How to find your best sellers and where your sales come from

The Best sellers card and the two rings, Sales by channel and Sales by category, answer the two questions a trading meeting opens with: what is selling, and where the money comes from. All three sit on Selling › Analytics, part of What is Store analytics?.

Each one follows the period in the page header. See How to change the date range.

How do you rank your best sellers?

With the dropdown in the corner of the Best sellers card, which reads By revenue or By units. The card lists your top eight products by whichever you pick.

The two lists often disagree. Revenue shows what pays for the business; units show what customers reach for, which is what you plan stock around.

At Fairgreen Golf Co., the merino quarter-zip tops the list By revenue and the logo cap tops it By units. Those point to different reorders.

How do you narrow the list?

With the two dropdowns beside it, All vendors and All categories. Each one lists every vendor or category that sold in your period.

Pick Kaimen Knitwear under All vendors to see how that one supplier's range is doing before you write their next order. See How to add and set up a supplier.

Changing the ranking or the period sets both filters back to All vendors and All categories.

How do you read each row?

Each product shows two bars. The solid bar is this period, the faint bar beneath it is the period before, and the figures on the right give both.

The chip at the end shows the change as a percentage, green for up and red for down. It is blank when the product sold nothing in the previous period, which usually means something new has started to sell.

By units shows each figure as a count, such as "42 sold".

What does the margin tell you?

The card shows Gross margin as one percentage above the list, and each product shows its own margin beside its name, such as "54% mgn". Margin is sales less the cost per item recorded in Shopify.

A product high on the list with a thin margin earns you less than its place suggests. Reading the two together is how that shows up.

A product shows no margin when any of its sales in the period had no cost in Shopify. The Gross margin line counts only sales that have a cost, so add the cost per item to those products in Shopify to complete it.

What does Sales by channel show?

Revenue split by where each order was placed: Point of sale, Online store, Draft orders, Shop app, Mobile app and Other. Every order sits in one channel, so the ring adds up to the Revenue tile.

Beside each channel you see its revenue, its share, how many orders it took, and its change on the previous period. A big slice from few orders means large baskets; many orders in a small slice means the opposite.

What does Sales by category show?

Sales split by the product type you set in Shopify. Products with no type sit under Uncategorized.

Beside each category you see its sales, its share and its change on the previous period. To see the products inside one category, pick it in All categories on Best sellers.

Both rings name their five biggest slices and fold the rest into Other, which has no change chip.

Why don't the cards add up to the same total?

Because they count different things. Revenue and Sales by channel count what customers paid on each order, including shipping and tax.

Best sellers and Sales by category count what each product sold for after discounts, without shipping or tax. Their totals come in below Revenue, and the gap is normal.

How do you go from a best seller to a reorder?

Open Selling › Inventory, which shows each product's stock with its Cover, the days it will last at the rate it sells, and a suggested Reorder quantity.

Best sellers tells you what deserves stock. Inventory tells you what is about to run out of it, and the two are often different products. See How to find out what you need to reorder.

Can you get this as an answer instead?

Yes, and for "what is underperforming" it is usually faster. Open the Agent with the sparkle on the right edge of the page (see What is the Agent?).

On an empty chat, Where are we weak under Sales breaks down this week's sales and ranks what is underperforming by the size of the opportunity. You can also press +, choose Saved prompts and pick it under Digests. See How to reuse a question: starters, skills, digests and saved prompts.