The LGS metrics that actually matter (and the ones that don't)

Every admin dashboard shows roughly the same metrics. Revenue, orders, average order value, conversion rate, top sellers, most wished items, visitors. After looking at hundreds of LGS dashboards, the pattern is clear — about half of those metrics correlate with profitability, and the other half are vanity numbers that feel productive to check but don't change any decision.

Here's how to tell which is which, and which ones actually deserve space on your dashboard.

Metrics that matter

1. Conversion rate. Not revenue — conversion rate. Revenue confounds traffic volume with shop quality. Conversion rate isolates the part you can actually improve. LGS industry average is ~4%; shops running a full-feature platform (deckbuilder, wishlists, saved carts) consistently run 20-40%. If your conversion rate is 4%, the highest-leverage improvement is site experience, not marketing spend. If it's 30%, marketing spend is your highest leverage.

2. Average order value (AOV). AOV × conversion × traffic = revenue. AOV moves on deckbuilder usage (customers buying whole decks spend 10x single-card customers), sealed attach rate (people buying singles also grabbing sleeves), and bundle recommendations. AOV is one of the three multiplicative levers — doubling it doubles revenue with no traffic change.

3. Buylist-to-retail ratio. For every £100 of retail sales, how much did you spend on buylist trade-ins? Healthy shops run 15-25%. Below 10% means you're not buying enough inventory — you'll run out. Above 35% means you're overpaying for cards customers don't want — you'll build dead stock. This metric alone catches most inventory-strategy mistakes before they become capital traps.

4. Stock-turn rate per segment. How many times per year does your singles inventory turn over? Sealed? Sleeves? Bulk commons? Each segment has a different healthy range. Singles should turn 4-8x/year for most shops. Sealed product 6-12x. Bulk commons can turn once a year and still be profitable if carrying costs are tiny. Anything below half its segment benchmark is dead stock in waiting.

5. Event contribution to retail. When someone attends FNM, what's the average amount they spend on singles and sealed in the 30 days following? This number tells you whether events are a loss leader paying for themselves via retail, or just a loss leader. Shops we see healthy LGS operations running get 2-4x the event entry fee in downstream retail from attendees.

6. Customer repeat rate. What percentage of customers who ordered in the last quarter also ordered in the quarter before? Card shops live and die on repeat business. Below 30% means you're acquiring customers who don't come back — fix retention before spending more on acquisition.

7. Store credit issuance vs redemption. How much credit did you issue this month (buylist payouts + event prizes + refunds)? How much did customers spend? Issuance up, redemption flat = capital trap, customers aren't coming back to spend. Redemption tracking issuance = healthy.

Metrics that don't matter (for decisions)

1. Total revenue (standalone). Revenue without a comparison basis is a vanity metric. £15k this month means nothing without £15k last month or £15k this month last year. Dashboard should show the comparison, not the raw number.

2. Top 10 sellers. This is fun to look at. It is not actionable. You already know your hot cards. Knowing the exact order of hotness doesn't change what you should stock — supply constraints already dictate the ordering.

3. Visitor count. Traffic without conversion rate is misleading. 10,000 visitors converting at 1% is less valuable than 2,000 visitors converting at 10%. If you track visitor count, track it as the denominator of conversion rate, not as a standalone number.

4. Most wished items. Useful for marketing trigger ('send email when X is back in stock'), not for operational decisions. Don't mistake 'most wished' for 'most profitable to stock' — customer wishlists over-index on high-demand chase cards you can't actually source reliably.

5. Pageviews. This is website-analytics thinking applied to a shop. LGS customers don't bounce around 12 pages before buying — they come in, do a deckbuilder search, check out. Pageviews are mostly a signal of bad site navigation, not engagement.

6. Social media followers. Zero predictive value for revenue. Don't optimise for it.

The one metric most shops don't track but should

Gross margin per channel. Break your revenue down by channel (own storefront, TCGplayer, Cardmarket, eBay, in-store POS, events). For each channel, subtract the cost of goods, the marketplace fees, the staff hours, and the payment processing. What's left is real channel profitability.

Nine times out of ten, shops are shocked to discover that their marketplace channels — which feel like 'extra revenue' — are actually near-zero-margin once fees and staff time are counted. Meanwhile their in-store POS channel quietly prints money. This doesn't mean stop using marketplaces; it means know which channel deserves more investment and which is a customer-acquisition channel that funnels to higher-margin touchpoints.

The only way to track this is to have unified order data with channel tagging across every surface — which is a straight argument for consolidated platforms over stacked-subscription toolkits. Stacked toolkits hide this metric.

A practical dashboard layout

If we were designing your dashboard from scratch for a single LGS owner who has 15 minutes a day to review numbers, it would have five widgets, not ten:

Widget 1: Conversion rate (online + POS) this week vs last week, annotated with any big changes (new theme, new feature, new marketing push).

Widget 2: AOV this week vs last, broken out by channel.

Widget 3: Buylist-to-retail ratio, month-to-date. Red if below 15% or above 35%.

Widget 4: Stock-turn per major segment (singles, sealed, bulk, accessories). Red if below half-benchmark.

Widget 5: Gross margin per channel, current month. This is the widget that changes business strategy.

Everything else goes on a weekly review page, not the daily dashboard. Daily noise is a tax on decision-making.