I'm a big fan of podcasts. They're just so handy when it's late at night or early in the morning and I want to take the dog on a walk. Why not learn something while I do that? Just yesterday I heard a WooCommerce question on the WPCast.fm podcast and I thought I'd take a crack at answering it.
Hi guys, my name is Travis and I'm interested in finding out what you think about the reporting options with WooCommerce. I have several clients who are running WooCommerce and are having issues with the way the reports are laid out. There's a couple paid options and I wanted to know if you knew of anyone with in-depth reporting experience & WooCommerce.
The good news is that the reporting that comes bundled with WooCommerce is actually pretty solid. It has all of the basics that any store would need. If you need more there are some pretty awesome free plugins and even a couple premium ones to take care of those needs.
WooCommerce Reports
WooCommerce provides several excellent reports built in. The most important is probably the variety of order reports. You can see the total number of orders, total income, daily sales, number of items, shipping costs, and taxes all on one screen.
You can of course see the top product sellers & top earners.
You can also view sales by category.
There are some other reports that aren't tied directly to sales like stock reports (what's out of stock, what is low in stock) as well as some reports about the coupons being used.
WooCommerce Advanced Reports
Those reports are a pretty darn good starting place for any e-commerce store. If you want to look for a little bit more there are two awesome free plugins that I recommend and a premium plugin that tracks customer data instead of order data.
WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration (Free)
I recommend that every single store downloads the Google Analytics integration for WooCommerce. And here's why – it's totally free and you set it and forget it. If you never use it again it isn't any skin off your back and if you decide to use it a year from now you have an entire year of data at your fingertips.
While WooCommerce reports focus on the products and categories that are popular Google Analytics focuses on figuring out what's going on your site. Stats like how long people are staying on your site, what sites led customers to your site, what pages on your site had the best conversion rates, etc. They're two very different types of reports but both of them are very useful. We love using Google Analytics for WooThemes.com and I've seen some of the great reports. My favorite report was a list of all of the sites that referred customers to you and how much revenue each site referred. Very cool.
The other nice thing about the Google Analytics integration is that it isn't tied to any content management system (CMS). That means that it's portable. You can move from Shopify to WooCommerce (or move from WooCommerce to Shopify) and keep your data.
Smart Reporter for WooCommerce and WP eCommerce (Freemium)
If you want a few more stats there's a pretty great plugin called Smart Reporter for WooCommerce and WP eCommerce available for free on the WordPress.org plugin repository.
This plugin adds a couple features to the functionality in WooCommerce. You can track which payment gateways are being used most often, the percentage of the order is product vs shipping vs taxes, and you can also see a report of which countries your customers come from. My favorite feature is the ability to forecast future sales.
This plugin is built and maintained by Store Apps. They've built several premium WooCommerce extensions which means that they know how to keep things up to date and they have quality code (far less likely to have bugs).
The only downside with this extension is that it only stores data for a month. If you want more than that you have to get the premium version. Kind of a bummer but pretty cool that you can basically stay on indefinite trial.
KISSMetrics (Premium)
If you want even more in-depth reporting there's a pretty great KISSMetrics plugin available on WooThemes.com.
The best way to explain KISSMetrics is to steal their tagline:
Google Analytics tells you what’s happening. KISSmetrics tells you who’s doing it.
Knowing who is doing what on your site is really powerful. Instead of looking at sales you're looking at people. This is really useful for knowing key information like the churn rate for subscriptions. If you have a subscription product you can see how often people pause it, resume it, get a new one, buy other products, etc. Seeing how customers act on your site allows you to see which pages aren't working for your customers and which ones keep them coming back.
Reporting
There's some pretty useful reporting built right into WooCommerce but if you need the extra power it's available through a variety of plugins. Happy reporting!
Photo credit: Armando G Alonso
Hey Patrick,
Great post and thanks for mentioning WPcast!
I’ve had good experiences with https://mixpanel.com/ (a Kiss Metrics competitor) as well. One of their biggest advantages over Kiss Metrics is that they have a very generous free plan.
-David
[…] a handy post on improving WooCommerce reporting from Patrick […]
Good roundup of reporting, Patrick.
It’s worth noting that the built-in WooCommerce Reports also have an Export CSV link that you can use to download your data for further analysis in a spreadsheet. I often find it helpful to look at the numbers rather than a chart in some cases.
I also recently put the Google Analytics Integration to very good use. I was looking at adding more SVG images to my site and wanted to know how important it was to offer fallback PNGs for older Android devices and older IE. I was able to look at browser share by income to determine which were worth supporting financially.
