Products: Product Performance

Overview

Hotcakes empowers you in many areas, and this is one of them.  When you're editing your catalog and choose a product to edit, you'll first be shown the Product Performance view.  This view allows you to instantly see live data about your product and make data-driven decisions.  All of this with you only having to click a link.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Have access to your Hotcakes store administration

Getting Started

There is nothing you need to do in order to proceed with this article.

Product Performance

Click on the edit link for any product in any view while in the e-commerce administration area to begin viewing the product's performance data.  This not only shows you what happened, but why it happened, and suggestions on how to may your sales increase even more.

This view begins by telling what product this is, when it was last edited and when it was originally added to your product catalog.  It also has a button to add another product from here.

You have the ability to switch the date range that this data is loading.  Whether you choose Year, Quarter, or something else... the data you see will show the information for the past length of time matching that selection for both the chart and the sales funnel.  The site will also remember that selection for you, so you don't have to choose it again every time you reach this page.

Performance Chart

The product performance chart allows you to plainly see the performance of your product over time, while at the same time seeing what may have caused any trends that you may see.  You can event turn on and off the various dimensions of data, by clicking on the respective data label.

When you see events in the chart, you'll be able to see it's label when you hover over it, as you see with the Price Update below.

The first set of data is the actual performance itself, as illustrated with the trending steps of colors in the image above.

Setting	Description
Bounced	This data represents the number of people that have viewed the product at some point, but haven't yet added the product to the cart.  This metric is generally higher than the others.  In general, you'll always want to see your bounce rate go down over time.
Abandoned	The abandonment rate is the number of times that the product has been added to the cart, but never purchased.  These are your abandoned carts.  This is a metric that you would also like to see trending downwards at all times.
Purchased	The rate of purchase is an area were upwards trends are good.  This is the number of times the product has successfully been purchased.

The next set of data is the various events that may have helped to cause the trends. 

Setting	Description
Image Update	Everytime you update the primary image of the product, it triggers this event.  An updated image could easily improve or hurt your product sales, depending on a variety of factors.
Copy Update	This event is triggered whenever you update the product name, description, info tabs, or any of the meta data.
Price Update	Anytime you update the cost, MSRP, and site price, this event is triggered and registered.  Pricing always has a direct impact on the sales in your site.
Multiple Updates	If you perform multiple updates on the same day, this event will be shown in the chart.  As an example, this would be the case if you updated both the copy and the pricing at the same time.

Sales Funnel

This is a standard sales funnel that allows you to see the current health of your product from a sales perspective.  The pattern you saw in the performance chart is mostly present here as well.  In each of the three sections of your funnel, you'll see not only the vanity number, but you'll also see how this number is trending, or not.  

The first stage is the number of views your product has had.  Ideally, you always want the number of views trending up at all times.  The more views you have, the more people you'll see moving into the subsequent stages of your sales funnel.

The Added to Cart stage of the sales funnel represents how many times customers are adding this product to their cart.  You'll want this value to continuously trend upwards as well.

The final stage of your sales funnel represents how many times the product has been purchased.  Like with the previous two stages, you'll always want this value to trend up.

Bundle Suggestions

Hotcakes is smart enough to know a lot about what you and your customers are doing on the site.  This information is kept locally on your site, and it's reverse-engineered to help you do a lot of things, including building product bundles.  You can read more about a product bundle in other areas of the documentation.

Whenever a customer buys two or more products together, this implicitly tells you that these products are likely to be purchased together by other customers as well.  When this happens, Hotcakes already automatically up-sells the product relationship on the front end, but this same information helps us to help you determine whether or not you might want to create a bundle.

Creating a bundle can help you raise your overall sales, and your average deal size in your store.  It's incredibly simple to do too.  Simply check the checkbox for each product you want to bundle with this one, and then click the Create a Bundle button.  From there, you'll be directed to a new product edit view where you can complete the bundle creation process.  This new bundle will help you sell more products and it can also help you sell more from a promotional perspective.

Control Panel Companion

The control panel has a companion feature that will allow you to see the same product performance information whenever you are viewing the product on the front end of your site, like a customer might.  This will appear, as long as you're authenticated as someone with appropriate permissions.  What you see is the collapsed view, but clicking on it will expand it to show what you're used to seeing in the back end, complete with a button to begin editing the product immediately.