Product analysis
Optimize your WooCommerce catalog by identifying high-performing products and missed opportunities.
In this chapter :
Key statistic** - 20% of products typically generate 80% of sales (Pareto's law). Identifying and optimizing this 20% multiplies your results without expanding the catalog.
WooCommerce product reports
WooCommerce offers essential product reports to help you manage your catalog.
Sales by product report
The menu WooCommerce > Reports > Orders > Products > By Product displays all products sold over the selected period.
Columns include: Product, Quantity Sold and Total Amount Generated. The table is sortable by each column to immediately identify tops and flops.
Filter by period: last month, quarter or year. Patterns differ according to temporality (seasonality and trends).
Export to CSV for analysis in Excel: ratios, graphs and pivot tables. The native WooCommerce report is basic but functional.
Top products
Click on the "Amount" column to sort in descending order. The first 5 to 10 products represent your bestsellers, your real cash cows.
These products deserve maximum attention in several respects. In terms of stock, never run out: always order in advance to anticipate demand. In terms of visibility, place them everywhere: on your homepage, in your marketing emails and in your advertising campaigns. To boost sales, create similar variants by playing on colors, sizes or pack formats. Systematically offer an upsell to a premium version costing 20 to 30% more. Finally, set up automatic cross-sell suggestions to offer complementary products when adding to the shopping cart.
A bestseller managed according to these principles can double its sales without any additional marketing effort.
Product flops
The bottom of the table shows products with zero or near-zero sales.
Methodically analyze the causes of this failure. Is the price too high compared to the competition? Try a 20% discount. Are the photos amateurish, whereas your competitors use professional visuals? Redo the photos with a qualified photographer. Is the description vague and boring? Rewrite it with clear, concrete benefits. Is the problem with visibility? Perhaps the product is invisible on the site, classified in the wrong category or completely absent from SEO search results. Or is the product simply obsolete and no longer trendy? If so, liquidate it quickly and remove it from the catalog.
You need to make a clear-cut decision: optimize or delete. An obese catalog full of dead products seriously damages the user experience and conversions by creating the paradox of choice (too many options kills the buying decision).
Download report
If you sell digital products, go to WooCommerce > Reports > Downloads.
This report displays the files downloaded, the number of downloads and the customers involved. Check that licenses are respected and that there is no massive illegal sharing that could impact your revenues.
Identify your star digital products and create similar ones. If Ebook X has been downloaded 500 times, this signals strong demand: write an Ebook Y on a complementary subject to capitalize on this interest.
Bestsellers and star products 🔺
Maximize the potential of products that already work.
Bestseller analysis
Carefully study the patterns common to your best-selling products.
When it comes to common features, there are a number of points to consider. Are prices similar? If so, you've identified your customers' sweet spot (for example, all bestsellers are between €30 and €50). Do the products belong to the same category? Then this category represents your strength: extend it with more references. Are the style and design consistent? This reveals that your customers have consistent taste, and you need to align your entire catalog with this aesthetic. Do they come from the same supplier? This source is as precious as gold: negotiate higher volumes to get better terms.
Then analyze why these products sell so well. Do they offer exceptional value for money? Are they unique and impossible to find elsewhere? Are they SEO-friendly and generate massive organic traffic? Are their visuals exceptional and particularly effective for conversion? Do they have a mass of 5-star reviews to reassure hesitant buyers?
Replicate this winning formula on other products in your catalog. If a bestseller combines 360° photos, a demo video and over 100 customer reviews, apply exactly the same approach to your slow-movers that have untapped potential.
Optimize the stars
There are several ways to further optimize your star products.
Price increases** are a viable option: a star product that enjoys strong demand will generally tolerate a 10-15% increase without a significant drop in sales. Test this increase cautiously, monitoring the impact on volumes.
The creation of variants follows the "good, better, best" principle: offer a basic version, a standard version and a premium version. This psychological anchoring effect makes the standard version seem like the better deal compared to the more expensive premium version.
