E-commerce business is a complex conundrum of tons of data, analytics, and accounting. An operation heavy business like this requires simple plugins that can assist it in day-to-day management.
For an online business, the data is everything so it becomes extremely necessary to monitor and analyze it from time to time. So platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify provide some form of basic reporting.
In this guide, I will be focusing on WooCommerce and the basic reporting that it provides inhouse as well as plugins that provide you advanced WooCommerce reporting.
What is WooCommerce reporting?
WooCommerce is an amazing platform. It provides its users with some basic reports to see their store’s performance from month to month using graphs and stats.
It has four sections: Orders, Customers, Stock, and Taxes.
WooCommerce order reports
Orders section lets you view net and gross sales volumes along with totals, top freebies, top earners, product downloads etc. Some sub section under Orders include:
- Sales by date- Provides sales data basis last year, last month, this month, last 7 days and custom date range
- Sales by category- Sales numbers can be viewed by categories
- Sales by product- Gives you a report similar to sales by date but it’ll be customized basis product
- Coupons by date – Shows discounts in total and number of coupons used. The coupons can be filtered basis the requirement
- Customer downloads- Downloads are tracked and logged as per a unique customer ID. This report details the customer activity using their IP address
WooCommerce customer reports
This gives an overview of the Customer V/S Guest report.
The report can be filtered on the basis of date and time. Apart from this, you will get an idea of the number of new customers along with returning customers.
WooCommerce stock reports
Stock report is quite literally your stock summary. It shows low stock, out of stock items and quantity of stocks.
It’s a great way to analyse your inventory and pre-plan.
WooCommerce taxes report
This report allows you to view ‘Taxes by Code’ (basis your state) and ‘Taxes by Date’. You can filter the details through custom time
WooCommerce reports are great. However, there are two major disadvantages of WooCommerce’s in-house reporting that need to be analyzed.
Limitations of WooCommerce reporting
- No advanced WooCommerce reports
- Multi-store WooCommerce reports in single dashboard
The native WooCommerce reports are very basic. They only provide you an overview. In order to truly analyze and gain insights, you need to dig deeper into your data. So you need to rely on WooCommerce plugins that provide you such advanced reports.
Reporting on WooCommerce is mainly done for a single store on a single dashboard. This becomes tricky for those who manage multiple stores. You have to log in to individual stores to view reports from individual stores.
Top WooCommerce reporting plugins
Since WooCommerce is one of the top eCommerce platforms, it has ton of WooCommerce analytics plugins that provide advanced reports. While these options have great features, not every business will be able to benefit unless they find the perfect fit for themselves. Here’s a quick look at various tools:
Features | Putler | Metorik | Metrilo | Advanced WooCommerce Reporting | Enhanced Ecommerce Google |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Sales Reports | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Customer Reports | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Order Reports | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Product Reports | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Subcription Reports | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
Insight Reports | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Customer RFM Segmentation | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Filtering | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Export option | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
Multi-store Reporting | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
Price | Starts at $20/month | Starts at $50/month | Starts at $119/month | Starts at $39/month | Free |
So that was a quick comparison of the top WooCommerce reporting tools. As you can see, all these tools are feature-loaded and each provides you with advance reports that are needed to make a business successful.
I recommend you analyze what is important for your business and then invest in the right tool. If you are a beginner or you are looking for something hands-on, simple, do try out Putler. We have a 14-day free trial.
But before you pick a trial, here’s Putler in a nutshell-
Putler: What makes it the top WooCommerce reporting tool?
Putler is a comprehensive, WooCommerce analytics tool. It has been created for the sole purpose of providing solutions for problems pertaining to eCommerce.
The tool provides a detailed analysis of your data and provides you reports on all important aspects of your business like – Products, Customers, Sales, Transactions, Orders and Website Traffic. Not just reports, Putler also provides you with essential features like segmentation, forecasting, filtering, custom segments, CSV export, comparison and a ton more.
How to connect WooCommerce to Putler?
All you have to do is sign in to Putler, enter your WooCommerce URL by clicking on the WooCommerce icon and login to your WooCommerce account. The Putler plugin will be automatically installed to your WooCommerce site. That’s it.
Putler provides the following WooCommerce reports:
-
Home dashboard
Provides an overview of your entire business by showcasing important performance indicators -
Sales dashboard
All important KPI data is provided in this report like net sales, revenue, average sales etc. -
Subscription dashboard
It’s a dashboard that gives you SaaS metrics like ARR, MRR, churn, LTV etc. -
Product dashboard
It’s an in depth analysis of your products and their performances -
Customer dashboard
This report provides more than customer insights, it allows you to get RFM segmentation of your customers which is a key index -
Transactions dashboard
This feature is unique to Putler and Google Analytics only as it extracts important metrics from Google Analytics and displays it in Putler -
Time machine
This dashboard allows a user to forecast monthly revenue and customers -
Audience dashboard
Putler is the only tool that has a ready WooCommerce Google analytics integration. That means, once you connect both WooCommerce and your Google Analytics account to Putler, it will automatically pull in data from both and provide you key metrics from WooCommerce and Google analytics. -
Insights dashboard
Putler was made to understand and analyse data, it keeps adding insightful reports to help you make better decisions.
This dashboard provides two insight reports:1. Holiday sales insights
2. Comparison insights
Conclusion
As WooCommerce reporting is quickly becoming a big part of eCommerce operations, more and more plugins are being developed to suit individual business needs.
I hope this article helps you find a tool that fits your business requirement. I invite you to first decide on a tool, take a trial and then make a decision.
Still on the fence? Here’s a live demo of Putler. Take a look!