There are many benefits to selling on Shopify—a full-fledged website builder, easy set up, a customized online store, and an extensive marketplace to cater to any Shopify store needs. The question, however, is how can merchants better translate these benefits into sales and grow their business?
Shopify sales analytics empowers merchants with the right set of reports and dashboards to monitor and grow their sales. In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at some of the key Shopify sales reports and metrics to keep a tab on. These reports can help you gain powerful insights into sales data, plan effective sales strategies, and improve decision-making.
1. Monthly sales trend
The foremost thing that comes to mind when you hear “sales analytics” is probably the overall sales the business has made. The Monthly sales trend report compares the current month’s sales with those of the previous month’s. This helps merchants understand sales trends, and validate sales strategies and commonly held assumptions.
Besides historic sales analysis, it’s crucial to estimate the sales numbers for the upcoming months. Sales forecasting helps Shopify merchants gear up their resources, set realistic targets, organize inventory, and provide a baseline for the necessary course of action. With Zoho Advanced Analytics, businesses can precisely forecast (dotted line) Shopify sales numbers or any other KPIs.
2. Sales by source
An online store will have visitors coming from a range of sources—social media, affiliate programs, search engines, and much more.
Let’s say John is a drop shipper running an online lifestyle store on Shopify. The store has customers visiting from a variety of sources, and John is unsure about which of these channels the business should invest its time and money in.
This is where the Sales by Source report finds purpose, by helping John understand the sales across channels. This gives John an idea of the top performing channels, and where to direct business efforts.
3. Sales by product category
The Sales by Product Category report presents the sales made across different product categories. By analyzing the top performing product categories, merchants can arrive at decisions like which categories to market better, products to be stocked, and much more. For dropshippers, this report can offer insights into the types of product categories they can consider investing in.
For instance, if John finds that apparel as a product category is selling more, he may choose to invest more in them. Alternatively, John can also consider investing in accessories or products that could be cross-sold with apparel.
For an online seller, drilling deeper into this data to understand finer details—say the top-selling products in a product category—would be of more interest and use. The drill-down feature in Zoho Advanced Analytics helps you get to these finer insights fast.
In the above case:
1. Right-click any data point in the Sales by Product Category report.
2. Select Drill Down and click by Products to learn about the top-selling products in a product category.
4. Sales by Region
The Sales by Region report gives insights on the physical distribution of sales. Unlike traditional charts, the geo map is a powerful visualization that helps merchants instantly spot sales hotspots by just analyzing the size of the sales bubbles. The bigger the bubble, the more the sales in that region. Upon hovering over the bubbles, you can gain insights on the sales numbers for the particular region.
This report can help:
Geo-target efforts to boost sales in top-performing regions
Align marketing efforts
Optimize inventory
Develop an effective supply network
And a lot more
For instance, if John identifies New York as a sales hotspot, the store may want to focus their marketing campaigns with a touch of regional culture.
These are a few possibilities in Zoho Advanced Analytics that offer powerful insights into your Shopify sales data. These reports can be easily built with a powerful reporting tool like Zoho Analytics. They help Shopify businesses achieve targets faster and optimize efforts. Check out more of these reports here.
What’s next?
Zoho Advanced Analytics is a powerful analytics app tailored for Shopify stores! It’s engineered and powered by Zoho Analytics, a leading self-service BI and analytics platform, trusted by more than 13,000 customers worldwide.
Install today, and transform your raw Shopify store data into actionable insights in a matter of minutes with Zoho Advanced Analytics!
Reach out to our Shopify analytics experts for a free personalized demo
For further questions or clarifications, we can be reached at support@zohoanalytics.com.
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