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, and visitors. Some support concrete decisions; others are easy to watch without changing what the shop does next.

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

Metrics that matter

1. Conversion rate. Revenue combines traffic volume with shop performance; conversion rate helps separate the two. Compare each store against its own channel, device, and period baselines before deciding whether the next improvement belongs in site experience or traffic acquisition.

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? Track the ratio against sell-through and gross margin so the shop can tell useful inventory acquisition from cash tied up in slow stock.

4. Stock-turn rate per segment. How many times per year does your singles inventory turn over? Sealed? Sleeves? Bulk commons? Each segment has different economics, so compare like with like and investigate categories that fall materially below their own historical range.

5. Event contribution to retail. When someone attends FNM, what do they spend on singles and sealed afterward? This tells you whether events create downstream retail demand rather than relying on entry fees alone.

6. Customer repeat rate. What percentage of customers who ordered in the last quarter also ordered in the quarter before? Compare cohorts over time before increasing acquisition spend.

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, compared with the store's target range.

Widget 4: Stock-turn per major segment (singles, sealed, bulk, accessories), compared with each segment's prior periods.

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.