A sale occurs every time a customer pays for a product or service. When we talk about sales as a metric, we're referring to the total of all those orders over a given period: a day, a month, or a season.

In retail and e-commerce, sales come from many different channels: online stores, brick-and-mortar stores, marketplaces, and even WhatsApp conversations. Looking at them all together is the first step toward understanding your business.

Why does it matter?

Sales are the most direct indicator of your business's health. But the total number, on its own, doesn't tell you much. What's valuable is breaking it down: how many sales come from new customers and how many from repeat customers, which channel contributes the most, and which products drive the results.

When you break down sales by customer type, you discover something key: growth doesn't always mean getting more customers. Often, it means getting the customers you already have to buy more often.

How is it calculated?

Formula: Ventas = suma del valor de todos los pedidos pagados en el período.

For example, if you receive 200 orders in a week with an average value of $50, your sales for that week are 200 × 50 = $10,000.

Story mode

Martín runs an online sports store and sells both on his website and at two brick-and-mortar locations. For months, he focused solely on his e-commerce sales and believed the business had stalled. When he factored in the brick-and-mortar locations, he realized that many customers were discovering products online and then ending up making their purchases at the physical store. Sales hadn’t fallen—they had simply shifted to a different channel.

How to Use It with Data4Sales

• A single view of sales: The Customer Data Platform brings together purchases from brick-and-mortar stores, e-commerce, ERP systems, and marketplaces into a 360° customer profile.
• Sales by customer and by segment: You can see what portion of revenue comes from each stage of the customer lifecycle, each RFM segment, or each cluster.
• Attributed sales: Attribution using a control group shows the actual incremental revenue for each campaign and channel.
• Natural-language questions: With Orbis Copilot, you can ask, for example, “How much did you sell to repeat customers last month?” and get an instant answer.

Related terms

• Billing
• Average order value
• Active customers
• Attribution