Business Context

ShopWave is a mid-sized e-commerce app for home and lifestyle products. The CEO says "customer metrics look mixed" and wants a structured approach to analyzing customer data before the next monthly business review.

Metric Scenario

In April, ShopWave had 1.2M website visitors, 240k product detail viewers, 72k add-to-cart users, 36k purchasers, and $3.6M in revenue. In May, traffic increased to 1.35M visitors, but product detail viewers fell to 230k, add-to-cart users to 64k, purchasers to 30k, and revenue to $3.15M. At the same time, Day-30 repeat purchase rate declined from 22% to 18%, while average order value stayed roughly flat at $105. Marketing spend rose from $420k to $510k, and customer support tickets increased 28% after a mobile app checkout update.

The Head of Growth wants to know whether the problem is acquisition quality, on-site engagement, checkout conversion, or early retention. You are asked to define the right customer metrics, explain how you would analyze them, and identify the most likely drivers of the decline.

Requirements

1. Define the core customer metrics you would track for acquisition, engagement, conversion, and retention.
2. Decompose the May performance decline into the most important metric movements.
3. Identify 3-5 hypotheses for what changed and how you would validate each.
4. Recommend the first analyses and dashboards you would build for leadership.
5. Propose 3 concrete actions based on likely findings and name guardrail metrics.

Data Available

• web_sessions
• product_events
• cart_events
• orders
• customer_profiles
• marketing_spend_daily
• support_tickets
• app_release_log