What Reporting Does Magento Offer?

Magento offers all sorts of functionality for selling, customer management, product creation, and so much more. One out-of-the-box feature includes sales reporting, a tool that can provide you with a lot of information about store activity. Magento’s reporting shows statistics for sales, shopping carts, products, customers, and things like SEO statistics and product reviews. To […]

By Alyssa Schaad

What sort of reporting does Magento have to offer?

Magento offers all sorts of functionality for selling, customer management, product creation, and so much more.
One out-of-the-box feature includes sales reporting, a tool that can provide you with a lot of information about store activity.

Magento’s reporting shows statistics for sales, shopping carts, products, customers, and things like SEO statistics and product reviews.

To view these reports, head over to the backend of your Magento store, and head to the Reports tab.
From there, you can select the kind of report you want to generate.
Let’s look at Reports > Sales > Orders.

As you can see, reports can be customized and filtered down to your needs.

You can get as specific as the exact date you want, what kind of orders you’re looking for (Order Status), and whether or not you want to include days with no activities (Empty Rows).
You can even choose to show projected or actual values.
An explanation of what all these values mean can be found at https://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/doc/sales_reports_specifications

If you need even more specific data, there are a lot of extensions out there that might help you get what you need.

So why is reporting important?

Magento’s reporting can show you some pretty nifty things.  You can see information like what your best selling items are, what coupons your customers have used, and how often they abandon their shopping carts.

Knowing information like this can help you pinpoint and combat potential sales losses.  You can decide your next e-mail campaign based off these reports. Or, you can see how successful your current campaign is.  How are people getting to your site? Where are they coming from? It can even help you build better customer relationships or predict trends in your store.

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One of the reports, Search Terms, shows what people are searching for on your site. This data can be extremely valuable.  It can help you get a better idea of what your customers are looking to buy from you, and from there, you can make decisions on what product to stock.  The caveat with this, is that it shows you every term they search for, including typos, and sorting through this data is less than optimal.  You can’t sort by date, and can only seem to sort alphabetically, by number of results per search term, or how often people search a term.

Some other downsides to Magento’s Out-of-the-Box reporting is the lack of graphical data. The data is mostly tabular, with the only graphical aspect of it located on the main admin Dashboard. Unfortunately, with this graph, you’re really only limited to 5 pre-set time periods and unspecific data.  The Dashboard can be helpful as it summarizes your reports showing you things like “Top 5 Search Terms”, new customers, etc, but outside of that, you can’t really customize what data to see and how specific you need it.

If you’re looking to get more robust graphs and a few extra specifications, the AheadWorks Advanced Reports extension might be right up your alley.
https://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/advanced-reports-by-aheadworks.html

Despite these drawbacks, it’s absolutely fantastic that Magento comes with this kind of reporting. There aren’t a lot of other ecommerce packages that come with something this complex. On top of this, you can export results in CSV format. This comes in especially handy when you need to make calculations with any sales data, or want to make graphs and visuals, in a program like Excel, to go with your data.

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