How to Analyze Sales Data on your Digital Downloads Webstore?

As a digital web store owner, you can generate different types of sales data such as order data, vendor data, customer data, product data, revenue data, profit data, vendor data, geographic data, and any other important data you can get and make use of for improving the sales performance of your digital webstore.

Now, you may have several eCommerce data in you, taken and generated from your digital download stores, but what significance can it bring to you? What can you get out of it? How those numbers can actually help your business grow? Do you know how to efficiently use those data for effective decision making?

Unlocking your true potential with eCommerce Sales Analytics

Sales Data Analysis in eCommerce provides businesses with a deeper understanding of customer habits and preferences. If you analyze sales data, it can give you a conclusion as to how are your products are doing? Why is your sales trend going up or down for a specific time period? What does your customer in a specific location want? Why some of your vendors are not doing well? And many other questions that can give light to your business decision-making.

eCommerce Sales Analytics will allow digital web stores to boost sales and conversions by running targeted campaigns to promote products among the different audience or customer segments that in turn, will eventually maximize their profits.

Also, we can discover additional untapped sales potential that they can also work on and try. But most importantly, these sales analytics will help them to do better in everything – products, vendors, marketing campaigns and many other sales and business aspects.

How to correctly Analyze Sales Data on your digital downloads webstore?

Tracking sales and understanding where the sales come from is essential when you look to optimize your Easy Digital Downloads store. Basically, you need to properly understand and get the most out of your sales data on your digital downloads stores.

Generally, the important questions to be answered are the following: Which countries do you sell best to? What are the best products to sell to by each country? From which vendors can you make most profits? How do sales compare to the previous month or the previous year? Which products are sold to which states (e.g. relevant for the US)? Also, which customers show the highest ARPU? etc.

Important Questions you might want to get answered

You may now wonder what in-depth analysis you must observe when using sales data in order to come up with a better decision that will help your business grow. To get you started, here we enumerated a few of the very important questions you might want to get answered in order to come up with better and effective economic decisions.

Which are the Top KPIs to track?

KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, can be used to measure and track the sales performance of your digital downloads webstore. These are the metrics to understand sales and to extract factors which drive sales. So how do we find this out? Here’s the magic formula we can use:

Net Earnings = Number of Paid Orders x Average Order value 

Or extended: Net Earnings = Number Total Orders x Paid Conversion % x Average Order value 

Now, how can we understand and get the variables for this formula? See below the top KPIs you should track on your digital webstore.

(1) Net Earnings – provide an accurate measure of a webstore’s financial performance. By tracking net earnings, webstore owners can identify areas where they can reduce expenses and increase profits. Knowing the amount of money, they have available after all expenses are paid, webstore owners can make informed decisions.

(2) Products Sold – this pertains to the number of products sold on your webstore from the selected time period. This helps us measure sale performance and determine if we are meeting our sales goals, as well as to evaluate our sales strategies and identify areas for improvement.

(3) Free to Paid Percentage – as already discussed, tracking conversion from free to paid products on your digital webstore is an essential aspect especially if you’re both offering free and paid products. You should aim for a high paid percentage which basically means your customers loved your Free Products, that they felt the need to obtain more features which allows them to upgrade and purchase the Paid Product.

(4) Number of Paid Orders – knowing how much of the orders received are paid is an accurate measure of real webstore’s sales performance. This is also used to compare and check the conversion from free to paid orders, which is essential to know your webstore’s revenue generating capacity. 

(5) Average Order Value (AOV) – generally, this metric only includes paid orders making it an accurate measure of actual order value. If the AOV is low, webstore owners can develop strategies to upsell customers or offer promotions to increase the value of each order. This can also provide insights into customer behavior and preferences. If the AOV is high, webstore owners can analyze the data to understand what is driving those higher sales and adjust their strategies accordingly.

Overall, KPIs are an important tool for businesses to measure, track, and optimize their performance, helping them to achieve their goals and objectives in an efficient and effective way.

Which products convert best from free to paid products?

When a customer starts using your free product, they are essentially trying it out and deciding whether or not it meets their needs. By tracking conversion rates, you can gain insights into what motivates customers to upgrade to a paid version of your product. 

Tracking sales conversion from free to paid products on your digital webstore is an essential aspect especially if you’re both offering free and paid products. This allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, improve your product offerings, and ultimately increase your revenue. 

Here are the KPIs you can see on our By Product Sales Report. We should focus on the # of Paid Orders, # of Free Orders, and the Paid Orders Percentage.

