More Customer Statistics Can Help Your Business

Selling online can be like walking around a mall with blinders on. That's why you need all the help you can get. If your service provider doesn't share useful statistics with you, it may be time to move on. It's refreshing to hear about some of the value service providers are sharing with their customers. Here's one.

FreshBooks, an online billing and tracking service, aims to provide its users with valuable metrics as a way of benchmarking against businesses in over eighty different industries. Statistics will include average time for payment, average invoice size by industry, monthly revenue, in addition to trends about online payments, payment methods and lots of other useful information.

Sample Trends from Oct / Nov 2006

For companies who accept online payment:

- In October, 14.5% of payments were accepted online
- November, 17.5%

Payment Methods:

- Visa: 16.4% in October, 17.3% in November
- Mastercard: 7.3% in October, 7.3% in November
- Amex: 4.0% in October, 4.0% in November
- Paypal: 6.0% in October, 5.3% in November
- Other (including check, cash, credit, etc.): 66.3% in October, 66.1% in November

For companies that send invoices by both email and by ground mail:

- In October, 97.0% of invoices were sent by email and 3% were sent by ground mail.
- In November, 96.0% of invoices were sent by email and 4% were sent by ground mail.

Browser Usage:

- Internet Explorer 7 - October 5.02%, November 9.68%
- IE 6 - October 37.64%, November 36.77%
- FireFox 2.0 - October 6.61%, November 24.51%
- FF 1.5 - October 44.26%, November 22.07%

Operating System Usage

-Windows - October 86.84%, November 85.87%
-Macintosh - October 10.32%, November 11.41%
-Linux - October 2.13%, November 1.92%
-Unix - October 0.11%, November 0.06%