Request for Comments: A picture is worth 1,000 words redux
November 13th, 2007 • Posted by Larry Donahue • Permalink
Thank you to all those who had contributed comments — online or offline — regarding my previous blog post entitled A picture is worth 1,000 words. In that post, I asked for feedback on what sort of statistics would be useful to you and your business.
David has taken this feedback, and we have a prototype that's pictured at right. What do you think? (You can click on the image to see a closeup!)
In the Information Technology world, we call this a "dashboard." And the dashboard is comprised of many "widgets," a widget basically being a graphic chart that you can configure individually. The dashboard is meant to give you a quick, bird's eye view of the performance of your business and in particular, your Instant Gift Certificate sales.
Our intent is to deliver a default dashboard, you can modify as you think most appropriate, either by changing what each widget displays or by changing what widgets show up and where. For example, the line-graph in the upper-left of the prototype dashboard (above) is meant to represent monthly sales volume for the past 12 months, with last-year's sales data superimposed so you can see how you're doing this year versus last year. You may decide you only want to see the past 6 months, or you may not be interested in this year's sales in comparison to last year's sales.
Our intent is to also give you some baseline information that helps you assess how you're doing, relative to your peers. We're hoping this can provide some feedback to you and your business, so you know where you stand. We're learning here, so your comments and feedback are going to be very helpful. Take a look at the graph below (it's a blow-up of the upper-right widget in the dashboard above):
"Others Like You" means organizations that are in your state, of the same org type (i.e. other "salons" if you've told us you're a salon), and are within 5 employees (plus or minus) of you. Is that fair? Would this be valuable to you, to see how your sales and average GC price compares to others like you?
If you have a dynamic website with us, we also know where your traffic comes from. In answering a question from our previous post, we can create a pie-chart widget on traffic locations. Take a look:
What other widgets do you think would be helpful or interesting to your business? Are we on the right track?
Posted in SpaBoom New Features, Spa Business Management, General • Share • Trackback
November 14th, 2007 at 10:28 am
How about a widget which tells you how many redeemed vs. unredeemed certificates plus the dollar values associated with them?
November 15th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Thanks for the suggestion Christine. What do you think of the following graph?
Note that the above graph represents monthly sales and redemptions. It's important to understand what it's not telling us: (1) The breakage (i.e. amount of unredeemed cash); (2) the total accumulated redeemed/unredeemed amounts; nor (3) is it telling us that for a given month, how much of the sales for that month were redeemed. In other words, this graph doesn't tell us what our redemption rate is.
Is that okay, or do you want or need that information too?
Note that we have a limitation with respect to redemption numbers: We can only report on them, if you're telling SpaBoom about your redemptions. If you're relying on a POS system to manage your GC's, and not re-entering that information into SpaBoom, we don't have any data to report on redemptions.