity increase.

Evaluating cost per order provides a very practical way to track that relationship. When you look at it alongside average order value and margins, you can see whether your business is actually becoming more efficient as it grows and where there’s scope for improvement.

Calculating your cost per order and breaking it down into its constituent parts is the first step in identifying where you can improve efficiency and what you should scale.

Your ecommerce business can grow without scaling, and that’s when you start to feel the pain. Growth means your ecommerce business is doing more. Scaling means it can do more without costs and workload rising at the same rate.

When you’re scaling ecommerce effectively, your store revenue will grow faster than your cost of doing business.

If you go from 100 orders a day to 500, that’s growth. If, in order to process those 500 orders, you now need 5 times as many people, then you’ve grown, but you haven’t scaled well.

The same applies throughout the business. Adding hundreds of SKUs is growth. Managing those SKUs with the same manual product updates is a scaling problem. Going into a new market is growth. Entering a new market means adding another disconnected system and another layer of admin each time, which makes that growth much more expensive.

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