quick wins

This article is a quick dive into what Portfolytics can do for you to save time and sell more. Without any sort of set-up or customization needed. I am confident that after reading this and checking out some numbers in Portfolytics you will be able to sell more and also think of your store from a whole new point of view.

Shopify Collection basic info

One of the most common questions Shopify merchants or ecommerce managers ask is how to check which collections sell the best. With Portfolytics you can just open the app and on the default report, Collections – Sales, you find a nifty report that shows you your best sellers in descending order (you can also reverse it to ascending) with some other useful numbers.

You can click on any collection to see sales and other info for all the products in that collection.

If you want to know how many collections you have online, on the top section of Collections – Sales the app has a handy KPI called Collections Online which you can compare to Collections with Sales KPI to quickly find out how many of your collections haven’t had any sales.

How to improve shopify collection sales

Ok so now you know your way around the Collection – Sales report and might be asking yourself “how do I sell more with this thing?”. I would start with comparing the best and worst selling collections to how they are located in your shop.

If you have a collection that sells really well despite not being very visible in your home page you should at least consider promoting it for a while. Better yet if you can do an A/B test.

Or when you check your home page and the collections that are above the fold or high up in the home page aren’t really converting, it might be time to replace those with collections that actually sell. Increasing conversion rate in Shopify in my opinion is just a function of doing lots of little things after another. There is no magic bullet.

Compare sales to your shopify portfolio

Let’s do something a bit more advanced. Now that you know how many collections you have what how they sell you might have already rearranged some of them on your Shopify store to get the best converting collections more visibility and thus more sales.

There is a way to make the good collections even better. I would bet that most Shopify store owners or ecommerce managers with a lot of collections and products don’t know how many products each collection has compared to how much it sells. And if you don’t know that, how can do you know which collections to expand?

Portfolytics offers an easy solution to this. Click on Sales vs Inventory in the left pane and now the easy-to-read tables show your Shopify product portfolio compared to your sales. The Sales vs Products Online compares your historical sales to the number of products you have online in your store now to give you a better picture on the effectiveness of each collection.

If the number is big – Add more products if you can. And if it’s small check if some of the products even have sales. Too many products can also hurt a store.

increasing Seasonal sales

The holiday season is coming and your store should be at it’s best for the increased traffic and untypically open wallets. But how can you sell more without spending a ton of money on expensive ads?

One fast and easy trick that I like a lot is to Filter by date, see what sold the same season previous year, for example the Christmas season of 2024, and the chances are that the same types of products will sell this year as well. This can be done very fast with Portfolytics. Filter by date and then check collections that sold well. I also recommend to check the best selling products in a couple of the best selling collections.

Now you will know what to promote on your home page and newsletters. Fast and effective!

shopify product hierarchy

So far I have only talked about collections instead of product categories (Women -> Dresses or Computers -> Accessories etc.). If you want to know more about them I highly recommend that you read this post.

Most of the advice I gave earlier also applies for the product hierarchies (click Hierarchy in the top pane) so I won’t repeat that here. But looking at your Shopify store product portfolio in a hierarchy instead of separate collections (remember, in Shopify each category and subcategory is still a collection) can provide you insights that you can act on.

Continuing from the previous Christmas season example: When you compare your last year’s Christmas sales to your sales for the past year you notice that Men’s category sold twice as much as it usually in the same time period does so you click that, see that especially shirts sold well (thank you for the soft packages ladies..) but trousers didn’t. Now in the next marketing team meeting you know what to suggest and can back it with numbers. No need to overcomplicate things.

conclusion

These tips are just a way to give you a quick win or two when you don’t have the time to do a more thorough analysis. The building block for improving an ecommerce store is to get a better understanding which collections, categories and products convert and to find hidden opportunities like those collections that sell ok but are hidden somewhere deep inside your store. Or to expand on categories that only have a few products but have decent sales (high Sales per Products Online).

I hope that these tips help you to sell more, and save some time from those spreadsheets. As always feel free to contact me through our contact form or the chat widget on the bottom right of this page (the fastest way) and I will do my best to help you.

All the best,
Ville