If I could give this post 1,000 +1’s, I would. Brianna Norcross is operations manager at Reaktiv Studios and she is super obsessive with the numbers and good reporting.
In her experience, and I wholeheartedly agree, WordPress eCommerce plugin reporting has room to improve.
A very important but oft-overlooked part of a successful business is regular analysis of different facets of your product, your customers, and the transaction itself.
Once you sell something online, you quickly realize how much you wish you could get out of WordPress product reporting that you can’t.
She recently had a call with some makers of eCommerce software about the kind of stuff to track, but what I really like in her post is her warning for folks to start with just making the right data available:
The best and most frustrating thing about most e-commerce software is that it’s probably already tracking all the data that would make those reports doable, but not providing the user a way to see or extract it. Making it easy for managers to get reports is the most reliable way to get people to pay attention to the data, and paying attention to the data is key to building better businesses.
If I know you developers reading this– and I do– you’re probably thinking of some grandiose way to display all this sexy, sexy data on a gorgeous dashboard chart. I admire your vision, but at bare minimum let’s get the data stored and exportable. Us analysts are really just looking for an excuse to mess with spreadsheets anyway.
I use SkyVerge’s CSV Export tool for some of the WooCommerce data I want, but I think more WooCommerce (and EDD / WP eCommerce / etc) built in reporting would be awesome too. So if you have anything to do with this kind of stuff, go check out Brianna’s post, not to mention Reaktiv’s snazzy new website.
