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Store owners are always looking for ways to reach new customers, increase average order values, and grow sales. What if I told you the answers to achieving your goals are within your reach? In fact, they are hidden in the data your business already generates every day.
Your data provides a goldmine of insights into what’s working, what’s not, and where opportunities for improvement lie. But turning this data from information overload to actionable steps takes a thoughtful approach.
That’s what you’ll learn today. We’ll show you how to harness the power of your data to make smarter decisions that drive real results. Whether it’s identifying the best new product bundles to boost average order values, analyzing return data to cut losses, or finding ways to streamline your operations, this post will get you started toward a super-successful 2025.
Increasing profits isn’t just about cutting the cost of goods, upping your ad budget, or undercutting your competitor’s pricing. There’s a lot of nuances in analyzing your store’s data and using that information to create sales-boosting strategies that work for both your business and your customers.
Whether a product sold well or poorly, you’ll want to look at the data around those sales (or lack thereof). Did the product “go viral” and spark a ton of website traffic? Did Google change it’s algorithm and improved your sales? Did people abandon their carts at increased rates when given shipping information? Did certain products drive a lot of returns? Did you get a lot of repeat customers or mostly just one-off sales? Did customers pair their purchases with other items?
These are just a handful of questions you’ll want to ask as you dive into your previous year’s data. Here are some of the major data points you’ll want to review:
Unless your business generates income from sources other than sales of goods and services, your annual revenue will be the same as your gross sales. Gross sales doesn’t account for any of your business expenses like costs of goods, general overhead, marketing spend, payment processing fees, etc.
You’ll use your revenue data to compare against expenses for profitability, but also to answer some key questions.
What was your sales goal for 2024? Did you have a specific revenue benchmark you wanted to reach? Was there a percentage growth in sales you hoped to achieve?
Whether you fell short, met, or exceeded expectations, you’ll want to review how sales changed and dig into the why.
In the WooCommerce Analytics dashboard, you can compare sales by year, month, date range, product category, and individual products, to determine areas of stronger and weaker performance.
Look not just at overall sales. Dig into sales by month, coupons used, and the origin of your sales. Not sure where to find this information?
There is a lot to dig through in those three items alone, but don’t worry. We’ll look closer into each one as we move forward.
Some retailers may take for granted that specific months will generate more revenue than others. Let’s take Black Friday and Cyber Monday, for example. In 2024, this high-profile weekend ran late and it crossed over into two months. Knowing this will help you see why November may not have been as strong as the year before, but December had a boost.
For a lot of U.S. retailers, it’s the time of year when they get their biggest boosts in sales. But it’s also a time of increased competition. People may browse more because they’re shopping for holiday gifts, but if you want to maximize your sales you’ll need to do more than just sit back and wait.
Expanded marketing efforts, discounts, curated product bundles, cart recovery strategies, and new product launches are just a few of the things you can do to capitalize on a time when consumers are already purchasing more.
And what about months that are traditionally slow for your store? Identifying these periods by looking at your WooCommerce data allows you to proactively fight against the slump. You may save certain product launches or special sales for these times. Or perhaps an uptick in email marketing to previous customers can bring these months closer to par with the rest of the year.
You’re not looking to make these the best months ever, but smoothing out the valleys will pay off big when you look at your overall 2025 numbers.
For seasonal businesses, there may not be a lot that you can do to change sales during those months without making a major shift in how you run your business.
For instance, if you run a community-supported agriculture business (CSA) and sell weekly deliveries of seasonal fruits and vegetables, you may only be able to sell subscriptions or individual produce items during the growing season.
If you want to keep your income more reliable throughout the year, you might have to change your business up a bit by:
How you shift your approach to improve sales in a particular month will depend on what you’re selling, the resources you have available (e.g. budget, staffing, materials), and what your goals are. But looking at data is the first step.
If your sales grew in 2024, you’ll want to pinpoint the areas that influenced that growth. You may want to do more of the same in 2025, further refine your approach, or change things up to test new revenue drivers. If your sales declined, though, you’ll definitely want to figure out why and pivot your strategy accordingly for 2025.
The variables causing shifts in revenue during any given month or year will look different depending on your industry and location, but here are a few to consider:
It’s important to remember that some variables are within your control and some are not. In 2024, we saw huge shifts in Google’s search algorithms and how theydisplayed results. Google moved heavily into using Google Merchant Center and the search engine results pages looked like an Amazon results page filled with attributes and brands.