Bundles** or complete packs combine your bestseller with complementary products at an attractive bundled price that encourages purchase.
The dynamic upsell is activated at the moment of addition to the basket, with a proposal such as: "Upgrade to the XL model for only €15 more". Between 20% and 30% of customers accept this offer.
Aggressive cross-selling** works on the principle of "Customers who bought X also liked Y", where Y ideally represents a high-margin product.
Finally, don't hesitate to invest in advertising (Google Shopping, Facebook) on your bestsellers. Their high conversion rate generates an excellent advertising ROI that fully justifies the investment.
Prevent out-of-stock situations
An out-of-stock situation on a bestseller leads to a double loss: lost sales and frustrated customers who turn to the competition.
The safety stock requires you to maintain the equivalent of 2 to 3 months' sales at all times. If you sell 100 units a month, your minimum stock must be 200 units.
Automatic replenishment relies on extensions like WooCommerce Stock Manager** that alert you when a critical threshold is reached and can automatically trigger a supplier order.
Know your supplier lead time precisely. If it's 30 days, you need to place an order when your stock reaches the equivalent of 1.5 months' sales to avoid any shortages.
In the event of an unavoidable imminent shortage, activate pre-orders via the WooCommerce Pre-Orders extension. Customers order immediately and receive their product the next time it's replenished.
Slow-moving products 🔺
Stagnant products weigh heavily on cash flow and take up valuable warehouse space.
Identify slow-movers
In the Reports > Products menu, sort the results by increasing quantity. Products with between 0 and 5 sales over a 3-month period are your slow-movers.
Calculate the turnover rate using this formula: Quantity sold / Average stock × 100. For example, if you've sold 10 units with an average stock of 100, your turnover rate is 10%, which is bad (the ideal is over 50% per quarter).
Extensions like WooCommerce Stock Manager automatically calculate the turnover rate per product, which makes tracking much simpler.
Causes of low sales
A visibility problem can explain low sales. Is the product buried on page 12 of a category and therefore impossible to find? Move it up the ranking or create a dedicated page to highlight it.
Inappropriate pricing** is a frequent cause. Compare with the competition via Google Shopping. Too high a price blocks purchases, but too low a price raises doubts about quality.
A poor presentation seriously damages conversions. A single blurred photo compared with 5 high-definition photos from your competitors, or a 2-line description compared with detailed paragraphs: the difference is prohibitive.
A product problem itself may be to blame. The product may be obsolete, out of fashion, or have a quality flaw revealed by the first customers in their negative reviews.
Finally, poor targeting explains some failures. A product may be excellent, but offered to an unsuitable audience: selling a sports product on a home decoration site creates a total mismatch.
Relaunch strategies
The optimization of the listing is the first step: redo the photos with a professional, rewrite the description with clear benefits, add a demonstration video and actively collect customer reviews.
Aggressive promotion** aims to clear stock quickly: organize a flash sale with a 40% discount, create a bundle associating the slow-mover with a bestseller, or offer free delivery to encourage purchase.
Repositioning** involves changing category, target or marketing angle. If a "fitness" product isn't selling, try repositioning it as a "senior health" product to reach a different audience.
Re-marketing** specifically targets visitors who have consulted the product without buying it, with a special offer to encourage them to finalize their purchase.
If nothing works, liquidation is essential: sell at cost or even at a loss to recover cash and space. It's better to lose 20% than to tie up capital indefinitely.
Outright deletion is the ultimate solution for a permanently dead product with no potential. It simplifies management and improves the user experience by reducing the paradox of choice.
Dead stock
Products with no sales for more than 6 months and no potential are dead stock. It's a dead loss.
The hidden costs are multiple: storage space (warehouse rent), tied-up capital (which could have been invested in profitable products) and gradual obsolescence (loss of value over time).