Overall, tracking conversion from free to paid products is crucial for your digital downloads webstore selling free and paid products. By monitoring and analyzing conversion rates, you can make data-driven decisions that will help you improve your marketing, and product offerings, and ultimately increase your webstore’s revenue.

Which of your vendors can bring you the most sales and profits?

When running a digital product marketplace, your vendors may issue products with both free and paid versions. Free versions are products that have limited features and benefits compared to the Paid Versions. In this case, customers may first try the product’s free version. Later on, few or many of those customers will return and purchase the product’s paid version.

Now, to answer our question of which of your vendors shows the best conversion rate from free to paid products, we need to generate sales data of each of your vendors and compare their free to paid version downloads and purchase and see which of them has the best conversion rate.

Basically, you can:

  1. Compare your vendor sales revenues per month.
  2. Compare your vendor profits after deducting commissions.

Since vendor management is very important when operating a digital product marketplace, conducting the analyzations above is essential to come up with decisions on how to particularly manage your vendors and therefore help them earn more.

Know your Best-Selling Products in Easy Digital Downloads 

If you want to optimize your sales conversion, keep revenue coming in and do better with your products and business as a whole, this is a very important question you have to get answered. Why? If you know which of your products sell best, there are a lot of implications you can learn and make use of to increase your sales revenue.

How to know which of your products sell best?

Upon analyzing specific sales data that you have gathered in your Easy Digital Downloads WordPress Webstore, you can try to come up with conclusions as to which of your products sell best.

Compare your product sales revenue over weeks, months or years. Watch how your sales trend goes by. This will show which of your products are selling consistently and which are slowly falling behind others.

What you can see in the chart above, is a sales report of the top 10 best-selling product and their earnings as per a selected time period and showing the earnings by product. 

A next important item is to obtain a quick view on your store performance overall. For this please refer to the listed key performance indicators on top of each report page.

Overall, knowing your best-selling products and comparing their sales metrics can lead to important insights into the sales performance of your Digital Downloads Webstore and allows for better reporting.

Using the product’s sales report to compare poor performance vs. the benchmark revenue figures of your best-selling products allows you to better identify unused potentials to improve some of your products in order to increase their average order values.

Using sales data effectively allows for identifying the reasons why some products are selling better than others and can lead to new ideas on how to create better-selling products. This is especially relevant in the case of selling digital downloadable products which can easier be produced and changed than manufactured products such as those sold in WooCommerce.

Which geographies show the highest revenue per user?

After establishing your digital product web store, you might actually conduct marketing campaigns to almost all parts of the world, just to reach every potential customer who might be interested to buy from your web store. But, as the months go by, marketing campaigns with very large coverage may no longer be needed, especially when paid advertisements and huge marketing budget is at stake. We now need to decide which specific locations we must prioritize in our marketing campaigns that we know will be effective in getting visitors that turn into customers.

Our goal now is to know which specific countries or states show the highest revenue per user that our web store is getting. How can we do that? We can apply below analyzation strategies to answer our question.

If you are operating a Digital Product Marketplace, you should consider revenue after deducting vendor commissions for a better and accurate sales comparison. Deducting commissions clearly shows which of these countries bring you the highest profit among others.

Now with all those analyzations above that, we have conducted using our sales data per geography, we can now conclude as to what countries our web store is earning the best revenues and profits. This is now the ideal time to decide and plan specific marketing campaigns and target those countries where our products are best purchased. In this case, we can increase our sales revenue by concentrating our marketing campaigns in certain regions where revenue and profits are actually coming, instead of spending the time and effort in regions which our products don’t sell well.

Analyze Sales Data using EDD Enhanced Sales Reports Plugin

Tracking sales and understanding where the sales come from is essential when you look to optimize your Easy Digital Downloads store. The EDD Enhanced Sales Reports Plugin offers additional analytics and reporting features to better understand where sales and profit data come from.

The goal of this plugin is to help EDD webstore owners extract all critical sales data from their website, and guide on how to use the best out of those metrics on optimizing the sales performance of the webstore.

Conclusion: Make the most out of your Sales Analytics

Being able to correctly and effectively analyze sales data on your EDD stores can have a major impact on your sales performance in the long run. Make sure you checked everything on the list above in order to properly improve your web store’s performance.

But, if you want to get an even extensive sales reporting with a lot more reporting features and customization, do not hesitate to try our EDD Enhanced Sales Report Pro Plugin. Kindly check the product page for the full plugin details.

