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Viewing product sales with SLST
How to use SLST to see how well your products are selling
Saturday, June 09, 2007
By: Zimbit Vidor
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Having tons of products in your store is a good thing usually. Varity makes your store look more professional and gives you a competitive edge against stores that do not offer as many items. When walking into a shop first impressions make a difference and having many products makes the customer feel as if they should spend some time looking. Poorly stocked stores are easy to go into and easy to leave from after only spending a few seconds glancing around. So having many products is good.
Of course having many products is also hard too. Each product you sell uses at least a prim assuming you do not use a multi-vendor. That means you are limited to the number of products you can sell. The balance you need to work out is having as many products you can with the space provided. Of course, there is one more dimension added in that makes the process even more complicated.
Imagine walking into your store and seeing a hundred products for sale. You know some are selling since you are making lindens faster then you can spend them. You want to maximize your product line so that every product you have in your shop is making you money instead of a few. Sure, you can eye ball it, makings some guesses as to what products are selling the best. This takes time, energy and experience. Further, it is very easy to mess up when you are just guessing about what products are selling well and which ones are not. You don’t want to remove a product you think isn’t selling well when in fact it is selling better then another product you didn’t see in the corner.
Shops using SLST have an advantage because they can pull up reports that outline their products and show with hard numbers what is selling the best and what they need pull to make way for newer and better products. Using these reports is simple.
This article will look at how to use some of the build in matrix-reports and a few of the items on the My Summary page, within the SLST web site. To get started log into your account and make sure you have some recorded sales.
The matrix-reports are a simple and effective way to see quickly what products are selling the best. Further, you can also see what products are selling poorly. This will enable you to shuffle your product line to sell optimally and bring in more money from your retail locations.
To view these reports and create your own hover over the Reporting menu item at the top of the screen for options. First, look at a pre-built report by selecting Reports and then choosing a report you want to see. The reports each provide a different view of your data. It is easy to see what product lines are doing the best and which are not. You should experiment to see what reports work best for you and your business.
Next, we will build a report that will let you see your least selling products so you can think about removing them to make room for new products. Hover over the Reporting menu and select New Report. The new matrix-report wizard comes up. For the rows, select Product. For the columns, leave the default value of none. Then for the Data Items select sum. Click next to move onto the sorting step.
The sorting step allows you to sort the items from least selling to most selling. To do that, select ascending for the Data. Then click the next button to move onto the filtering section.
The filtering section lets you determine what sales will participate in the report. The defaults are good for now but remember to come back and explore the options offered in the filter section of the matrix-report wizard. Click next to move onto the final step, which is naming your report.
Naming your report is simple, just type in a name. For this report, you can type in Least Selling Products into the name text area. Then make sure you click the Save Report for Later Use. This will allow you to view this report any time you want with out having to re-create it from scratch. After you are finished, click the View Report button.
In a few seconds, the site will display your report. Notice the report sorts the least selling products to the top so you can quickly see what ones are not making you much. It is that simple to get a good list of products you can work with. This list of products is a great starting place when looking for products to drop or to work with a bit more, to turn into better selling products.
Next, this article will take a quick look at some “My Summary” parts that will help you to see how well your products are doing. Sometimes it is good to get a list of best selling products or a list of recent product sales. Not only is it fun but it keeps you in touch with your store. Click the Hover over the View menu item and then choose My Summary to pull the summary screen up. Your view might differ because you may have already added items to your summary page.
Click the Add Content link near the top right of the page to see a Content Catalog. For now put a check mark next to the top selling products and the most recent transactions items. Then click add and once the page refreshes click close. Your view will have changed to include these sections. Further, you can configure these sections to uniquely suite you by click the little black triangle and choosing edit. Each part has it’s own edit screen that allows you to choose what data you want to see and how much of it you want to see. You can really customize this screen to give you a quick view or a pulse of your business. Do not be afraid to play around with this section to build a mash up that works for you!
So remember when you need to see what products are selling and what ones are not look at the various matrix-reports, including the one you just created and saved, and the My Summary page. These reports can help you to make more money from your already outstanding business.
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