Several solutions exist. The extreme flash sale with 70% discount aims to recover even just 30% of the initial value. A donation to an association allows a tax deduction (depending on the country), generates goodwill and frees up storage space. Destruction** remains the last resort for totally unsaleable products (out-of-date, defective), provided that the operation is documented for accounting purposes, as the loss is deductible.
Analyze your stock on a quarterly basis and ruthlessly eliminate dead stock. Every euro tied up in useless stock is a euro not invested in your profitable bestsellers.
Category analysis 🔺
Performance varies greatly from one category to another. It's essential to identify which categories are winners and which are losers.
Report by category
Export your sales by product to Excel or Google Sheets, add a "Category" column, then create a pivot table to obtain sales by category.
The Metorik or WooCommerce Google Analytics extensions offer this report natively, greatly simplifying analysis.
Category A** generates 60% of your sales. It's the heart of your business. Expand this category with more similar products, create sub-categories and develop variants.
Category B** accounts for 30% of sales. These are profitable complementary products. Maintain them and optimize them moderately.
Category C** generates only 10% of sales. These marginal categories need to be evaluated: should they be eliminated or boosted? If boosting them proves impossible, do away with them altogether, and concentrate on categories A and B.
Margins by category
Sales do not equal profit. A category that generates 40% of sales but only 5% margin yields less than a category that generates 20% of sales with 30% margin.
Calculate gross margin according to this formula: (Sales price - Purchase cost) / Sales price × 100. For example, a product sold for €100 with a purchase cost of €60 generates a margin of (100-60)/100 = 40%.
Then compile the average margin by category. If Category X generates 40% of sales with a margin of 50%, its contribution to total profit is 20%. If Category Y also generates 40% of sales but with only a 10% margin, its contribution to profit is only 4%.
Category X is therefore worth 5 times Category Y in terms of real profitability. Systematically prioritize high-margin categories.
Product mix optimization
The 80/20 rule requires you to focus 80% of your efforts on the 20% of products that generate 80% of profits.
Eliminate low-margin products: if a product has a margin of less than 20% with a low sales volume, eliminate it. This frees up energy and resources for truly profitable products.
Increase the share of profitable categories through advertising, site placement and email campaigns. Actively guide your customers to high-margin categories.
Introduce complementary, high-margin products: accessories, consumables and services generally have margins of 50-80%, compared with only 20-30% for core products.
Margins and profitability 🔺
Sales become a vanity metric if margins are non-existent. Real profit is the only metric that really counts.
Calculate margins by product
The unit gross margin is simply calculated : Selling price - Purchase cost. A product sold for €50 with a purchase cost of €30 generates a gross margin of €20.
Gross margin as a percentage** uses the formula: (Sales price - Purchase cost) / Sales price × 100, i.e. (50-30)/50 × 100 = 40%.
The net margin also subtracts variable costs such as packaging, shipping, payment commissions and marketplace fees. A product sold for €50 with a cost of €30 and fees of €5 generates a net margin of €15, or 30%.
Include absolutely ALL costs for an accurate calculation. Forgetting platform fees (Amazon and Etsy charge 15-20%) totally distorts the real profitability.
ABC analysis
Classify your products according to their contribution to overall profit.
A** products represent 15% of your catalog but generate 70% of your profit. These are your absolute stars, deserving maximum stock protection, intensive promotion and constant investment in innovation.
B** products make up 25% of your catalog and generate 25% of your profit. They are solid, profitable complements. Maintain them and optimize them moderately, without devoting too many resources to them.
C** products take up 60% of the catalog but generate only 5% of profit. This is the ballast of your catalog. Evaluate them ruthlessly: should you eliminate them or try to boost them if they have potential?
The strategic objective is to turn promising B products into A products, and ruthlessly eliminate C products with no hope of recovery.
Bait products vs. profit
Bait products** have low margins (less than 10%), but attract customers thanks to competitive pricing and generate strong SEO and advertising traffic.
Case in point: a game console sold almost at cost (5% margin) attracts gamers who then buy games and accessories (50% margin).
Profit products** generate a high margin (over 40%) and are sold via cross-sell and upsell to customers acquired through bait products.
