Last updated - July 26, 2023
Reporting is an integral part of any business as it provides insights on growth and performance. In the eCommerce scenario, reporting tools are more readily available, but the complexity of the data has definitely increased. It is important to filter the large volumes of data to effectively find out actionable insights. When it comes to WooCommerce, you will find efficient reporting tools incorporated into it by default. These reporting tools offer great insights on the sales patterns of your store. However, it might be a necessity to use some advanced tools for reporting purposes. This article lists out some of the top WooCommerce reporting plugins with advanced features that you can try out.
WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro
You might be familiar with the insights that you receive through your Google Analytics account. This extension enhances the capabilities of your Google Analytics integration with your WooCommerce store. You will get a great number of actionable insights regarding your store’s traffic and other eCommerce events. The regular tracking of Google Analytics does not include any eCommerce specific event. However, this extension moves several eCommerce events to the scope of Analytics so that you can track them better. The data you receive includes sales by a particular product or category, average value of your orders, rate of conversion, etc.
The advantage of this extension is that you can understand customer behavior on your site in a more detailed manner. For example, you can track how many customers accessed a coupon available on your site. From there, you can easily understand how many of those customers actually went ahead with the purchase. This data will be a clear pointer on the efficiency of your coupon strategy.
This WooCommerce extension will also provide you with an advanced report detailing your customers’ checkout behavior. It would be quite helpful for you to work and improve your checkout flow, if necessary. Another positive aspect of this extension is its flexibility towards customization. You can name each eCommerce event according to what you prefer, and track user IDs for better accuracy. It also allows customization via code snippet for custom event tracking.
You need to purchase this extension from the WooCommerce store; prices start at $29 for a single site subscription.
Cart Reports
Cart abandonment is one of the unavoidable realities of eCommerce. A lot of store owners are interested in finding out ways to save abandoned carts. This WooCommerce extension is an effective tool to track your users’ Carts. This will give you a better control over conversion rates, and you can very well try out strategies to improve sales.
Once you install this extension, it will add a new tab on your WooCommerce default reporting tool. All insights from your Cart will be featured on this tab. The data you can capture include carts which are open, abandoned or converted over a date range that you choose. You can also track the products that are abandoned the most times, as well as a monthly count of cart abandonment. For your registered users, the extension provides an option to email, which will improve the chances of conversion.
In addition, the extension provides two widgets that will help you track the cart abandonment data more easily. These include one Recent Cart Activity widget, which has Cart data for the moment, Last 2 days, and for the Lifetime of the store. Another widget will give you a monthly graph that will help you understand cart activity.
WooCommerce Customer History
Monitoring customer behavior on your store might be a great strategy to understand the sales and conversion process. This extension provides you data like purchase history of a particular customer, and the lifetime value that customer imparts on your store. With the help of this extension, you will understand which screens are leading to a purchase, and which are disrupting the sales. Accordingly you can enhance the features of a page to make sure you have the best user experience.
Once you purchase and install this extension, you can simply go to WooCommerce > Orders and view the purchase history as well as browsing history of a customer. You have to click and open the order number to get access to these data. The extension will list out all the pages the customer visited before completing an order. In the purchase history section, you can view a list of all the orders that customer made. At the end, you can see the lifetime value of that customer too.
You can purchase a single site license of this plugin for $49.
WooCommerce Sales Report Email
This is a simple extension, but it can be quite a useful tool for busy entrepreneurs. It will send sales report as an email based on the frequency specified by you. People who really don’t have the time to login to the admin side of their store on a daily basis can find great use in this. Basially, the extension will send you an email with a daily, weekly or monthly report on your sales. You can understand aspects like total sign ups in that period, total orders, number of items sold, etc. It also provides the total sales value during this period, as well as your top selling products.
The installation and setting up too is quite simple and straightforward. You will get a clear, uncluttered list on your inbox to have a precise idea on how your store is performing. If you prefer to receive emails on multiple email ids, you can enter the ids separated by a comma. The extension also allows you to choose the exact time for the email to be sent. For the type of email, you can choose between HTML, Multipart or Plain Text.
You can purchase the single site subscription of the plugin for $29. The 5-site license is $49 and the 25-site subscription would cost you $79.
