The AARRR metrics fascinate us with simplicity and effectiveness. That is why we have been exploring them and demystifying them to you, the e-commerce entrepreneurs who need to be using them.

We have reached the last metric in the framework – Revenue. Although it doesn’t always come last, it is the ultimate prove that all four other metrics work.

After you acquire potential customers and activate them, after you manage to keep them coming back and they tell their friends how cool you are, it is time to collect the earnings.

We all get inspired by the great examples of eCommerce unicorns that reach unprecedented success. However, we rarely talk about the other 80+ percent of eCommerce businesses that fail and what causes it.

A lack of strategy, vision or competence, you’d say and you’d be right. But we can’t fix that. If anybody lacks those, we doubt they’d be reading this and not fighting for their business’s life.

Sometimes, though, the devil is in the details. You may have the strategy and not be an ecommerce failure, and yet feel something’s not working well.

Each week, we choose the most important e commerce trends – events and news – and comment on how they influence your business.

We do it with your limited time in mind and highlight just enough to keep you up to date with current trends in the field to run your business smoothly.

So what happened this week that matters?

A new provider for the enterprise omnichannel e commerce emerged, Magento launched a new marketplace and marketplaces in Southeast Asia begin challenging Alibaba’s expansion while it snuggles up to Australia and New Zealand.

We enjoy curating the most important trends in eCommerce for the week and add our view how it affects you as players in the game.

When we’re preparing each new digest, we like to imagine you enjoying it with a cup of coffee or beer. We hope it’s as informational and useful as we intend it to be.

This week we comment on updates from Shopify and Alibaba.

We’re continuing with the AARRR Metrics for eCommerce. So far, we’ve explained the first 3 – acquisition, activation and retention. This week it’s Referral time! (For a quick recap, see this infographic.)

What’s referral as an AARRR metric?

Dave McClure, who coined the framework, doesn’t set strict limitations on what it is and what it isn’t.

In his original presentation of the concept, he puts it broadly: it’s when someone refers someone else to your website and the new visitor takes some action. Just that. They don’t have to be a customer to do the referral, and the action is not necessarily a purchase.

Recently, we started a series of articles on the analytics for WooCommerce businesses use and rely on in an attempt to determine what is important across product niches and how an analytics platform like ours can help for driving growth in e-commerce.

So far we’ve talked with a mature coffee selling business, an up-and-coming healthy lifestyle player, and the newly-born fresh seafood delivery about the analytics they employ as WooCommerce stores at different growth stages to drive their business forward.

*Why WooCommerce? Because more than 37% of all eCommerce sites run on it.