This is a case where some of this is in your control and some is well outside. While you can augment your product data with schema and connect your store to Google Merchant Center, you have very limited control over how Google displays product results.
A critical data point to focus on is your source of revenue. Know what data you have to work with, dig into this information, and figure out what you can learn from it. In this case, you can learn a lot by looking at results in GA4, Google Search Console, and Google Merchant Center. These tools will show you where data came from in Google and which type of search might need more love from you in 2025.
Once you know the high-level sources, you can start to dig down into lower-level sources like individual referrals. What were your best-performing referral sources? How much effort did you put into obtaining this referral traffic? What can you do to grow this in 2025? These questions represent different facets of where your sales are coming from and can help you determine where to find your ideal customer.
Do you know if most of your customers are making purchases from links in your email campaigns? Or are they primarily coming from social media ads and Google Shopping? Maybe they’re finding you through word of mouth and typing in your URL directly.
Maybe a popular influencer mentioned your products on social and generated a large portion of your sales. While this might be hard to replicate, it does signal that influencer marketing is worth a larger investment in the coming year.
To determine your best referral sources, check order origin data in WooCommerce or GA4. Don’t forget to look at what portion of that traffic is actually translating to sales. Accuracy may vary between software, so comparing more than one source leads to more accurate conclusions
Knowing where your customers live is also important. Are most of your customers located in your own country or even in your own city? If so, you may want to invest more in local or regional marketing.
Net profit is even more important than your overall revenue statistics. This is the amount of money you’re left with after accounting for all sources of income and expenses. Your net profit is the money you use to invest back into your business and, depending on the legal structure of your business, it may also be the money used to pay yourself.
Growing your net profits is vital if you want to sustain and expand your business, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to increase your revenue to do so. You can also boost your net profits by cutting expenses.
Before you start any cost-cutting measures, however, look at your profit and loss report and answer the following questions:
Based on what you find, address the areas that need the most improvement first. You might consider any of the following cost-saving measures:
By identifying opportunities to reduce expenses, you can run your business more efficiently, increase net profit, and ensure that you’re continuously paying attention to your business goals.
Don’t forget to identify the areas where your net profit is strong. Give them a little extra scrutiny to see if there’s any further improvement that can be made. Sometimes you don’t want to make any adjustments to something that’s working well, but it’s always worth reviewing and evaluating whether a change might be beneficial — even if it’s just to confirm that no changes are necessary.
Did you have a total number of orders that you wanted to reach for 2024? Did your orders go up or down from 2023? What do you think may have caused this?
The answers to these questions will likely be very similar to the reasons for your increased, decreased, or flatlined revenue. External influences like weather, economic conditions, competitor offerings, and product trends may all influence your orders. Additionally, what products you offer, your pricing, shipping options, the quality of your customer service, and the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives will all play a role.
Identifying which customers are placing the most orders and what kind of people they are can help you get a better understanding of where to focus your marketing and retention efforts.
Did you know that WooCommerce is already tracking and providing data for you? Each order has little pieces of information to help provide feedback on what is working.
If you have a handful of high-value customers, you may want to incentivize them to shop even more. Put hand-written notes in their packages, create a reward tier just for them, or send them a special gift with their next order.
If orders are primarily from returning customers, you may be doing a great job of cultivating loyalty from the customers you acquire, but you may not be very successful at grabbing the attention of new customers. You may want to invest in display, search, and social advertising to drive traffic and come up with sign-up offers, first-time purchase discounts, or other incentives to drive new sales.
When you look at your data, it could also show that most of your orders are one-time purchases. You may be converting a lot of new shoppers, but haven’t invested in enough retention strategies. Implementing loyalty points and rewards, subscriptions, wish lists, and follow-up emails may keep customers engaged and coming back.
People are more likely to place an order when they experience minimal friction at checkout. If your checkout process takes a long time, is confusing, or is difficult on mobile devices, it can affect the number of orders you get.
Review your checkout process and see if there are areas for improvement. Here are some best practices for creating a seamless checkout experience:
Were there any changes in the economy, supply chain disruptions or improvements, or new competitors emerging or leaving your industry in 2024? What about weather and political elections? These factors play a role in your overall revenue, but they can provide an entirely different insight at the order level.
