Mastering Custom Reports in WooCommerce

For an eCommerce business, reports are one of the most important things that help facilitate growth. 

Through reporting, owners see all the cold, hard data they need to assess how their store is performing, measure success, find weak spots, and make logical and informed decisions about how to move forward.  

While convenient, the default reporting capabilities of WooCommerce may prove restrictive when you want more in-depth insights, showing a lack of advanced segmentation, limited exporting options, and more. 

To unlock the full potential of your data and gain deep business insights, you’ll need to look beyond WooCommerce’s default reporting functionality. 

In this article, we’ll look at the default WooCommerce reports and show you some more advanced plugin options that can improve your reporting process.

Default vs. custom reports: Maximizing your WooCommerce insights

In WooCommerce, you have several ways of generating reports: using the base functionality, installing specialized plugins, or with custom code.

Default WooCommerce reports

The innovative WooCommerce Analytics software has replaced the platform’s previous reporting tool.

This robust analytics platform collects and returns data from all corners of your eCommerce store, offering a comprehensive perspective of your business performance. A few clicks will lead you there – just navigate to the Analytics section found on your WordPress dashboard.

This feature provides real-time analytics sourced from your store’s diverse range of sales and logistics data. It shows several types of information: 

• Sales data: Sales data can be segmented by product, variation, or category. By deeper analysis of sales trends, merchants can identify top-selling products and understand which variants perform best.

• Customer insights: Delving deep into customer behavior can reveal valuable findings, from patterns in buying habits to personal sales histories, which can customize customers’ shopping experiences and improve sales.

• Inventory updates: Proactively manage your merchandise to avoid missed sales opportunities and overstock with real-time stock notifications. This includes lists of low-in-stock, out-of-stock, and backorder products, enabling you to maintain an optimal inventory level.

• Tax information: Equip yourself with comprehensive tax data segmented by tax code and rate. This strategic insight can guide financial planning and streamline the daunting task of tax season.

Every report derived from WooCommerce Analytics is equipped with basic filtering options like data ranges. Still, some more specific reports offer more advanced filters to help you segment important data, like:

• Product categories. 
• User roles.
• Order status.  
• Coupon codes. 
• Taxes. 
• And more. 

And if you want to take advantage of external analytics tools, you can export the different reports as a CSV file.

Custom WooCommerce reports

While WooCommerce’s default analytical tools provide valuable insights into an online store’s operations, they can sometimes fall short. For instance, they may not provide insights into customer behavior over time or in-depth product performance. For businesses craving more comprehensive data, custom WooCommerce reports are the perfect solution.

Custom reports unlock access to data beyond the reach of WooCommerce’s basic analytics, for example, providing you with a deeper understanding of your customers. Through them, you can aggregate various data points, such as purchase history, frequency, and preferences, to build well-informed customer profiles. These profiles can then be used to fuel personalized marketing campaigns or improve customer service.

One of the most useful use cases for custom reports is using them to make intelligent stocking decisions. Using a custom report to track a product’s lifecycle – from the initial restock to the final sale – can aid in predicting sales trends, thereby optimizing inventory turnover and reducing carrying costs.

Overall, custom advanced reports can provide a substantial boost to your store’s performance. With the refinement of these detailed insights, businesses can increase their conversion rates and improve customer satisfaction significantly, leading to a direct increase in their bottom line. 

There are several ways of creating WooCommerce custom reports, one of which is through code. This is done by fetching the required data from the WooCommerce Rest API and using some advanced PHP knowledge to turn it into something you can actually use. 

As you’ve probably already guessed, this can be quite challenging if you’re not a programmer yourself. So, what most WooCommerce owners do, and what we recommend, is use a dedicated reporting plugin. If you’re wondering why we haven’t mentioned Google Analytics as a viable option, there have been some reports about data discrepancies, which is not ideal when striving for accuracy. Additionally, most WooCommerce owners and agencies prefer to have their analytics dashboard directly in the app instead of using an external platform.

Choosing a plugin for enhanced WooCommerce reporting

When choosing a plugin, you need to carefully consider your business needs. For example, you might be an eCommerce store owner who needs to segment product data in order to decide how to expand. Or you could be an agency looking to provide in-depth analysis to their clients according to their specific KPIs and goals. 

Whatever your need might be, there is a plugin for it, and you can make your search easier by keeping an eye out for key features, such as: 

• Customizable dashboards: Ability to create personalized dashboards that display the most relevant data for quick analysis.
• Data filtering and segmentation: Features that allow users to filter and segment data based on various criteria, making it easier to focus on specific areas of interest.
• Real-time data reporting: The plugin should offer real-time data tracking and reporting capabilities for up-to-date information.
• Export and share options: Ability to export reports in various formats (e.g., PDF, Excel) and share them easily with team members or stakeholders.
• User access control: Features that allow different levels of access to different users, ensuring data security and appropriate data access.
• Custom metrics and KPI tracking: The ability to track custom metrics and KPIs that are most relevant to the business.

While we can’t cover every option on the market, we’ll show you our top choices when it comes to WooCommerce reporting plugins. 

Metorik

Meteorik is a reporting plugin we recommend for agencies that work with multiple WooCommerce stores due to its unique functionalities. 

• A multi-store unified preview that brings all your store’s performance metrics to a single platform.
• Customizable dashboards that you can build yourself, save for later use, and even share with other users. 
• Enhanced reporting that supports a wide range of metrics, including revenue, customer retention, product stock, gross sales by UTM channel and source, and many more. 
• A great customer support team, frequently praised by the user community for its prompt and proactive service.

Pricing depends on the amount of orders you get per month. For example, the lowest option is 500 orders per month, and for that, you’ll have to pay a monthly fee of $50.

Product Sales Report for WooCommerce

Product Sales Report for WooCommerce stands out with extended sorting and filtering options. What sets it apart from its competitors is the user’s control over what is included in the report, how it’s sorted, and where it’s emailed. 

• Choose from many sorting options, including date range, order status, and product specifics.
• Group product variations, set display orders, and choose reporting fields.
• Save report presets for repeated use – PRO feature.
• Create email reports in different formats like XLSX and HTML, available via the PRO plan.
• Advanced styling and CSS customization – PRO feature. 

While the free version has many useful features, some advanced functionalities are available exclusively in the Pro version. The pricing for that starts at $59 per month for a single site. 

Advanced WooCommerce Reporting

Advanced WooCommerce Reporting provides critical eCommerce insights, including customer behavior patterns and product purchase data, in comprehensible graphical formats. 

• Interesting visual reports such as pie charts and bar charts. 
• In-depth reporting capabilities for orders, products, categories, countries, states, taxes, and refunds.
• Target setting and analysis – Set sales targets and compare actual sales to projected sales.
• The capability to send reports via email at scheduled times.

Pricing for Advanced WooCommerce Reporting is $45 for a regular license.