Sales By Products Dashboard
Data visualization is all about answering questions. Starting from basics, let us analyse sales by products dashboard. Sales departments usually want to know what, when and how many iteams were sold, so let’s try to answer these most frequently asked questions to better understand business we run.
What is my income?
The first metric shows total income as sales amount. This one is set to calculate the entire loaded orders from database without predefined period of time. In some cases it’s good to show only income in current (most recent) month or year, but this approach should be taken only in specified situations. In general I prefer to show entire numbers and let user to analyse the period of time he wants for the needs of given situation.
Let’s assume that we are interested in last half year.
In last full month the income was 555,279 and it was higher with 132,512 than in previous month. Total income in 6 months was 2,576,343.
What is my income in comparison to 6 months ago?
To answer that question just select the first and last month in our last half of year and read check the sales difference. The income in Jun was 401,814 and we simply see that within next 5 months the income increased with 153,465.
How many products were sold in a particular period of time?
So in our case in last half year the company sold 10,301 products in 5,198 orders. Keep in mind that it’s the total number of sold products. The number of sold unique products is 3,015.
Here we can also check some details of categories, subcategories and products itself.
What is the trend of income by products?
For this one we can use bar chart with product hierarchy. Notice that this visualization allows to drill down the data from category, through sub-category to individual product list. Hovering our category or product automatically filters trend line for a chosen detail.
The “Motorola Smart Phone, Full Size” shows a big increase of sales in last month.
What sub-category of products is most frequently sold?
In the same visualization use “sort” icon to set subcategories in decreasing order by “nr of sold products” measure. Now it’s obvious that most frequently sub-category is “Binders” from “Office Supplies” category.
Use other sort icons to set your dimensions up with any measure.
Which product sub-category has the highest ratio of profit to sales?
In similar way just sort sub-category by “profit to sales ratio” and additionally we can choose three sub-categories from each category. Notice that the highest “profit to sales ratio” is not necessary related with products with the highest income.
Which furniture products have the highest shipping cost?
For this we have to select furniture category and drill down into sub-category details. Products should be again sorted by shipping cost, but they are grouped by higher dimension in product hierarchy. We can simply select top products from each sub-category and read the result from shorter list.
In our case, the highest shipping cost for furniture products are chairs: “Harbour…”, “Hon…” and “Novimex…”.
What iteams are usually sold in the most expensive orders?
There is another visualization which shows top 15 orders by sales for current conditions. Let’s pick just first 5 orders to see what products make it so expensive.
Which products are most frequently returned?
Use “show orders” filter to get only returned orders. Looking again on category bar chart we can see that mostly returned orders contain office supplies. Manager responsible for that area should definitely check the quality of his services.
What is the profit to sales ratio for top 10 phones by sales in orders which were not returned?
This time select only not returned orders, keep only phones from technology category and drill down into details. In next step order products by sales and select top 10 phones. The profit to sales ratio KPI is shown at the top of dashboard with 13,05%.
As you see Sales by products dashboard can answer a lot of questions and I shared just a piece of possibilities here. But remember to not clutter to much your dashboard applications with all the functionalities and types of visualizations. Just focus on those which answer your business questions.
I hope you like my data visualization approach. Please leave a comment, your thoughts or ideas for next data story. Thanks!
Here is link to dynamic version of Sales by products dashboard.