How to See What Products Sold in WooCommerce: A Comprehensive Guide
Understanding which products are your bestsellers is critical for making informed business decisions in your WooCommerce store. Knowing what’s selling allows you to optimize your inventory, refine your marketing strategies, and ultimately, boost your profits. This article provides a comprehensive guide on how to effectively see what products are selling in your WooCommerce store. We’ll explore various methods, from the built-in WooCommerce reports to more advanced techniques using plugins and code snippets.
Analyzing Your Sales Data: Why It Matters
Before diving into the ‘how’, let’s quickly touch upon the ‘why’. Analyzing your sales data offers a wealth of actionable insights:
- Identifying Top Performers: Discover which products consistently generate the most revenue.
- Spotting Trends: Notice seasonal peaks and dips in product sales.
- Optimizing Inventory: Avoid stockouts for popular items and reduce dead stock of slow-moving products.
- Refining Marketing Efforts: Focus your marketing campaigns on products with high potential and adjust strategies for underperforming items.
- Improving Customer Experience: Tailor your store based on customer preferences and purchase patterns.
- Sales: This provides an overview of your total sales, net sales, average order value, and more. You can filter this report by date range and customize the display. While it doesn’t directly show individual product sales, it gives a good overview.
- Orders: This report allows you to filter orders by status (completed, pending, processing, etc.) and date. You can download order data to CSV for further analysis.
- Products: This is where you’ll find the most relevant information for understanding product performance. It lists your top-selling products by quantity or revenue.
- Sales by product: This section shows the total sales and earnings for each product.
- Sales by category: This section displays sales by product category. Useful for identifying broader trends.
- Downloads: If you sell downloadable products, this tracks download activity.
- Customers: Provides data on customer spending and order frequency.
- Metorik: A powerful reporting platform specifically designed for WooCommerce. It provides detailed insights into sales, customers, products, and subscriptions.
- Google Analytics for WooCommerce: Integrates your store with Google Analytics to track user behavior, traffic sources, and conversion rates. This provides a wealth of data beyond just sales figures.
- Advanced WooCommerce Reporting: Adds custom reporting options to the WooCommerce dashboard, allowing you to analyze sales data in more granular detail.
- Jetpack: Includes basic WooCommerce analytics features, such as sales overviews, top products, and order information.
- Real-time dashboards: Visualize your sales data in real-time.
- Detailed product reports: View sales by product, variations, categories, and more.
- Customer segmentation: Analyze customer behavior based on purchase history.
- Email automation: Trigger automated emails based on customer actions.
Leveraging Built-in WooCommerce Reports
WooCommerce offers a set of built-in reports that provide a good starting point for analyzing your sales data. These reports are easily accessible from your WordPress dashboard.
#### Accessing the WooCommerce Reports
1. Navigate to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Click on WooCommerce in the left-hand menu.
3. Click on Reports.
#### Understanding the Key Reports
Within the Reports section, you’ll find several valuable reports:
#### Using Filters and Date Ranges
Filtering reports by date range is crucial for identifying trends and comparing performance over different periods. WooCommerce offers various date range options (e.g., last month, this year) or allows you to specify a custom range. You can also compare data from different periods. For instance, compare sales from last year’s holiday season to this year’s.
Utilizing WooCommerce Extensions and Plugins
For more advanced reporting and analytics, consider using WooCommerce extensions or plugins. Several plugins offer enhanced features and customization options.
#### Popular Reporting Plugins
#### Setting Up Google Analytics for WooCommerce
Here’s a basic outline of setting up Google Analytics for WooCommerce. Remember that details might vary depending on the specific plugin you use for integration.
1. Install and activate a Google Analytics plugin for WooCommerce (e.g., “GA4 for WooCommerce”).
2. Connect your Google Analytics account: The plugin will guide you through connecting your GA account. This usually involves authenticating with Google.
3. Enable Enhanced Ecommerce tracking: This setting is *crucial* for tracking product-specific sales data in Google Analytics. Most plugins have a toggle to enable this.
4. Configure event tracking: (Optional, but recommended) Configure the plugin to track specific user interactions, such as adding products to the cart, initiating checkout, etc.
5. Verify the integration: Place a test order and check Google Analytics to ensure that the data is being tracked correctly.
#### Using a Plugin: An Example
Let’s say you use Metorik. After installing and connecting it to your WooCommerce store, you’ll gain access to:
Employing Code Snippets and Custom Queries (Advanced)
For those comfortable with coding, using code snippets or custom queries offers the ultimate Learn more about How To Remove Plugin From Woocommerce flexibility in retrieving sales data.
#### Accessing Product Sales with PHP
You can use PHP code snippets to query the WooCommerce database directly and retrieve sales data for specific products.
<?php global $wpdb;
$product_id = 123; // Replace with the actual product ID
$query = $wpdb->prepare(
“SELECT SUM(oi.order_item_meta._qty) AS total_quantity
FROM {$wpdb->prefix}woocommerce_order_items AS oi
LEFT JOIN {$wpdb->prefix}woocommerce_order_itemmeta AS oim ON oi.order_item_id = oim.order_item_id
LEFT JOIN {$wpdb->posts} AS p ON oi.order_id = p.ID
WHERE oim.meta_key = ‘_product_id’
AND oim.meta_value = %d
AND p.post_status IN (‘wc-processing’, ‘wc-completed’, ‘wc-on-hold’)”,
$product_id
);
$total_quantity = $wpdb->get_var( $query );
if ( $total_quantity ) {
echo ‘Total quantity sold for product ‘ . $product_id . ‘: ‘ . $total_quantity;
} else {
echo ‘No sales found for product ‘ . $product_id;
}
?>
Important considerations when using code:
- Backup your database: Always back up your database before making any changes to your WordPress site.
- Use a child theme: Implement code changes in a child theme to avoid losing them during theme updates.
- Security: Be cautious when using code snippets from untrusted sources, as they may contain vulnerabilities.
Conclusion: Turning Data into Action
Knowing how to see what products sold in WooCommerce is only the first step. The real value comes from Read more about Woocommerce How To Offer Free Shipping analyzing the data and using it to make informed decisions. Whether you rely on built-in reports, utilize powerful plugins, or delve into custom code, consistently monitoring your sales data is essential for growing your WooCommerce store. By identifying top-performing products, understanding customer preferences, and optimizing your marketing strategies, you can maximize your revenue and achieve long-term success. Remember to regularly review your data and adapt your strategies as your business evolves.
