How to conduct an effective post-mortem analysis for your ecommerce startup

What do today’s most successful ecommerce companies have in common? They routinely leverage the power of the post-mortem analysis to help them better understand their customers, reflect on performance, and set themselves up for continued growth and success. To make the most of your fast-growing digital marketplace, it’s important to examine how you sell — but where do you start?

Read on to learn more about why it's important to do a post-mortem analysis, how to conduct one effectively, and how the results can help your ecommerce startup sell better and go further.

A post-mortem reflects on the success of a specific season, launch, or project. It is usually conducted in both a meeting and a written analysis, combining data and insights from people involved.

Companies refer to a post-mortem analysis by different terms, but have the same goal in mind: figure out what worked, and iterate on what didn’t work. Other common terms include:

• Project debrief: A recap of the project that reviews the goals and outcomes
• Retrospective: Often used in software development, a retrospective surfaces any issues and anlyzes the root cause.
• Campaign review: Looks at how a specific marketing campaign or launch performed compared to expectations
• Lessons learned meeting: Conducted after a project is finished, this meeting focuses on what can be improved for future projects. 

Whatever term the company uses to describe the analysis, during a post-mortem, companies can celebrate wins, reflect on losses, and assess the success of their business performance to identify any areas for improvement. The key is being able to derive action items from the learnings that can be applied to project and marketing efforts year-round. As Henry Ford said, “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”

The end or start of the year is an especially good time to conduct a post-mortem, as it gives your team a chance to take stock of the annual performance as a whole, as well as review how things wrapped up at the end of the year during holiday sales.

There are plenty of reasons to conduct a post-mortem analysis — whether it’s for a one-off campaign or for a set period of time. Here are a few key payoffs of this strategic performance retrospective:

1. Learn from what went well

A post-mortem allows your team to see what worked successfully, and what led it to that point.  This is a great way to see what successes can be repeated in future and what experiments offer learnings that can inform the new modus operandi for continued success. For example, if you tested out a design-led announcement for email and saw significantly better results than the typical written-through email that you send, you can take that as valuable learning for future announcements and adjust resource allocations accordingly.

Reviewing “wins” not only fine-tunes your operations, but also provides a great sense of accomplishment to your team.

2. Learn from what went wrong

The reality is, mistakes happen — but they also provide invaluable opportunities to learn. Let’s say you invested significantly in a rebranding project with an external agency, but after all of that, your customers don’t seem to respond to the rebrand as well as they did the “old” look. Rather than viewing this as a failure, you can take this as a lesson to tap your audience and conduct more thorough customer research before embarking on a big design project in the future.

For example, you could:

• A/B test your new designs with a focus group
• Conduct audience surveys with a prize incentive
• Track brand sentiment through customer feedback

Zooming out during a post-mortem analysis to assess what went right and, more importantly, what went wrong, will arm your team with the knowledge to iterate on processes and future efforts to be more effective.

3. Refine operations and processes

In addition to providing learnings from internal workflows and processes, a post-mortem analysis can be a good way to identify weak points or areas for improvement in your functional operations.

For example, a post-mortem analysis can shed light on friction points in fulfillment, including issues that arise during busier sales periods, such as the holidays. Were any packages lost, late, or damaged? Did a customer have a less-than-ideal delivery experience — and, if so, what was their complaint? Use these insights to map out future processes to optimize, outsource, or automate your shipping and fulfillment to ensure your customers (and team) are avoiding hiccups that create a disappointing customer experience. This will ensure your business can keep up with future customer demand.

Remember that smooth shipping and fulfillment delivers on your brand promise, with 37% of customers stating they’ll never shop with that merchant again after a negative delivery experience — so be sure to review this area thoroughly for any hurdles.

4. Improve communication 

The more comfortable your team becomes with analyzing processes, the more quickly they’ll be able to work through roadblocks as they arise. Was a significant complaint about the checkout escalated to the right team? Was a slow sale promotion reviewed to ensure the right audience was targeted? Implementing a regular cadence of data-led analysis across teams will encourage them to have transparent conversations and lead to faster problem-solving.

Here are a few ways you can improve communication during the post-mortem analysis:

• Identify and map out an escalation process, with “go-to” team members or checkpoints across each area of the business.
• Streamline how your team communicates. Do they use Slack, or do they prefer to raise problems in a weekly team stand-up? Getting everyone on the same page will ensure key issues are always captured.

5. Improve team morale

It’s normal for your team to experience moments of frustration, especially when dealing with a big launch or navigating process-related roadblocks. In addition to giving your team a chance to pause and celebrate successes — which, in itself, can have a positive effect on morale — a post-mortem analysis can help you zero in on areas where there were hurdles or bumpy workflows so that you can consider a more productive approach in the future. This will leave your team feeling like the causes of their frustrations are being recognized and addressed, which in turn encourages strong performance next time around and reiterates the collective goal to improve together.

Here are a few ways to can improve morale during the post-mortem analysis:

• Include an agenda item for “wins” and share what went well during the project.
• Have your team share ‘kudos’ for another team member to call out good work and collaboration.
• Encourage team members to speak openly about areas where they felt that workflows had room for improvement.
• Ask the team to share suggestions for how processes could be made more effective and efficient.