This deliberate strategy consists of losing or breaking even on products A to gain handsomely on products B, C and D. It is valid ONLY if you effectively convert bait buyers into profit buyers.
It's essential to measure this conversion rate: what percentage of customers who have bought a bait product also buy high-margin products? If this rate is below 20%, the strategy fails and you simply attract cherry-pickers who take advantage of your low prices without buying anything else.
Increase margins
There are several ways to significantly improve your margins.
Negotiating with suppliers** is based on your growing volume, which gives you negotiating power. Ask for a 10% discount if you double your orders.
Factory direct purchasing** eliminates intermediaries and reduces your costs by 30-50%.
Price increases** can be considered for differentiated products where competition is weak. Test an increase of 5 to 10%. If sales fall by 5% but margins rise by 10%, your net profit will be higher.
Reducing variable costs** involves cheaper (but not cheap) packaging, negotiating with carriers and choosing a less expensive payment processor (Stripe at 1.4%+€0.25 vs. PayPal at 2.9%+€0.35).
The removal of low-margin products allows you to focus all your energy on the really profitable products.
Each margin point gained represents thousands of euros in additional annual profit. Continuous optimization of margins is therefore essential.
Seasonality and trends 🔺
Sales fluctuate according to seasons, trends and events. It's crucial to anticipate and exploit these cycles.
Identify seasonality
A graph of monthly sales over 24 months reveals clear seasonal patterns.
The fashion sector sees peaks in September (back-to-school), November (Black Friday) and December (Christmas), with pronounced troughs in January-February and July-August.
Gardening** explodes from March to June, and dies out completely from November to February.
Winter sports** generate sales from October to February, with zero sales from April to September.
Plan your inventory, marketing and cash flow around these predictable cycles.
Anticipation and preparation
Three months before peak season, order massive stocks and negotiate prices thanks to high volumes.
Two months before, prepare your complete marketing campaigns: visuals, email sequences and advertising campaigns. Recruit temporary employees if necessary.
One month before, launch teasing and early bird pre-promotions to build anticipation.
During the season, focus on operational execution, real-time adjustments and enhanced customer support.
After the season, liquidate remaining stock via sales, analyze the past season's performance and plan for the following year based on lessons learned.
Counter-seasonality
Reduce your seasonal dependency by intelligently diversifying your offer.
Complementary off-season products** allow you to spread your income: a ski store sells mountain bikes in summer, targeting the same sporting clientele.
Reverse geographic markets** exploit seasonal differences: winter in Europe corresponds to summer in Australia, so you can sell winter products in Australia from June to August.
Off-season promotions** such as "Buy your Christmas decorations in July at 40% off" attract smart customers who stock up, allowing you to smooth out your production over the year.
Subscriptions and recurring products** generate predictable monthly revenues that are totally independent of seasonality.
Emerging trends
Google Trends (free) shows the evolution of searches for specific keywords. If searches for "electric scooter" explode in 2019-2020, it's a business opportunity worth seizing.
Social networks** like TikTok and Instagram reveal emerging trends long before they become mainstream. A product that goes viral generates a massive rush of orders.
Competitor analysis** is instructive: what are your competitors launching? Frequent new products in category X signal growing demand.
Your own sales data are the best indicator: a product that has shown a steady rise of 10 to 20% per month for 6 months confirms a solid trend in which you need to invest heavily.
Surf on trends early to benefit from high margins and low competition. Being late means a saturated market and a destructive price war.
In a nutshell
Use WooCommerce reports to identify your tops (20% of products generate 80% of sales) and your flops (0-5 sales per month). Optimize your bestsellers by securing stock, offering variants and highlighting them through upsells. Enhance or remove dormant products after attempting optimizations (photos, prices, descriptions). Analyze profitability by calculating net profit per product (margin - costs). Anticipate out-of-stock situations using sales trends, and adjust your supplier orders accordingly.
Next steps 🔺
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