Value of Good Customer Service for your Digital Product Webstore

If they run into problems, customer anger rises and they can’t find a representative to speak to quickly. There are many online businesses that are not responding to customer complaints or their responses are very sluggish, adding insult to injury. However, response time is crucial because three out of five customers never complete their purchases due to poor customer service.

American shoppers believe that customer service is a “true test” of how much a brand values them. Which is to say, they recall the customer service you have. For both negative and positive reasons the customer service that you provide is strong. 70% of consumers said they would remain loyal to certain retailers because of good customer service and 70% of customers cite poor customer service as a reason for not buying from a brand.

It costs seven times more to attract new customers than to retain existing customers. Providing excellent customer service not only improves revenue and revenues but also allows businesses in the industry to stand out. There are so many ways to offer excellent online service, even without face-to-face contact.

What is Good Customer Service?

Customer service is the position that lets clients get the value they’ve paid for from a product or service, particularly when things go wrong. Most companies have a dedicated customer service team, but those invested in providing quality experiences make support a priority for the organization at large.

The word ‘good customer service’ is intended to help clients make the right decisions. Your eCommerce brand needs to reduce the uncertainty of your customer, answer any questions and build enough confidence to persuade the shopper to pull the trigger and purchase. In comparison to traditional retailers – online shops don’t benefit from supportive customer service assistants.

Good Customer Service Strategies

Below are some best strategies to exercise good customer services on your WordPress webstore:

Build trust and relationship with customers

Loyalty is both the rarest asset in eCommerce and the main determinant of sustained eCommerce performance. When you can produce loyal customers consistently-you have a competitive advantage for yourself.

Note, the market is full of rivals and if your customer service fails by any measure, online shoppers need not walk far to visit one of the thousands of other rival stores in your niche. eCommerce brands need to work harder to maintain customers and create trust than any other company. It’s just that quick to abandon your online shoppers without having to offer any explanation.

Request Customer Feedback

Let’s face it, most consumers won’t leave reviews or suggestions unless you ask them to. Write a follow-up email asking them to rate their experience or write a short review on your blog or on social media. They’ll more than likely jump on it, particularly if you’re offering a small discount on a future purchase for that.

Feedback and ratings are also important for the company as they provide useful information and allow companies to see what works and what isn’t. Poor reviews aren’t all negative either, they’re an opportunity to find out and fix what went wrong. If the review was constructive or negative, reacting and thanking the client is often the right way to. Getting a conversation started is often a win-win. And the name of the game is being positive with social media.

Live Chat With Customers

Live chat is a great way for current and potential customers to get easy, easily accessible help. Fixes real-time consumer issues. There’s no need to have live chat available 24/7. You should set hours and post them on your website, so that customers know where you can be found. The duration of live chat will be dependent on the highest traffic levels, with additional hours added during a sale or directly after a promotional email has been sent.

Provide Service Through Social Media

Community Support for the clients. Social networking is where people meet and talk and connect, so why not be where your clients are and talk with them to answer any questions or concerns they may have. Your customers will not only appreciate the immediate attention, but it will also encourage future customers to see how open your company is.

Alerts from social media let you know when your business is being addressed, and let you join in the discussion. According to a report by Bain & Company, businesses that connect with customers and respond to customer service requests on social media end up generating 20 to 40 percent more revenue from those clients.

Prepare FAQs to lessen customer inquiries

Head off (and reduce) supporting questions by developing a FAQ page or other documentation that communicates your specific policies and responds to the most popular queries. Providing this knowledge to your customers, and making it easy to find, gives them the opportunity to self-serve and saves valuable time.

5 Tips in replying to a customer

1. Respond as soon as possible – Always get back to the customer as soon as possible whenever there’s an issue. Cases like these need attention since they could’ve spotted a technical issue happening on the website. Otherwise, it is still important to be active in answering inquiries and questions.

2. Be helpful by offering assistance – If the customers complain about not being happy with the digital product they bought, instead of directly conducting a refund, it is better to ask the customer what they are unhappy about the product. 

Negative feedback will be very helpful in further improving the product. Or in our case, we simply assist the customer and help them on how to use the product properly. This way, we are showing that we truly care about the customer’s thoughts and that we are putting effort into connecting with our customers.

3. Avoid compromising the store’s reputation – If there was an issue with your system and caused inconvenience to the customer, if possible, avoid divulging too much information when explaining to the customer. Compromising the store’s reputation is the last thing you want (e.g. web stores system being faulty). As long as it can be fixed as soon as possible, an apology email works but it’s best to not make it sound severe and be simple about it. 

