sales vs inventory reports

In addition to Sales analytics Portfolytics shows you important info how your collections and categories are constructed. All without any additional setup. Depending if you are in the Collections or Hierarchy view you will see KPIs such as “Collections Online”, “Collections with Sales”, “Products Online” or “Unique Products Sold”. These numbers will update based on the filter values you have selected.

This is what we call “Sales vs Inventory.” I haven’t seen it mentioned much online but it is a very useful and intuitive way of improving your store and thus getting more sales and optimizing conversion (CRO). The Reports show the amount of sales per collection or category, how many different (unique) products they have, how many different products (not variants) were sold and how much sales you had compared compared to the number of unique products.

Why this matters

Some Shopify categories or collections have dozens of products but very few sales. Others have just a few products but bring in a lot of revenue.

Here are two examples to make this clear. Let’s say we filter for the previous 30 days:

  • 20 products in “Scarves” → 2,800€in sales
    • Sales per unique products = 140€
  • 20 products in “Socks” → 360€ in sales
    • Sales per unique products = 18€

With the same amount of products scarves are selling almost 10x what socks are. This is a great opportunity to find more scarves to add to your collection or category.

  • 3 products in “Men’s Shoes” → 1,000€in sales
    • Sales per unique products = 333€
  • 15 products in “Men’s Trousers” → 1,000€ in sales
    • Sales per unique products = 67€

These numbers tell a different story. When you first glance at the sales numbers you might think that both collections are doing equally well, after all they both have sold for a 1000€. Then you look at the Products Online column and realize that “Men’s Shoes” only has 3 different products available while “Men’s Trousers” has 15. And the Sales per Unique Products shows you 333€ and 67€, respectively.

The obvious take from the second example is that you should certainly expand the “Men’s Shoes” shoes. Notice how easily you can figure out which categories or collections have more potential.

One thing I would make a habit of doing when analyzing your collections is to check how visible and easy to find each collection is. If it is selling well but a bit hidden try moving it to an easier to find location. If it isn’t sellign well but you’re still promoting it -> time to find a replacement. I personally really like this kind of CRO because it’s both easy to do (with Portfolytics, good luck with spreadsheets) and doesn’t take a lot of time.

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