For instance, if a major competitor goes out of business or has a favorite product out of stock, it may drive more shoppers to your store. You may even see an uptick in orders and boosted revenue for the year, but that doesn’t mean you’ve cultivated ongoing customers.
Perhaps you notice that there are many small, one-time orders. It could be that customers coming from your former competitor are simply comparison shopping. If you don’t have reengagement strategies in place or your products don’t offer a comparable quality or value, you may never see those customers again.
Your average order value (AOV) is another data point that shouldn’t be missed. It’s a key performance metric in ecommerce that measures the average amount a customer spends per transaction on your website. It helps businesses understand purchasing behavior and assess the effectiveness of pricing strategies, promotions, and upselling tactics.
AOV is calculated by dividing your total revenue for a specific period by the number of transactions (orders) during that same period. So if your store made $100,000 in revenue from 2,000 total orders, your average order value would be $50.
WooCommerce includes built-in analytics for sales and order data and will automatically calculate your AOV for you. To find your AOV without having to pull out a calculator:
When you compare your number of orders to your average order value, do you find that your order volume is up, but your average order value is down?
Or maybe you want to zero in further and review data for a specific month. WooCommerce lets you pull the same data mentioned above, but narrowed down to a month. You can look at the comparison month-to-month or year-over-year.
What could have influenced any shift that you found compared to 2023? Here are some things to consider:
Combining these tactics will maximize individual transaction values. They can also work hand-in-hand with other revenue-boosting approaches.
For example, discounts and promotions can encourage spending to meet a free shipping threshold, and upselling and cross-selling can complement product bundles and add-ons.
Or, if you’re offering flexible payment methods to boost overall revenue, this can also improve AOV by ensuring customers can afford larger purchases without hesitation.
A good way to determine what types of products are worth investing more into and which you should discontinue is by looking at product category sales statistics. It’s also a great way to gauge your audience’s interest in a product category as a whole.
Ask yourself:
You can look at product category sales data in your WooCommerce dashboard under Analytics > Categories. Here you can compare specific categories, look at a single one, or view them all.
Once you’ve determined which categories did well and which didn’t, take a look at the individual products within each. It’s possible that an entire category’s success or failure is due to a few outliers.
Looking at individual product sales can help you further refine the products that you want to shift your attention to for 2025. Some products may have sold well in 2022 or 2023, but dropped off in 2024.
So make sure you look not only at the total number of sales of that product but also compare them to previous years. Perhaps a product didn’t sell well this year compared to other products in the same category, but it doubled in sales from the previous year.
Ask yourself:
Then, ask yourself why certain products performed better than others. Some of the biggest influences on product performance include:
By identifying the specific reasons why a product is underperforming and implementing solutions, you can boost visibility, enhance the customer experience, and drive better results for your WooCommerce site.
Streamlining your shipping and fulfillment strategy for 2025 is another key part of your business’ success. Review the following questions about 2024 and come up with ways to make your shipping more efficient, cost-effective, and convenient for your customers:
Here are some ideas that will help optimize shipping for both your customers and your business:
Coupons are a great way to drive sales, but if you use them too frequently, customers may rely on them to make all their purchases. This can lead to decreased average order values and declining revenue, overall.
Make sure to take a close look at your coupon strategy from 2024 and determine:
If you’re looking for ideas to inspire your 2025 promotion strategy, here are a few to get you started:
Your returns data can help you identify potential problems with products or product categories, whether you manufacture them or they come from a supplier or dropshipper. Ultimately, you want to minimize returns since processing them is costly, leads to dissatisfied customers, and causes extra stress.
When you look at your return rate for 2024, examine the following:
If you’re getting a lot of returns for a certain product or category of product, why? Review customer feedback and reviews to get an idea of where you’re falling short. For instance, if you sell slippers and everyone is returning them because they’re too big, you might need to add more detailed product photos and a size chart to your product listing or a suggestion in the product description to size down when ordering.
Or, what if you offer a product that is often purchased as a gift? Is there data you can provide to help gift-givers select the right product, thus reducing the possibility of returns?
Did you have too little or too much of a particular product last year? Having a lot of inventory that’s out of stock or on backorder can discourage shoppers. But overstock can be a problem too, especially if your goods have an expiration date.