[…] Patrick’s blog post has more details […]
WooCommerce reports only show Top Earners and Top Sellers… How can I get a list of ALL sellers and earners (in a specified period)?
You can search for any product. Not just the top earners/sellers.
FYI I’m using the bleeding edge version of WooCommerce from GitHub. That version (2.3) should be released in the next month.
Hi Patrick,
Good post and some plugins I wasn’t aware of. I want to run a report showing sales by product /sku for a defined period e.g. month/quarter. It seems the only way to do that is to search each product individually which takes ages as I have a lot of products/skus. Do you know how to do this or is there a plugin/extension that will let me do it?
Thanks
Hi Suellen, Not sure exactly what you’re looking for. Do you want a graph showing all of the product sales over a time period?
Hi Patrick, I am also looking for something to export the order information:
For instance, the website I am developing sells food. Orders cut off at noon Thursday and are delivered on Sundays.
I don’t think I can export a report which has all the items ordered for the week on it.
Hey,
You should be able to use the WooCommerce Order/Customer CSV Export extension.
You can set it up so that it automatically exports orders and one of the options is to export orders that haven’t been exported.
I hope that helps! 🙂
Hi Patrick, I think that what Suellen and I are looking for is a report that will print out all the numbers of each item sold in a month (or quarter) Ie: January 2015:
Product A: 50
Product B: 35
Product C: 25
It’s a crazy amount of work to get the # sold on 100+ products one at a time.
Great selection Patrick, Thanks for this work.
Hi Patrick,
I am looking for a reporting plugin that will report on product sales and show how many discounts have been given on a product- not just total discounts for a time period. We are selling event tickets with each specific event as a product. We would like to see how well an event performed (profit) with the ability to see the sales as well as discounts given. currently the WooCommerce reports give the discounts under Sales by Date, but don’t show discounts under Sales by Product.
Is there a plugin you recommend that would allow us to see sales by product as well as the discounts given for that specific product?
Hi Vicky,
Off the top of my head I can’t think of anything like that. Maybe someone else here has some suggestions?
We have a need to make a report of sales revenue based on a date collected during checkout vs the actual date of the sale. We collect the date with the WooCommerce Product Add Ons extension. This is the date of the tour event the customer has purchased. Any tips on how to achieve this? Any help greatly appreciated. The DB is really confusing and a series or Joins needs to run in order to get the data together. Any tips on the DB and it’s structure and how to query it for reporting would be helpful too! I digress but this would be a killer tutorial actually. How to make a plugin that adds some new reporting to the admin….
these are great plugins, will check out the kiss metrics one for sure!
Hi Patrick, nice overview, thx for sharing.
I’ve developed WooReports, found at http://woo.report, which analyses past customer behaviour in terms of number of orders and amount spent and segments the customers in new, active, returning, churning and inactive. The report breaks down number of orders and amount spent in previous intervals and these intervals can be years, months, quarters, weeks or days.
At this stage, there are two reports, one which offers the full list of the customers and another one which is more analytical and does offer rates of churn and customer acquisition rate, etc.
Let me know what you think, maybe you would like to extend the article with some screenshots and few words on this.
Cheers
Hey, do you know if WooCommerce Order/Customer CSV Export includes the fields added when you use gravity forms? I need to export a report of orders that includes the purchase information and gravity form fields. We need to export by product so our fulfillment folks just have a report of the individual products they work on (so a report of who ordered T-shrits to the T-shirt person, sticker orders to the sticker person, etc)
Can any of these plugins be used to print off the reports as well?
Hello Patrick Rauland,
Can you please tell about the sales report customization.
i want to filter all the reports which products has price zero, means i don’t want to display free products order in my reports.
Thank you.
I’m trying to find a WooCommerce report feature that will search all sales by a product, then list the actual customers that made those purchases. Right now, I can see 11 people signed up for a cooking class on July 6th, but I don’t have a way to extract those 11 customers and/or their email addresses to contact them about class details / updates (without looking through every single site-wide order manually).
Any advice?
I am seeking a report from WooCommerce that will extract number of products in stock, their description, sku, retail value and an additional field we have added to each product called “user defined”. We put our purchase price, using a code, in the user defined field which is not visible to customers. We will use this report to value our stock at year end. Can you recommend a plug in, extension or how we can add the user defined field to an existing report please?
Anyone try @Lucian plugin yet? it looks pretty darn good. Also, it’s marked as $30 however their buy now has the item at $0 … I emailed them to let them know. Perhaps they made it free to stir up some demand.