The Power of Reports in LemonStand

2 | published by Aleksey B. on Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Everybody seems to love the visual reports in LemonStand. But do you realize the real power of the reporting features in LemonStand? I want to reveal some tricks that you may not know about.

Filters

You can find filters above some lists in LemonStand - for example, above the product and order lists. Although the filtering feature is not a visual report, it is a reporting function, because it helps you narrow down data lists and find specific information. Using filters you can limit the product list by manufacturer or product category. The nice thing is that you can apply multiple filters simultaneously. For example, you can ask LemonStand to display all products from a specific category, produced by specific manufacturers.

Or if you deal with the order list, you can configure filters to display all new orders made by registered users, which contain items of goods or downloadable product type.

Visual reports

Visual reports represent your sales information as charts. The Reports menu contains reports provided by all LemonStand modules. At the moment only the Shop module supplies reports. But in the future other modules may introduce additional reports.

Some reports can display data in different modes - as a line chart, pie chart and bar chart. The line chart is handy when you want to track the dynamics of something, for example how the order totals progresses over time. The line chart mode is available for all reports, while the pie and bar charts are available only for some of them. This is due to the nature of the types of data being displayed. It wouldn't make sense to preview order totals as a pie chart. But it is handy to see a pie chart when you analyze sales distribution among different manufacturers.

You can select a report using the sidebar menu of the Reports page. Right now there are 7 different reports in LemonStand:

Orders - displays sales data independently on ordered items.
Products - display sales distribution of individual products. You can display subtotals, assigned to specific products or number of items sold.
Categories - displays performance of product categories based on total products ordered or order subtotals within the categories.
Groups - displays sales distribution of custom product groups. You can create groups of non-related products (we call such groups custom product groups in LemonStand) in order to analyze sales information assigned with these groups. Product groups can be used for things such as "Featured Products" on your homepage or anywhere else.
Product Types - displays sales distribution between different product types. You can compare order totals between downloadable and physical products for example.
Manufacturers - this report displays sales information between the entered manufacturers.
Coupon Usage - displays sales distribution among coupons. Orders and Coupon Usage reports are order-centric reports. They can display revenue and order totals information, while other reports are product-centric and can display only subtotals assigned to specific products in orders.

In reports, filters work in the same way as they work in lists. You can narrow down displayed information and limit a number of displayed records. For example, if you have many products, when you open the Products report, you could see something like this:

You can fix the report by selecting specific products in the product filter. Click the product link in the Report Filters area and select products which you want to see on the chart. Alternatively you can limit the data by a specific product group or with any other filter.

A fiew more tips

You can change the chart height by dragging the grey bar which is below the chart area. It is especially helpful when you work with pie charts.
It is possible to export orders and customers corresponding to a current report configuration to CSV files.
The drop-down menus on the left above the chart area allow you to select which information you want to preview (for example - tax value, or number of items sold), and whether you want to see all orders or only paid orders (i.e. orders which have a Paid status in the status history).