Small and mid-sized merchants can decline due to operational friction (cancellations, refunds, slow prep time) or inefficient marketing spend. This project builds a portfolio-level merchant health system to answer:
Which merchants are at risk of churn, why are they declining, and what actions should we take next?
Output: Merchant segmentation + Opportunity Score ranking + Tableau dashboards + prioritized action list.
Merchant performance drops often go unnoticed until the revenue impact becomes significant. The goal of this project is to:
- Detect early churn risk
- Diagnose the drivers of decline
- Prioritize the most recoverable merchants using a repeatable analytics workflow
The dataset contains merchant performance across cities and categories, focused on growth, reliability, and efficiency.
- Revenue: total merchant revenue (impact sizing)
- Orders: completed orders
- Orders Growth 4W (%): 4-week order trend (negative = churn signal)
- Cancel Rate (%): reliability risk (high cancellations reduce conversion)
- Refund %: quality risk (high refunds indicate fulfillment issues)
- Avg Prep Time (mins): operational friction (impacts cancellations + CX)
- Rating: customer satisfaction signal
- ROAS: ad efficiency (low ROAS = inefficient spend)
Merchants are grouped into actionable segments for Ops and Sales prioritization.
- At Risk: negative growth + high cancels/refunds/prep issues → immediate recovery plan
- Ops Constrained: demand exists, but ops bottlenecks limit growth → fix fulfillment first
- Ad Inefficient: low ROAS + weak growth → reset campaigns before scaling spend
- High Potential: healthy fundamentals + room to scale → upsell and growth programs
- Core: stable merchants → monitor + light experimentation
To avoid treating every merchant equally, merchants are ranked using an Opportunity Score based on:
- Revenue impact
- Growth headroom
- Fixability of issues
Opportunity Score = AVG(Revenue Weight) × (0.6 × Headroom + 0.4 × Fixability)
- Revenue Weight: higher-revenue merchants receive higher priority
- Headroom: recoverable decline potential
IF Orders Growth 4W < 0 THEN ABS(Orders Growth 4W) ELSE 0
- Fixability: how actionable reliability issues are
Cancel Rate + Refund %
This project includes a complete Tableau workflow designed to move from:
Portfolio Monitoring → Merchant Prioritization → Root Cause Diagnosis → Action Planning
Each dashboard answers a specific business question and supports drilldowns for decision-making.
Purpose: Quick health check of the entire merchant portfolio
Business Question: How is the portfolio performing overall, and is risk increasing?
- Total portfolio Revenue and Orders
- 4 week growth trend across the portfolio
- Reliability signals such as:
- Cancel Rate
- Refund Rate
- Early visibility into churn risk before revenue loss becomes significant
- If growth turns negative, drill down into issue drivers to identify the root cause
- Use as a weekly portfolio review view to monitor stability
Purpose: Prioritizes merchants by business impact + churn risk
Business Question: Where should the team focus recovery efforts first?
Merchants are positioned into quadrants based on:
- Revenue impact
- Orders Growth 4W
- High Revenue + Negative Growth → High Priority (recover immediately)
- Low Revenue + Negative Growth → Fix Later (monitor, low urgency)
- High Revenue + Positive Growth → Protect (retain and prevent churn)
- Low Revenue + Positive Growth → Monitor (light touch tracking)
Instead of treating all merchants equally, this view highlights where the highest recoverable revenue is concentrated.
Purpose: Diagnoses why revenue decline is happening
Business Question: What’s driving churn risk and revenue loss?
Revenue exposure linked to common drivers such as:
- High cancellations
- High refunds
- Slow prep time
- Declining order demand
- If cancellations and refunds dominate → focus on operational recovery
- If growth decline dominates with clean ops → focus on marketing and retention
Purpose: Converts insights into execution through merchant ranking
Business Question: Which merchants should we contact first, and what action should we take?
- Ranked merchant list based on Opportunity Score
- Performance indicators such as:
- negative growth
- reliability issues (cancel and refund drivers)
- Recommended next-step actions:
- Fix Ops
- Fix Ads
- Protect
- Monitor
This view is the most actionable output and functions like an Ops-ready merchant outreach sheet.
Purpose: Identifies city and category clusters of opportunity and risk
Business Question: Which markets should Sales and Ops focus on?
City-by-category areas that highlight:
- High opportunity merchants
- High churn risk concentration
- Markets with high recovery potential
- Helps identify “hotspots” where operational support or growth campaigns should be deployed
- Enables market-level planning instead of merchant-by-merchant only
Portfolio-level order growth trends downward, indicating broad churn risk and urgency.
Most revenue is concentrated in the High Priority quadrant, meaning retention efforts should begin with top-revenue merchants losing demand.
Merchants with high cancellations, refunds, or prep time issues decline even when demand exists. Promotions without fixing ops first can waste spend and worsen customer experience.
Low ROAS merchants require campaign resets, spend controls, and targeting cleanup before increasing budgets.
Strong health signals + stable performance make them ideal for ads onboarding, upsell programs, and controlled growth experiments.
- Reduce cancels and refunds
- Improve prep time stability
- Run targeted promos only after ops stabilizes
Track: orders, growth, cancellations, refunds, rating
- Staffing and hours audit
- Menu simplification and availability improvements
Track: prep time trend, cancellation drop
- Cap spend temporarily
- Tighten targeting and use ROAS guardrails
Track: ROAS improvement, incremental orders
- Prevent drift into churn with baseline monitoring
- Run small controlled experiments
Track: growth stability, reliability metrics
- Upsell ads and promos with ROI story
- Track uplift after adoption
Track: incremental lift, repeat orders