Sales reports by category, brand and period: what to look at and how to compare

You open your statistics, see that you sold less this month than last month and start to worry. Or more, and you are pleased. In both cases the conclusion may be wrong: the month had one weekend fewer, the previous one included a campaign, or the drop comes from a single category that ran out of stock. Looking at sales is easy; comparing them properly, not so much.

This article covers which sales reports are worth reviewing in an online store, how to slice them by category, brand and period, and how to avoid the most common traps.

The breakdowns that matter

By category

It tells you which part of the catalogue drives the store. What is useful is not only how much each category sells, but:

• Share of revenue: what percentage of the total it represents.
• Trend: whether it is growing or falling compared with the same period last year.
• Margin: a category with high revenue and a low margin may contribute less than a small one.
• Returns: a category with many returns earns less than it seems.

By brand

Essential if you negotiate with suppliers or distribute several brands. It helps you decide which brands to highlight, which to review and with which to negotiate better terms. Crossing it with category is even more useful: a brand can do very well in one category and badly in another.

By product

The best sellers are obvious. More interesting are those that decline for no apparent reason and those that sell nothing for months: they take up space in the catalogue, in the warehouse and in the customer's attention.

Comparing periods without fooling yourself

Most misinterpretations come from comparing periods that are not comparable.

• Compare with the same period last year, not just with the previous month. Seasonality in retail is strong: December is not comparable with November.
• Watch out for days of the week. A month with five Saturdays and another with four are not the same if you sell more at weekends. For fine comparisons, compare full weeks or align by day of the week.
• Mark your campaigns. Black Friday, sales, a strong email campaign: note them down, or you will compare a period with a promotion against one without and draw the wrong conclusions.
• Isolate large orders. In stores with some trade customers, one exceptional order can distort the whole month.
• Take stock into account. If a category falls because its star product was out of stock for three weeks, the problem is not demand.

Metrics that go with revenue

Revenue that rises because the average order value rises is not the same as revenue that rises because more customers arrive. Each calls for different decisions.

Where the data is in PrestaShop

PrestaShop comes with a Stats section with reports on best-selling products, categories, customers, orders and more, with a period selector. For finer breakdowns (brand within category, year-on-year comparisons, margins) you need to export the orders and work on them in a spreadsheet or connect them to an analytics tool. If you export, make sure you filter by order statuses that count as a real sale.

A maintenance note: the native statistics read tables that grow endlessly (connections, visits, carts). In stores with years of history, keeping the database clean and PrestaShop up to date means those reports respond in a reasonable time.

A one-page monthly report

You do not need a complex dashboard. For most stores, a single page filled in the same way every month is enough:

1. Net revenue excluding taxes for the month, compared with the same month last year.
2. Orders and average order value, with the same comparison.
3. The top five categories with their share and change.
4. The top five brands, likewise.
5. The ten products rising most and the ten falling most, not just the best sellers.
6. Notes for the month: campaigns, stock-outs, price changes, technical incidents.

Point six is the one most often forgotten and the one most valuable a year from now, when you look back and cannot remember why March was so odd. A drop in sales that coincides with a week of broken checkout after a poorly tested update is not a demand problem, and without the note it will look like one.

If you run several stores or channels, make the same page for each one and another for the total. Mixing channels into a single figure hides exactly what you want to see.

From reports to the store

A report that nobody turns into a decision is useless. Some direct actions:

1. Reorder the categories in the menu according to their real weight.
2. Highlight what sells in each category and brand: a best-sellers block per category helps visitors who arrive without knowing exactly what they want.
3. Review the range of what does not sell: price, photos, description or simply removing it.
4. Adjust purchasing to the trend by category and brand.
5. Review the same reports every month, with the same definitions. Consistency is worth more than a spectacular analysis once a year.

How to do it in PrestaShop

Seller Plus brings those breakdowns into the store itself: it creates product carousels by category, brand and sales period (from one day to the entire history), with fourteen signals such as sales, orders, revenue, add-to-carts, most viewed or new arrivals, chained so that a category without sales still fills its slots. It has its own product page view counter, without cookies or personal data, and a panel shows you, carousel by carousel, how many slots it fills and which signal each product comes from. It is placed in the theme's hooks, in its own hooks or with a shortcode in CMS pages. It is not an accounting reports tool: its purpose is to make what sells best in each category, brand and period visible where the customer decides.