Magento 2 has seen tremendous growth over the years, solidifying itself as the most powerful and versatile e-commerce solution in the world. One of the biggest factors behind its success is the dedicated community that is constantly working to create new and exciting extensions for the platform. These extensions take an already powerful e-commerce solution and give business owners the chance to add any and every feature imaginable to their online stores. One feature that Magento 2 sorely lacks is the ability to create advanced reports from internal sales data. But we have a solution.
Advanced Reports for Magento 2, which we use as part of our Magento 2 Upgrade Package, comes from our friends over at aheadworks and is one of the most popular and most useful extensions available today to Magento 2 users.
So how can Advanced Reports help your online store and what are some of the standout features? Read on to find out.
Performance
Advanced Reports for Magento 2 from aheadworks is the fastest reporting extension available on the market. We always talk about the importance of online store speed and how it helps keep end-users happy. Well, sometimes it should be about you as well!
As a store owner, being able to access up-to-date advanced analytics from all aspects of your online store is important both to your productivity and your sanity. The latest version of the Advanced Reports extension introduced data indexing which means all your store data is pre-generated daily. This allows you to pull up your stats instantly without waiting a long time for data to be compiled on the fly. In fact, the reports show up on your screen without actually contacting the online store server. As with most things in this extension, the data indexing can be changed from the default daily option, allowing for more flexibility.
The Advanced Reports for Magneto 2 extension is great for stores of any size and was designed to work with large stores that process multiple orders at any given time. With a proper server setup (like Rackspace or Google Cloud hosted with Finestshops, for example), you can index over 200,000 orders within a few minutes. Not only is it quick, but the extension will not put an extreme strain on your server or cause any downtimes.
Reports
It would be one thing to allow for simple reports to load quickly. You would probably expect that. But the Advanced Reports extension goes way beyond that, showing you a huge amount of data through different views, sorting methods and criteria customization. Every report available is important and should be monitored, but there are some standouts.
- Detailed Sales – Shows an in-depth breakdown of all your items sold over a specific time period, including profits, margins, discounts applied, taxes and exact amounts of items sold.
- Sales by Category and Manufacturer – To truly understand your audience and your products, the category and manufacturer sales reports are a fantastic way to determine where your strengths and weaknesses are. Combining these 2 reports can provide a lot of insight into what the users are shopping for, which could end up being different than what you have been focusing on selling and promoting.
- Abandoned Carts – Monitoring abandoned carts is is important to conversion and engagements. The average abandoned cart rate is almost 80% and being able to view daily abandon rates compared to other weeks, months and years can show where your store is losing revenue as well as help you strategize for the steps to take after a cart is abandoned.
- Traffic and Conversion – Is your traffic pretty good but you don’t think you are selling as much as you should? This report will show your conversions compared to traffic, with a lot of customizable options, as well as how this all related to specific products.
Visualization
All these great statistics and reports wouldn’t be of much use to most people unless they were laid out and presented in the right way. The Advanced Reports extension handles visualization better than anyone, displaying data in an easy to understand manner while providing you with powerful sorting mechanics.
The dashboard shows all the essential data available about your online store and can be customized to your liking. This is the best place to get a quick snapshot how everything is going, and the best way to quickly spot issues, like an above-average abandoned cart rate or an increase in refunds, all of which is displayed on one page without having to drill into any sub-menus or secondary pages.
Every piece of data is color-coded and every chart can be adjusted. Every report comes with specific parameters that you can choose to display or not display, like in the detailed sales display we mentioned in the reports section above. All the totals of a specific query will be highlighted, and every marker of a chart will show an exact value if you hover over it. Everything is extremely intuitive and very easy to use.
Advanced Reports for Magento 2 User Experience & Interface
Speaking of ease of use and intuitive design, we have to mention the interface and how users interact with the Advanced Reports extension. The UI is designed for users to easily sort and organize data. Everything is clearly labeled and can help you navigate through a sea of data with a few clicks.
Every report can have data columns added or removed. Every report can also be filtered by all the data that is available in the columns that is in that report. The more data you show, the more complicated it will be to sort so these filters give you endless customizability options for how you want your data to be shown to you, without having to look at things you are not interested in at the time.
Dates can be adjusted, certain times and periods can be shown, all of the products and categories link to their actual associated pages within the online store, and every piece of data and every report created can be exported into CSV or XML, no matter how large or small it may be.
Summary
The Advanced Reports Extension for Magento 2 is the best reports extension available for the popular e-commerce platform. It is highly rated, well optimized, affordable and fully supported by the folks over at aheadworks.
If you run a Magento 2 online store, then chances are you are very serious about running a successful e-commerce business. And one of the best ways to maximize conversion is to leverage your own data in order to understand your brands and your products.
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How can we help?
We can upgrade your current online store or work with you to create a new one. Sign up for our Managed E-commerce Service and create your new online store risk-free with no commitment. If you already have an online store, request a free performance test for an in-depth analysis of its’ strengths and weaknesses.
We use Magento 2, X-Cart or WooCommerce e-commerce systems for new store deployments and re-platforming as well as state of the art Rackspace or Google Cloud data centers for hosting that serves 60% of Fortune 500 companies worldwide. Our account managers are knowledgeable and innovative, our support engineers and developers are outstanding, and customer satisfaction is second to none.
If you are interested in Magento 2, as us about our Magento 2 Upgrade Package. This package is tailored towards small businesses to provide a feature-rich e-commerce experience without the steep startup costs. The package includes deployment of Magento 2, a modern design for the store, a number of essential extensions, 24/7 support and top of the line Cloud-based hosting using Rackspace Cloud and Google Cloud data centers around the world.
