If you are reading this, then you probably already know that commerce is a highly volatile industry. In fact, some brands experience over 70% of their total annual revenue during Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone. There are very few business models that can say most of their revenue comes from a single week of the year.

The same dynamic plays out across industries. For example, golf brands hit peak season while skiing or winter apparel brands sit in the dead of summer.

We call this high-velocity commerce: an environment where revenue and profit can change dramatically from day to day. Even during a “normal” week, weekends often outperform weekdays, and evening hours regularly outperform the workday. The result is simple yet critical - your daily contributions to monthly revenue and profit goals are not evenly distributed.

It’s not uncommon to see 40% of an entire month’s revenue generated during a single event, such as a Fourth of July sale or Prime Day. That reality fundamentally changes how goals should be set, tracked, and managed.

Monthly Goals Alone Aren’t Enough

You can set a monthly goal, close your eyes, and hope you hit it. Or you can set a monthly goal, break it down day by day, and ensure progress brick by brick.

Daily goal setting matters because it gives you the ability to course-correct in real time. If you’re exceeding expectations or falling behind, you don’t find out at the end of the month when it’s too late, you find out today.

Consider this example:

You set a monthly revenue goal of $1M and a monthly contribution margin goal of $300,000. Halfway through the month, you check Shopify and see $500,000 in revenue. On the surface, everything looks perfect and you’re pacing exactly where you should be.

But revenue alone doesn’t tell the full story.

When you layer in your associated expenses and calculate contribution margin month-to-date, you may discover you’re not pacing at 50% to goal, or you may find the opposite: you’re already ahead of your contribution margin target.

That insight changes things.

If contribution margin is ahead of plan, you may be able to responsibly increase ad spend and capture incremental growth. Maybe CAC is lower than expected. Maybe new customer AOV is higher than forecasted. These are strategic signals that inform your next move.

The Metrics Worth Tracking Daily

To operate effectively in high-velocity commerce, there are several variables that should be tracked every single day.

1. Revenue

Revenue is the outcome, but it’s driven by multiple underlying inputs:

Revenue Drivers

• Ad Spend

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

• New Customer Count

• New Customer Average Order Value (AOV)

• Returning Customer Count

• Returning Customer AOV

2. Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)

• Product Costs

• Other Variable Costs

3. Contribution Margin

Tracking contribution margin daily is what connects revenue, costs, and profitability into one actionable metric.

Why Daily Tracking Actually Matters

Tracking these components together is critical for one reason: context.

You might hit your revenue goal because returning customers outperformed expectations. While that’s positive, it may also indicate that new customer acquisition is underperforming or that CAC has increased beyond plan. If you’re only tracking top-line revenue, you could miss a rising CAC entirely.

However, if you’re tracking CAC and new customer revenue daily, that increase becomes immediately visible, allowing you to respond quickly by reducing spend, increasing creative output, or reallocating budget across channels.

The same logic applies to cost of goods sold.

Gross margin can change significantly day to day depending on product mix. If you sell one product at a 60% margin and another at a 40% margin, a shift toward the lower-margin product will reduce your blended margin even if revenue stays strong.

Seasonality compounds this effect. A sunscreen product may dominate sales during summer months, naturally pulling margins toward that product’s unit economics. More gross profit means more room to spend on acquisition at the same CAC. Less gross profit means the opposite.

Without daily visibility, these shifts go unnoticed until they materially impact profitability.

Know Your Numbers Every Day

Contribution margin is influenced by many variables: product mix, CAC, returning customer behavior, and average order value. Every one of these inputs matters.

If you want to scale your business effectively in a high-velocity environment, you need to know your numbers - not monthly, not weekly, but every single day.

That’s how you stay in control when the pace of commerce moves fast.