by Joe Callon
When you’re running an online store, a lot of numbers and statistics are thrown at you. Sometimes it can be hard to boil them all down to the cold hard facts and understand what they mean for your business. We’ve put together a short list of great Shopify apps that will help you to generate and analyse reports based on your store's sales.
When you’re running an online store, a lot of numbers and statistics are thrown at you. Sometimes it can be hard to boil them all down to the cold hard facts and understand what they mean for your business. We’ve put together a short list of great Shopify apps that will help you to generate and analyse reports based on your store's sales.
Compass
Price: Free
Compass is a free app that gives you a well broken-down insight into how your store’s sales are performing and how customers are finding your site (via a search engine or through an advertisement). The app integrates well with Amazon and Facebook to give you solid, collective reporting from a variety of sources, all available on one dashboard.
Compass also generates automatic reports based on key customer metrics, such as lifetime value, which can be sent straight to your email inbox for complete transparency into how your business has performed over the previous week.
Xporter
Price: $7.00 - $45.00 p/month
Gathering information from your store for use in reports is an incredibly time consuming, tedious task. Xporter allows you to quickly export your orders (with line items), customers, products, blogs and sales stats in one fell swoop.
After installation, you can easily set up a template which contains all the key information that you or your manager needs to see, and then have Xporter automatically generate a report based on that template each week that can be sent to you via email or to an easily accessible Google spreadsheet.
Hits Analytics
Price: Custom
Hits is an app that displays your store data in a beautiful, easy to analyse format - not too dissimilar from the format featured in the $79 Shopify subscription tier - but for free.
Reporting isn’t all Hits is capable of though, as the app also provides access to Facebook advertising campaign management and works out what your best course of action is based on the data available from your store.
For example, Hits can automatically work out how your campaign should be split across devices (desktop/mobile/tablet) based on the number of visitors and converted customers you're receiving from each. However, there's a 20% management fee charge on any Facebook campaigns set up through the app.
Profiteer
Price: Less than 25,000 products - $15/month, 25,000+ products - $30/month
Pricing your products effectively is difficult, but luckily Profiteer is here to help. When calculating your profits, you need to know the cost price of your products, which is where Profiteer comes in.
The app gives you insight into the highest performing products in your store. giving you a simple way to analyse which of your products is the most profitable for your business. It's also incredibly easy to export the data collated by Profiteer, giving you a report containing the total estimated cost of your current inventory, and even the current profit being brought in by certain vendors you stock.
It's Important to Report
It’s more than likely that you already have someone who expects to see numbers from your store in front of them each week, so that they can determine their next steps.
However, if you don’t currently have a reporting system set up, it's essential to see how well your company is performing online so you can assess what's working well and what isn't. If you have any questions about reporting or analysis, please don’t hesitate to tweet us @Statement or get in touch!