4. Always investigate customer claims thoroughly –  There was actually one time where a customer lied about purchasing a product from us. It turns out, he was just trying to get a free product. But we handled it by being nice and polite all the way. 

Showing screenshots (if any) of unpaid transactions or no transactions at all under the same name/email. Another case would be a customer did purchase a product but used a different email and name. As such, there was a misunderstanding but was easily resolved by asking politely without judging the customer right away. At the end of the day, staying polite is the best solution in handling cases like these and at the same time being thorough.

5. Always be polite – Customers often get nervous when buying digital products online due to fraudulent cases, hence, if there’s a case where they don’t receive the product after purchasing, they mostly complain, reach out, and scream “scam”. Cases like these are unavoidable and happen quite often for digital marketplaces/stores. But, don’t get discouraged. Just reach back and explain the cause of the delay after investigating the case thoroughly. It could be there was a system bug, payment not going through, or other hiccups that delayed the process. 

Again, being polite is the best way to go and, of course, don’t forget to add the line “Thank you for your understanding and patience”. Though the customer might be quite the opposite of what the line means, in this way, we can calm their opinion about the store.

Conclusion: Good Customer Service equals to Sales

Customer service is vitally essential for any company. While the internet breaks down barriers to retail market entry around the world, competition for eCommerce is intense. The goods are a commodity more than ever before. Customer service is an important part of the brand.

When the best customer service in your market is offered by your eCommerce shop, you can build loyal customer relationships, create daily repeat sales and maintain profit margins by persuading consumers to pay a premium. Focusing on customer satisfaction and providing your customers with the very best experience gives your company an incredible, competitive advantage that goes way beyond your competition. Concentrate on the entire shopping experience through consumers ‘eyes to make sure it’s simple, friendly, and personal all over your web.

As for a Digital Product Marketplace, apart from exercising a Good Customer Service, one must also know how to properly manage their vendors, since they are a vital component of a marketplace. This article How to Manage Vendors in a Digital Product Marketplace could be very helpful for you.

As many experienced online marketers know, you’ll be on the road to success when you put your customers and vendors first and meet their needs, rather than putting your goods or services first.

How to Automate Payments for your Digital Product Marketplace

Digital Product Marketplace’s store owner and operators have a very long list of tasks to do in order to manage his/her digital product marketplace well. This encompasses tons of administrative and non-administrative works just to get their webstore all up and running. Digital product marketplace owners have vendors to manage, customers to handle, marketing strategies and tactics to implement, developers/programmers to relate with and many other stuffs that would definitely consume there day.

This is now why it is essential to free some of your time and therefore concentrate on many important tasks for your online marketplace. But how? We need to learn and adopt an automated process that will lessen the burden of manually doing administrative works for your digital product marketplace.  

Common Problems of Manually Paying Vendor Commissions

Here are some of the problems that a Digital Product Marketplace webstore owner most likely to experience when doing the manual payment to vendors.

  • Spend a lot of time paying vendors manually – Having only a few vendors and sales per week or month could still go through manual payments.  But, if you are now getting more vendors and earning more sales, you may notice that you’ve been starting to spend a lot of time paying them manually than before, and it is not healthy especially if you also have other administrative tasks to pay attention to.
  • Vendors do not want to wait long to get paid – It is important as a marketplace owner to always keep your vendors happy. One way is not to delay or give payments for too long. This may happen if you have tons of vendors and sales needed to split and give payments manually, and maybe a few of them are already overdue. We shouldn’t let this happen or your vendors will feel unsatisfied with your service.
  • Adopt automated payments to easily scale up – As we have said earlier, business owners/staff should be doing something important for the betterment and growth of the marketplace instead of spending an awful amount of time in paying vendor commissions. This could actually prevent business upscale and growth.
  • Possible problems with Manual Payments – Making tons of vendor payments each day or week can cause you a lot of confusion and headache. From different calculations, percentages, splitting of payments, tracking amounts and others can quickly get above our heads. Thus, the manual process are very vulnerable to different mistakes and errors. This is one main reason as to why we should adopt an automated payment service.
  • PayPal is still the best and commonly used payment service – PayPal is still today the benchmark for most developers, vendors, freelancers, and customers on the web. Almost everyone has their PayPal accounts and you won’t get any trouble explaining things to you with regard to it. In conclusion, PayPal is the best practice for online payment solutions.

