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:

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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 number of orders and the amounts, measuring them over a monthly period:

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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…

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…and on a per-variant basis as well:

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Breaking down your return rates by product and product variant is extremely helpful when identifying trends.

For example, if I sold summer dresses from my online store and noticed that a certain product had an unusually high return rate, I might want to investigate further:

1. Is the product perhaps of poor quality or unusually fragile?
2. Is the product not matching customer expectations, meaning the images or descriptions need improvement?
3. Does the product use a different shipping or fulfillment method that needs adjustment?

You get the idea.

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

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For customers that work with a large number of third-party vendors or affiliate partners, this report is incredibly useful.

Reports like this allow you to quickly identify key outliers and assess which vendors may be impacting your bottom line.

For instance, is it related to the products themselves, the promotion strategy being used, or a logistical issue such as shipping or 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 so you know where to find it.

Oh, and speaking of moving things around…

Other Reports

This section is more of a quick-fire miscellaneous list, but we've tweaked a few reports to make them more useful.

The first update is splitting the Sales by Tags report into three separate reports: Order Tags, Product Tags, and Customer Tags.

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This makes it easier to analyze different tag combinations, which is important for many merchants and the way they manage sales.

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

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This report shows how many of each product you need from the warehouse for all unfulfilled or partially fulfilled orders (excluding cancelled orders).

Very handy when managing your fulfillment workflow!

Finally, since we’ve had a Most Profitable Products report for a while now, we thought it was only fair to introduce Least Profitable Products as well:

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The goal with all of these reports is to make it easier for our merchants to get the information they need, helping save both time and money.

If there’s a particular report you’d like help creating for your account, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] — you might be surprised what we can come up with!

Until next time!