Advanced Reporting by Proword
If you are looking for a comprehensive reporting system on your WooCommerce store, you may find this one quite useful. Advanced Reporting plugin would give you reports of your product views, order summary, recent orders, stock, etc., in an easily decipherable manner. The reports are quite easy to read for users of all knowledge levels as they are provided in bar and pie charts. On each report page, you will find a search option, which will help you find the specific details you are looking for.
The plugin also provides an option for projected sales, and you can compare it with your actual sales. You can view a summarized view of all the reports on the dashboard. It also has tools to generate invoices for individual orders as well as in batches. You will also get an option to automatically email the sales summary.
You can purchase a regular license of this plugin for $35.
Why WooCommerce reporting is important?
As your store grows in size, you may find the scope of reporting growing along with it. It may look like a tedious task to arrive at actionable ideas with the vast amount of data. However, reporting is an essential aspect for any eCommerce business that wants to grow. As you have seen with some of the tools mentioned above, advanced reporting opens up a lot of opportunities and scope in expanding your business. Let’s look at a few of these aspects in more detail.
It will help you understand customers better
Understanding your customers is one of the essential factors that determine your business success. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, “Don’t just listen to your customers, understand them.” But how will you understand customers? A lot of this understanding can come from insightful reports created by tools like the ones we discussed above. Metrics like purchase history, browsing patterns, lifetime order value, etc., can tell you a lot about each customer.
You may be able to see patterns in conversion for a particular customer, and the frequency with which they abandon a cart. These data might point you to develop more personalized marketing approaches for your loyal customers. More often than not when you take an effort to understand what customers are looking for, you will find better results.
Improve user experience on your site
The user experience on your site plays a big part in determining the traffic and conversion rate on your website. As there is no single success formula for the best user experience, you will be in a constant process of improvement. Nothing helps for this cause more than advanced reporting tools. If you are tracking metrics like customers’ browsing patterns, you will be able to see which all pages on your site are contributing to conversions. You might notice that some pages on your site are in fact disrupting the flow on the sales funnel. You can very well remove these pages and make it easier for your customers to complete a purchase on your store.
Similarly, you can improve several aspects related to your site’s user experience with the help of advanced reporting tools. However, you may have to test out several strategies to find the one that is most beneficial.
Devise new marketing strategies
As an online store owner, you know very well about the pain of acquiring new customers. You may have to try out several marketing strategies to bring in steady traffic before you can even focus on conversions. However, when you are trying different marketing approaches, how will you know what is working and what’s not? Advanced reporting tools are an essential aspect here that will help you measure each of your promotional campaigns. Once you are able to find a specific marketing channel or strategy bringing in more value you can invest more on that. At the same time, you can give the ax for approaches that are not working.
Manage stock better
Many advanced WooCommerce reporting tools provide you product specific data that you can use to plan your stock management strategy. For example, by looking at the reports you can easily find top selling products on your store at a given time. Naturally these products need to be replenished more often in your warehouse than certain others. You can even get more specific by identifying specific variations of the same product that is generating more interest and stock more. Similarly, you can easily identify products that are not generating any considerable interest in customers.
Reducing cart abandonment
Cart abandonment is one of the everyday realities of an online store owner. Advanced WooCommerce reporting tools would give a firm grip on your cart abandonment rate. You will find tools that will specifically track customer behavior on the cart page. They will also give you information about the entire browsing session too. This will help you identify patterns contributing to cart abandonment in your sales funnel. You can focus on improving this factors to reduce cart abandonment and bettering conversions.
Conclusion
Reporting tools are an essential aspect of any eCommerce store. They help you understand customers and find gaps in your site’s user experience. Overall they help in improving sales and revenue on your store. WooCommerce, by default, has a decent reporting tool that would give you sales reports specific to product, category, date, etc. However, you can find more advanced reporting tools that will track eCommerce events, specific customer behavior, etc., too. This article has listed out some of the advanced WooCommerce reporting plugins that you can install on your site. You might have also found some of the points reiterating the importance of WooCommerce reporting tools. Let us know if you want to share a specific scenario where reporting tools helped you improve sales.
