What's New? - September 2022

It's that time of the month again! 

Throughout most of September, we've been focused on adding some backend support to the underlying infrastructure that keeps Report Toaster running smoothly.

Even so, we wanted to take the time to revisit a couple of the reports we have on offer (and even create some new ones as well) 

Let's take a look :)

Return Reports

Lately, we've been getting a lot of requests for more complex return reports. 

With the addition of our new Calculated Fields feature, we've been able to boost our critical returns metrics and provide new reports to our users.

Now, some of the more keen-eyed among you may have noticed our new Returns section in the left hand report templates menu: 

The first of these reports introduces our new Return Rate metric, measuring what portion (and percentage) of your orders ultimately end up as Returns. 
This report tracks both the # of orders and the amounts, measuring over a monthly period:

You can then use this data to get a high-level overview of your overall return rates.
Further down the list, you can then see this information broken down on both a per-product basis... 

...and on a per-variant basis as well:

Breaking down your Return Rates by Product and Product Variant are really helpful to identify certain trends.

For example, if I sold summer dresses from my online store, and saw that a certain product had an unusually high return rate, I might want to dig in a little deeper.

1. Is the product perhaps of poor quality, or unusually fragile?
   
2. Is my product not matching a customer's expectations, and thus I need to improve my product images and/or descriptions?
   
3. Does this product utilize a different shipping/fulfillment method, and thus I need to make different shipping arrangements?

You get the idea. 

Next, we have a similar report that looks at return rate on a per-vendor basis too: 

For our customers that work with a large number of 3rd party vendors (or maintain an extensive network of affiliate partners), this one will be a godsend.

Reports like this give you the ability to quickly identify key outliers and assess which vendors are impacting your bottom line. 

For instance, is it something to do with the products they're providing? Are they using a different promotion strategy, or is this a logistical problem that comes down to shipping/fulfillment?

Finally in this section, we have our Physical Returns report. This is the former Returns report moved from the Orders section, but we'll mention it here just so you know where to find it :) 

Oh, and speaking of moving things around... 

Other Reports

Really this is just a quick-fire 'miscellaneous' list, but we've tweaked a few of the other reports to make them a bit more useful.

The first of these is to divide the Sales by Tags report into Order Tags, Product Tags and Customer Tags respectively: 

This is a good way to examine different tag combinations, which is crucial to some of our customers and the way they handle sales. 

Next, we have introduced a Product Pick List report, which you can find under Fulfillments:

This report gives you the ability to see how many of each product you need from the warehouse for all your Unfulfilled/Partially fulfilled orders (excluding those that have already been cancelled).

Very handy when it comes to managing your fulfillments! 

Finally, we've had most profitable products for a while now, so we thought it was only reasonable to introduce Least Profitable Products as well: 

The aim with all of these reports has been to make it that much easier to get our merchants what they're looking for, helping to save you all some time (and hopefully some money!)

If there's a particular report you'd like us to help you create for your account, why not reach out to us and let us know? Feel free to email us at support@cloudlab.com and you might be impressed with what we can come up with! 

Until next time! 

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