Here is a problem we see again and again with retailers in Northern Ireland who sell both in a shop and online. They use one system, often WooCommerce, to run the website and the till. The monthly sales figure looks healthy. But ask "how much of that came from the website?" and nobody knows.
That matters, because you cannot improve what you cannot see. A website taking ten orders a month and one taking a hundred can look identical in a combined report.
Why the numbers get mixed up
A modern point of sale system records every till sale as an order in the same place as your online orders. So do marketplace connections such as eBay, and so do orders you key in by hand over the phone. The headline "orders this month" figure counts all of them.
How to separate them
Every order carries two pieces of information that tell you where it really came from:
- How it was created. Orders record whether they came through the website checkout, the till, a marketplace connection or were entered manually.
- How it was paid. Till orders are paid by cash or card at the counter. Website orders are paid through an online card processor or PayPal.
Put those two together and every order falls cleanly into one of four groups: website, in-shop, marketplace or manual. Most reporting tools can filter by payment method even if they cannot filter by where the order was created, and that alone gets you most of the way.
What it looked like for one retailer
We did exactly this for a Northern Ireland retailer whose combined sales had always looked fine. Split out, the picture was very different: the website was taking around 25 orders a month. It was a small side channel that nobody had been measuring.
With that baseline in place, the work could be measured properly. Nearly two years on, the website takes more than 100 orders a month outside the Christmas peak, nearly five times what it did, and website revenue has almost doubled. The shop's till sales grew over the same period too, so this was not simply moving customers from one channel to the other.
One honest detail: the average value of a website order fell as order numbers rose. That is normal and healthy. It means the site started converting everyday shoppers, not just the occasional customer hunting for one expensive item.
What to do with the answer
Once you know your true website numbers, three figures tell you where to focus: how many people visit, what percentage of them buy, and how much they spend. Low visitors is a search visibility problem. Plenty of visitors but few orders is a website problem. We cover both in our e-commerce service, and it starts with an audit of your store.