Today we feature Ali Kothari, owner of AK Consulting. Ali works with eCommerce businesses to unlock insights from their data. By better understanding customer behavior and product trends, Ali’s clients can unlock growth opportunities and reduce marketing waste.
Check out our templates center for a version of this solution that you can download and try out for your own business or clients.
The Problem
Shopify is a powerful and ubiquitous solution for eCommerce businesses to build on, but as businesses become more sophisticated, the standard set of Shopify tools can be limiting. Ali found this especially when his clients wanted to drill deeper into sales by SKU to learn more about customers and what they were ordering.
“On Shopify’s Dashboard, it’s not easy to drill into which customers were purchasing which products. They do have sales by SKU reports, but you can’t learn anything about who is purchasing, or what else those same customers are purchasing.”
Ali is a pro, so he’d been able to create the reports he needed with a Frankenstein combination of a half-dozen Shopify CSV exports. But these reports were difficult and time intensive to update. Time is of the essence when it comes to making sales, so these additional hours were significant for him and his clients.
The Solution
Ali’s solution is built on the Shopify Orders Detail report. Usually this would be created and emailed to the account owner, but Amalgam lets Ali sync a tab of his spreadsheet to whichever account, for whatever time period he wants.
“This solution uses a pivot table to summarize sales by SKU month over month (both by units sold and dollars sold). The pivot table is useful because it allows us to easily dig into the raw data to learn more about a certain SKU sold during a specific month.”
In other words, having the visualization and the source data in one place allows Ali to identify trends, then dig into the data to better understand these trends.
The Impact
Ali now has a base document that he can adapt to any Shopify company over any time period. Instead of spending time re-building this report for each client each month, that time is spent in the numbers looking for insights.
The reduction in time spent on data prep, and the consequent increase in analysis has significantly improved the value of Ali’s analysis, both to his clients, and to his own business. So much so, that he’s got a whole suite of tools built out along these same lines.
“Some other reports you can build out: cohort analysis, VIP customer list, month over month sales report, sales by state, etc. You can recreate the entire Shopify analytics dashboard with this data set which becomes extremely powerful since you can always dig into the raw data to understand where the metrics are coming from.”
AK Consulting helps eCommerce businesses dig through their numbers to understand sales performance, delivering actionable insights to drive measurable performance. To get in touch with Ali or discuss working with him, contact [email protected].