Having a solid understanding of product demand will help you know what to order and when so you aren’t constantly running out of stock or overstocking. It will also inspire more trust from shoppers, who can always rely on your store to have what they need.
Review the following data points to see where your store did well and where it could use improvement in terms of inventory management:
Improving how you manage your inventory isn’t just about making sure you have the products you need when you need them. It’s also about how you communicate product availability and the ordering options you provide to the customer.
Here are a few ideas on how you can improve inventory management while also creating happier (and higher-spending) customers:
Having top-tier customer service can improve sales and win customer loyalty. Looking at the different ways that you support your customer from pre-sale to post-purchase can help you identify where you need to fill in gaps.
Ask yourself:
Knowing this information can help you identify where you need to make changes to your customer service strategy. Consider:
Now that you have data on what happened in 2024, it’s time to start planning your strategy for improving sales in 2025. But how do you sort through all this data (and there may be a lot) and formulate an effective plan? Here are a few tips to get started:
Consider this your to-do list for a great sales year in 2025.
Don’t wait to start auditing your data and writing down your observations. Start as soon as you can. The longer you put it off, the more likely you are to get wrapped up in other day-to-day activities and suddenly find yourself in Q3 wondering where the time went.
Reflect on last year’s performance and document your key successes, failures, and lessons learned. Note any trends or anomalies.
Put all your data and observations from all your sales channels into a centralized spreadsheet so that you can easily sort by different data attributes. Do the same for your marketing channels and expenses.
Analyze revenue, net profit, customer demographics, purchase behavior, and top-selling products to determine which items should stay or go in 2025 and where you should shift your marketing focus. Use analytics tools like Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, Google Merchant Center, or heatmaps like Hotjar, Crazy Egg, or Lucky Orange for deeper insights into referral traffic and on-site behavior.
Off-site influences like competitor activity, social media and email marketing, display and search ads, weather, holidays, and trends can all have a big influence on your sales.
So remember to:
Analyzing data, forecasting, and planning can be very challenging and it’s easy to get overwhelmed. To prevent burning out before you even get started, create action items and assign priorities to them from highest to lowest.
You can use labels like high-priority, medium-priority, and low-priority or you can assign numbers (e.g. 1-10) in order of most to least important.
Focus on assigning priorities to tasks with the greatest impact on revenue first, like optimizing product pages or launching key marketing campaigns, then move on to tasks that might reduce expenses or improve operating efficiency.
Once you’ve assigned priorities, it’s time to tackle them. Address high-priority items immediately, such as fixing site speed issues, addressing cart abandonment, or launching a new product line.
Assign resources to ensure these tasks are executed efficiently. This may mean shifting employee focus, hiring contracted help, or purchasing new software.
Break medium- and low-priority tasks into manageable milestones and set deadlines for them. Complex tasks like redesigning the website, introducing new payment options, or improving customer support systems may require multiple smaller tasks and associated deadlines and may be dependent on the completion of other projects.
Using a project management software that includes a Gantt chart may help you better manage expectations and understand project progress. Gantt charts are a visual bar graph that some project management software employ to illustrate project timelines. They include start and end dates for individual tasks, their interdependencies, and key milestones.
This type of visual representation helps teams track project progress, identify potential bottlenecks, and help keep completion timelines on track.
The first step to ensuring that you achieve your goals is to make them realistic, measurable, and specific. Here are some examples:
Regularly review your progress and adjust strategies as needed. You can even change your goals based on changing circumstances and new opportunities.
By carefully reviewing your past sales data, prioritizing tasks, and setting new goals for the future and tracking them, you’ll create a structured plan to improve sales and make 2025 a successful year.
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Whether you’re looking to boost site speed, reduce downtime, or scale effortlessly during peak sales, Pressable has you covered. Elevate your store’s revenue and performance today with hosting that works as hard as you.
Zach brings a wealth of knowledge to Pressable with more than 15 years of experience in the WordPress world. His journey in WordPress began with creating and maintaining client websites, fostering a deep understanding of the intricacies and challenges of WordPress. Later, his knack for problem-solving and commitment to service led him to pursue a role at Automattic, where he excelled in providing customer support for WooCommerce. His expertise extends beyond technical proficiency to encompass a deep understanding of the WordPress community and its needs. Outside of work, Zach enjoys spending time with his family, playing and watching sports, and working on projects around the house.
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