Now that we have a sense of why a post-mortem analysis is worth conducting after a big campaign or sales cycle, the next question comes down to approach. Read on for a step-by-step guide on how to conduct an effective post-mortem analysis that lends itself to valuable insights to inform future strategy.

Need a way to keep your post-mortem analysis organized? Check out this template from Asana.

1. Compile a broad invite list

An effective post-mortem looks at all the work done to contribute to the result across teams. For example, if the campaign or sales cycle being reflected on involved a significant website update or heavy brand design work, it’s important to include engineering, design, and product teams in addition to your core marketing or brand team.

Similarly, if you worked with any external agencies that helped drive results, the post-mortem analysis should include those team members, too. Keep the invite list broad, and ensure that everybody relevant has a chance to have their voice heard or to learn from the conversation.

2. Revisit your goals and KPIs

Determining success and evaluating performance can feel overly subjective without the parameters of target metrics to guide the conversation.

In order to ensure that your post-mortem analysis is effective, make sure to resurface goals and target KPIs identified at the onset of a campaign or sales period, whether that’s a quarter or the full year. These metrics will help root the conversation in tangible, quantifiable success metrics and allow the team to reflect on performance based on what targets were hit, what targets were missed, and what variables contributed to the outcome either way.

3. Send out a pre-meeting questionnaire.

A few days before the post-mortem, send out a questionnaire to your team. The responses to this will help shape your meeting agenda and identify any talking points.

Your questionnaire should include qualitative, open-ended questions to encourage honest answers from your team about the process, project, and people involved. This will help to surface any action items for improvement.

Sample questions you can use include:

• What went well?
• What didn’t go well?
• What made your part of the project successful or unsuccessful?
• How can we improve our process for next time?

4. Set the agenda and stick to it

The purpose of your post-mortem analysis is to surface areas for improvement and resolve conflicts — not to create new ones.

Rather than concentrating on the negatives, keep discussions constructive by creating a clear agenda and then sticking to it. This will keep the reflective conversation and forward-looking ideas flowing.

Your agenda could look like this:

• Introduction
• Shoutouts
• What went well
• What could have gone better
• Suggestions and improvements
• Conclusion

During the meeting, assign a moderator who can keep the group on task and make sure all agenda items are covered.

5. Document outcomes and assign action items

If your post-mortem only exists as a meeting, you don’t have a way to go back and review the information later. Although written documentation can feel like an added chore, there are a few ways to make this process much easier. 

An AI notetaker (such as Otter, Fireflies, or Fathom) can record your meeting and produce a transcript. AI notetakers also produce recaps or summaries that highlight the major talking points of the meeting. While you may want to fill in some additional context or information, these summaries go a long way in reducing the amount of time spent documenting your post-mortem analysis. 

AI notetakers can also capture follow-ups and action items from a meeting. After the meeting is over, review the list of action items and make sure they’re assigned to someone using a project management tool or another collaboration tool like Notion.

Finally, make sure the final post-mortem report is easily accessible to the group It should reflect the full lifecycle of the post-mortem — not just the meeting itself. Include the meeting recording, raw transcript, supplementation documentation (which we’ll cover in the next section), and summaries. As action items are completed, make sure additional notes and materials are added. Add everything to a shared folder on your Google Drive, your project management tool, or a collaborative workspace. 

As mentioned above, metrics are the guiding light for a post-mortem analysis, and help ground the retrospective analysis in quantifiable wins. That said, a comprehensive data report is an important part of the review.

Data-driven insights give you clarity around what performs well and what falls short within the context of your broader marketing and business goals. For example, a report may reveal that your Christmas promotion on Pinterest didn’t translate to increased online sales and could benefit from different creative assets and messaging. A closer look at numbers around engagement and user behavior can help you learn and iterate on future campaigns to be more effective.

Using a consistent approach and measuring the same metrics each time will ensure key details aren’t forgotten and will help your team to identify trends or patterns.

A strong post-mortem report should include:

1. Financial analysis 

It’s the question at the forefront of everyone’s mind: did the launch/campaign/project make money?

A few important numbers to consider:

• Budget: Compare the project’s budget to actual expenses, such as marketing spend or the value of the team’s time
• Revenue analysis: How much you earned as a direct result of the project, including new customers acquired, sales data, or other income streams
• Break-even analysis: Determine the point at which the project or campaign starts to generate profit, if that hasn’t happened yet
• ROI: Compare the net profit from the project to its total cost

Financial analysis can help you make better decisions for future projects, such as how much you need to budget and if any levers (like a marketing campaign) directly led to more sales.

2. Customer feedback

Was there any useful customer feedback that came in through email, social media, customer support tickets, or other channels? Consider including customer support exchanges or screenshots of customer feedback as part of your post-mortem to help drive the conversation around customer response and spark ideas for creating a better customer experience.