Benefits of Automating your Payment Processes

Business process automation is the use of technology to execute recurring tasks or processes in a business where manual effort can be replaced. It is done to achieve cost minimization, greater efficiency, and streamlined processes. Any business that wants to gain an edge over their competition should consider automation, which can simplify a company’s operations, not to mention speed them up by a great deal.

Automating your Payment Processes is essential when you are operating a Digital Product Marketplace. Enumerated below are some benefits of automating your business processes.

  • Quality and Consistency

Automation ensures that every action is performed identically – resulting in high quality, reliable results. Also, they will experience the same level of service from your business, thus providing a high-quality, consistent work output.

  • Time Savings

Automation reduces the number of tasks you and your employees would otherwise need to do manually. This frees up your time to work on items that add genuine value to the business, allowing you to be more innovative and increasing your employees’ levels of motivation.

  • Improved Operational Efficiency and Productivity

Process automation reduces the time it takes to achieve a task, the effort required to undertake it and the cost of completing it successfully. Automation not only ensures systems run smoothly and efficiently but that errors are eliminated and that your best practices are constantly leveraged.

  • Simplify Repetitive Tasks

Many employees spend most of their working day performing repetitive tasks, which can be both boring and when all of the alternatives are considered, unproductive. Automation software can, therefore, automate many of these repetitive processes, so your members of staff can focus on other areas of the business. This will allow you to use your staff more effectively, and it could even speed up the processes involved.

  • Greater Opportunities

Automation can open doors to countless opportunities for your business. Instead of wasting your time doing repetitive administrative works, business owners might be doing something that would greatly scale and increase business growth. This is how important automating your business processes is.

Automate Payment Commissions on your Digital Product Marketplaces

Your Digital Product Marketplace might have several vendors who needed to get paid off their commissions. Whenever a digital product has been purchased on your marketplace, your vendors needed to get paid manually, and this consumes and wastes a lot of your time. This could cause your marketplace growth a huge setback just by doing this repetitive administrative work manually, especially when you needed to pay many people of their commissions, every single day.

This is now why automating your vendor payment commission is very important if you are operating a Digital Product Marketplace. The Admin user may find it very difficult to track each and every sales and afterward payout vendors manually. So here comes a solution – the PayPal Adaptive Payments Plugin.

Introducing PayPal Adaptive Payments

This plugin works by automating your vendor commissions by instantly and automatically splitting third-party commission up to 6 receivers. This way, it will save you a lot of time in manually paying vendor commissions.

A great benefit brought by this PayPal Adaptive Payments Plugin is that it works best with EDD Frontend Submissions and Commissions extensions in operating your EDD WordPress Digital Product Marketplace.

If you want to scale up your marketplace and want to work with more and more vendors, we strongly recommend implementing an automated solution brought by this PayPal Adaptive Payments Plugin.

Key Features and Benefits

Here are the Key Features and Benefits you can enjoy by using this plugin:

  • The payment of third-party revenue can be done instantly and it saves significant time instead of manually paying your vendor commissions every time a sale has been made.
  • With the PayPal Adaptive Payments gateway integration, you can easily split payments with up to 6 different receivers at the same time. This plugin handles payments between the sender of a payment and one or more receivers of the payment. It’s possible to split the order total with secondary receivers, so you can pay commissions or partners immediately afterward.
  • You can set each receiver up with a specific percentage of the payment within the settings for this gateway. Not only that but it provides configurations that can help you set this up as you prefer.
  • Lastly, you can determine whether you would like to use a Chained or Parallel payment type. Chained Payments: Your Store accepts the entire payment and secretly pays commissions to Vendors after the sale. Parallel Payments: The customer knows everyone who will receive payment upon checkout – as the payments are split visually at checkout.

Please check out the PayPal Adaptive Payments Setup page for more explanations on how this plugin works.

Conclusion: Automate payments on your Digital Product Marketplace

Sticking with a Manual Business Workflow simply creates opportunities for delays and errors. Adopting business process automation, especially on paying vendor commissions, can improve organizational efficiency by automating redundant administrative and repetitive tasks. Remove those processes that are putting a strain on employee time and free them up with workflow automation, with this approach you will be able to accomplish more by using fewer resources and in a more efficient way.

In conclusion, vendor payment automation, if implemented correctly, can help you in increasing the efficiency and accuracy of your payment processes. This can make your vendors very happy and will surely affect the growth and scale of your business.