Report Toaster
Background
Water n Wine is a craft wine-making merchant that is now the largest brewing store in Colchester County. Based out of Nova Scotia in Canada, they sell a full range of wine, beer, spirits, and even brewing kits, available from both their online store and retail outlets.
Water n Wine has been operating successfully since 1994, and you can check out their website here.
Case Study
Surpassing Shopify’s Limitations
Featuring Water n Wine
The Problem
Eric Jackson, Marketing Coordinator at Water n Wine Truro, explained that they had a very specific challenge concerning an inherent Shopify limitation - namely, the ability to pull up a customer’s sales history by the line items they had purchased.
As Eric explains:
“We had a specific challenge with a Shopify limitation, and that was the ability to pull up a customer’s sales history by a list of recent line items purchased. Shopify only gives you the ability to pull up tickets, and then you have to click through each ticket to look at line items.”
Because most of their business involves repeat customers (approximately 85%, month-over-month), the ability to upsell and recommend certain products to previous customers is critical to their business success.
Solution One
Track Purchase History
While Shopify only allows a merchant to pull up prior orders (and then click through each of them to look at line items directly), Report Toaster can create reports that compile this data into a single view.
The report we created for them was designed to filter down the data to a specific group of products (in this case, Wine, Fruit Wine, Specialty Wine, Beer Kits, or Cider), allow them to plug in an individual customer, and then display their entire purchase history at a glance.
Here is a screenshot of something similar we created in our test store:
By tracking a customer’s purchase history like this, Eric could use the data for future promotional efforts, targeted upsells, and of course, ongoing trend analysis. The report is also enormously flexible, so they could do things like
-
Remove the filter for an individual customer, add a column for the customer’s name, and then filter down to only a single product. That would provide a list of everybody who purchased say, a Beer kit, in chronological order.
-
Add a column for Line Item Count (or even filter for Line Item Count > 1). This would enable you to see who bought the items in question with other items.
-
Sort the data by Line Item Quantity (instead of date). This would allow you to see who bought multiples of the same item, which might be valuable for future promotional offers.
Solution Two
Expanding Capabilities
While this particular customer report addressed one of their immediate business needs, for Eric, the real value of the app was the depth of customization that Report Toaster provided. As a fan of Google Analytics, Eric was pleased to discover that the reports we provide could cover a bunch of other use cases, ranging from managing products and inventory quantity to profit reports and even taxes.
As Eric puts it:
“I liked how deep I could go with customizability. The more I go into Shopify, the more I discover how limited the reporting is. Report Toaster always seems to be faster to the finish line for the things we need.
I imagine that if if somebody got used to Report Toaster because it solved a specific problem in Shopify, then they might as well convert everything over to remove unnecessary apps, boost their quality of life, and ultimately provide a better service to their customers.”
Water n Wine is still exploring some of the exciting ways that Report Toaster can provide even greater value for their business, but these were some of the reports that Eric was considering implementing for their storefront:
-
Sales by Product Variant
-
Sales by POS Device (to measure each staff member’s sales)
-
Profit by Product (broken down with gross sales, net sales, and product costs)
-
Marketing UTM Campaign/Source/Medium (tracking campaign performance, like Google Tag Manager)
-
Dead Stock Reports
Water n Wine is also looking into the possibility of using Scheduled Reports to push inventory data out as CSV files, ready to import to a Google Sheet or even into their other apps via Mechanic.
.
Solution One
Report Toaster Can Handle Your Data
Fundamentally, Water n Wine is looking for anything that can improve the quality of life for their storefront operations and boost customer service, so Report Toaster helping them to manage their data more efficiently is a big help for their business.
Key Takeaways
So what are some of our key takeaways we can look for here?
Track Customer Sales History: Shopify has some purchase history, but being able to specify a key range of line items and see all of someone’s purchase history is great to target promotions.
Customize your reports: Every Report Toaster report can be tailored to your individual business model, so customize and sort the data in a way that makes sense for you.
Are you looking to set up something similar for your business? We love doing these case studies and any opportunities to do a deeper dive on the data, so if you’d like us to do something like this for your store, please let us know.
Otherwise, you can always check out our app listing and feel free to contact us at support@cloudlab.com if you need help customizing something for your store.