3. Charts and data

Use charts to visualize the impact of your marketing efforts and any other key data points (for example, if your business had a drastic uptick in sales in response to an advertising campaign). Alongside conversions and online sales, pay attention to metrics such as:

• Bounce rate: Did a key marketing campaign landing page experience a high bounce rate? If so, your customers may not be finding what they’re looking for. Consider page presentation and layout as part of your review, and look for opportunities to help your customers find products faster.
• Page load speed: Every second it takes for a page to load results in customer drop-off. Slow websites bleed revenue, so ensure that your ecommerce pages are fast and optimized for quick sales — especially during busier sales seasons when an uptick in traffic might already slow down the site.
• Click-through rate (CTR): It might seem obvious, but CTR demonstrates how well your ads, emails, website, and keywords are performing. Achieving a good CTR is essential to better performance across the board — whether it’s your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, your product announcements, or your website. Depending on the channel, a closer look at CTR can help ensure that your keywords are optimized for relevance and profitability, that your emails are engaging and optimized for email service providers (ESPs), and that your website creates an easy user flow for visitors.
• Cart abandonment: The customer has viewed your site, added a product to their cart, and then — before they can get to the finish line — dropped off without checking out. Can you get that customer back with a gentle reminder, or tempt them to complete the sale with a discount code or free shipping? As part of your post-mortem, look for signs to optimize your cart experience or win back some of those lost sales through cart abandonment campaigns or retargeting.

If you’re doing a post-mortem of a specific season or campaign, you can also look at product-specific performance. You might do a breakdown by product categories to identify the top sellers. Additionally, you might also look at customer acquisition or acquisition by channel during a specific time period. 

More than other industries, ecommerce companies should pay attention to campaign success around holidays or major product launches. Take Black Friday, for example. You can analyze the profit from your specific BFCM sales, after accounting for ad spend and discounts. Digging into the data might reveal that certain channels or products were more profitable than others, and can help you lean into that success for future campaigns.

4. Bug reports and tickets

Let’s say you experienced higher than usual traffic to a landing page, but customers were unable to complete the purchase due to page time out. These bug reports are critical to review so that you can understand what might have caused them and fix them ahead of future campaigns or busy periods.

5. Screenshots

Did a new landing page perform particularly well? Attaching relevant screenshots of high-performing pages, as well as supplying documentation around the component of the page that worked well, can be a valuable way to identify elements — e.g., design approach, page structure, CTA placement — that drove noticeable changes in page performance and sales.

6. External factors

You can do everything right to plan for a launch or campaign only to have it impacted by external factors. Some might turn into lessons learned — like seasonal fluctuations or market trends — while others are completely unexpected or outside of your control.

In your post-mortem, note any external factors (such as unexpected events) influencing the results. 

An annual post-mortem analysis is a great way to wrap up the year and reflect on results before setting goals and defining the strategy for the new year. Similarly, campaign-specific post-mortems are best conducted as close to the end of the campaign as possible, while feedback is still fresh in your team’s mind.

The sooner you act, the sooner you can make meaningful improvements to your operations and processes and set your ecommerce business up for continued success and growth.

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What is a post-mortem analysis, and why is it important for ecommerce businesses?

A post-mortem analysis is a review process after a specific campaign, launch, sales period, or seasonal sale has ended. The review has a defined structure and includes both meetings and written analysis. Ecommerce companies can use a post-mortem analysis to reflect on any lessons learned and optimize for future campaigns.

When should I conduct a post-mortem analysis for my ecommerce business?

A post-mortem analysis should be conducted soon after the end of a campaign, launch, or seasonal sales period, while the information is still fresh. Ecommerce businesses should also consider year-end post-mortems.

What are the key metrics to analyze in an ecommerce post-mortem?

Some key metrics include revenue, ROI, budget vs. spend, conversion rates, bounce rates, cart abandonment and click-through rates.

Who should be involved in a post-mortem meeting for an ecommerce business?

You should include all teams involved in the project, such as marketing, design, product, fulfillment, and any external agencies. By including all teams, you can get a well-rounded review and actionable insights.

How do I structure a post-mortem meeting for maximum effectiveness?

Your post-mortem meeting should have a clear agenda. A meeting moderator can keep the attendees focused and make sure all agenda points are covered.

What common mistakes should I avoid during a post-mortem analysis?

During a post-mortem analysis, avoid blaming individuals or focusing on failures. Additionally, don’t skip writing a post-mortem report or leave any action items unassigned. 

How can I use post-mortem findings to improve my next product launch or marketing campaign?

If you rely on insights from your post-mortem, you can repeat what worked and fix what didn’t work. With this information, you can refine your processes, focus on the channels that offer the biggest ROI, or allocate resources differently. 

What tools and software can help streamline an ecommerce post-mortem?

A project management tool like Notion or Asana can help ecommerce teams keep track of data and documentation related to a post-mortem. AI notetakers can record meetings and provide transcripts and AI-powered summaries. 

How do I ensure post-mortem action items are implemented effectively?

Each action item identified should be assigned to a specific owner. Track progress and completion in a project management tool, and store any additional documentation gathered with the post-mortem analysis. 

Can post-mortems be beneficial even if my ecommerce business is performing well?

Post-mortems will help you understand what’s driving success. That way, you can replicate those variables as you launch new products or grow your business in other ways.