While ShopSite comes with an easy to use, built-in reporting system; sometimes you need a more detailed or specific report. If you keep past orders in ShopSite you have a wealth of knowledge at your disposal.

Report, What Report?

For example, say a new add-on or option becomes available for a popular product you carry. You could post a note on your site or create a blog post about it. Both of which are good options and should be considered. Wouldn’t it be nice though to send a directed mailing to customers who have purchased the product in say the past six months?

Maybe you’re looking to forecast future sales, look for trends, offer incentives, or just dig deeper into your business. Sifting through the data in orders allows you to find some interesting information.

Downloading the Data

It’s really quite simple to do this in ShopSite. To start, log into your ShopSite back office and go to:

Utilities > ShopSite Database > Database Download

Next select “Orders” and then click on the “Download” button. On the page that appears we’ll select the format of the file we are going to capture along with what fields we want to work with. You’ll want to set the Download format as “Tab-delimited.” Don’t get confused by the XML text file format. XML should not be confused with the Excel .xls format!

Next you have a choice to make. Depending upon what you are looking to do, you can either download all the fields (select “All fields”) or only the fields you need to create your report (select “Selected fields only”). If you opt to download specific fields you can then click on the “Select Fields” button to choose the fields you wish to capture.

There is a lot of data stored in the orders so take a moment to think about what your goal is. If your plan is to gather a list of names and email addresses for customers who have ordered a specific product; then by downloading only the fields you need you’ll save yourself some work. For example, rather than downloading all the data; you could simply download Customer Name (or First name, Last Name), Email, and Product Name (or Product SKU). If you download all the fields you may find yourself deleting or hiding much of it just to see the forest through the trees!

Make sure you have “Download data to your browser (client)” selected as the download option and then enter a name for the file you’ll be creating. After that simply click on the “Proceed” button to download the data into a file stored on your computer.

Viewing and Manipulating the Data

Once you’ve downloaded the file it’s time to fire up Excel or whatever your favorite spreadsheet application happens to be. Open a blank spreadsheet and import the tab-delimited file you downloaded. You’ll most likely be asked a series of questions so that the data will be imported correctly. These generally deal with the delimiter, a tab in this case, and data formatting for the various columns.

Once the data is imported you can use the power of your spreadsheet application to help you create a custom report. For the case of collecting the email addresses of customers who bought a specific item; the process would be as simple as selecting all the data and sorting on the product name or SKU. You would then simply grab the email addresses that match the orders for the item.

As you can see, it’s not a a complicated process. With a little sorting power you can pull out some valuable information to help you manage and grow your business.