How to create custom WooCommerce customer dashboard

WooCommerce is a great tool that allows you to create an online store in no time. In this blog we’ll show you how to create a custom WooCommerce customer dashboard with create custom reports with dedicated WooCommerce customer area. With a customer dashboard and data insights you can get from it, you can make data-driven decisions and improve your decision-making process.

One of the biggest assets of tech-based companies is their data. That’s because data can help us understand our business and customers. Collecting and processing the right data points is the difference between taking amazingly good decisions or bad and uninformed decisions.

And that’s the problem we’d like to solve.

If you are using WooCommerce, a lot of data is being collected already and in this article we’ll understand how to go from raw data in your WooCommerce database to creating your own WooCommerce customer dashboard.

The benefits of data visualization and data-driven decisions

Before we dive into the details some definitions are needed. Data visualization is the study and method used to organize and present your data. There are many ways to visualise and present your data, such as using charts, tables, infographics, databases.

When used correctly, data visualization can help you digest a lot of information very quickly. You can see at a glance how different data sets compare to each other.

When used correctly, data visualization can help you digest a lot of information very quickly.

Additionally, well-structured data can be drilled down or up. This means that you can increase or decrease the detail level. For example, you can switch between daily, monthly, or yearly sales. You can also switch from city-wide, state-wide or country-wide stats. As a result, you get a better sense of your data set and its individual parts.

Because of these data tools, you can use your data as a thermometer of your business activities and results. Your customer dashboard can be used as a way to evaluate performance. For instance, if a state brings more product sales than others, we can find out why this is happening. It could mean just that this particular state has more traffic (this can be easily verifiable by tools like Google Analytics), but it could be because of other reasons like higher conversion rates or better product market fit.

Therefore, you can use your WooCommerce dashboard to better understand your data and its subsets. You can as well use it to track down performance. And going a step further you can use these performance metrics to find out trends.

What data should I track on my WooCommerce Customer Dashboard?

Let’s define what good data visualization means for your WooCommerce user Dashboard. According to the Information is Beautiful team, there are 4 elements, that when combined tell us what we need to know:

• Information – Our data points, such as a sale, customer address, sale price, products.
• Story – What concept we have in this report? Why is this important? Why should we even build this? What kind of issues lead to the need for building this?
• Goal – What are we trying to achieve? Understand sales? Get to know our customers? Understand sales from the product X in 2018?
• Visual Form – The representation we choose, be it a report, table, charts

Regarding data storage, most of the work is already done by the WooCommerce team. If you want to spice up your WooCommerce customer dashboard you can bring some more data. For example, Users Insights as a dashboard plugin can collects your user location via the GeoLocation API or user tracking activity data.

You can collect more data using custom fields and tools such as Gravity Forms or ACF. Additionally, when collecting your data, keep in mind its granularity. The granularity is how big or small your data point is. For example, if you collect your customers’ birth date you can calculate their age. But if you collect only their age, you can’t update this information later on. The same rule applies to your sales data, product costs, stock information and so on.

Finally, you should consider which metrics you want to create. We have many articles on different metrics you can use, here are some suggestions:

• Customer login activity
• Customer Wishlist products purchase
• WooCommerce membership reports
• Returning customers & repeat purchases
• Finding your revenue by country
• Customer Conversion rates
• Customer coupon usage

How to create a WooCommerce customer Dashboard

The Users Insights plugin has the Reports section. There you have a WooCommerce customer dashboard ready to use with a lot of interesting metrics. Let’s go through a few of the metrics you can find.

First, your sales report. Any WooCommerce customer dashboard should give you an idea of how much you are selling. But beyond that, we need the flexibility of checking how sales stats are progressing over time. Therefore, on the sales dashboard widget you can switch the sales report from daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly reports.

 

Often in your WooCommerce dashboard, you need to quickly see how many new WooCommerce customers you’ve got. That’s when the new customer sections are going to be useful. Since you are using a dashboard, you can quickly see how customer acquisition is working, and how it compares to other periods.

 

As we mentioned before the repeat purchase ratio is an incredibly important metric. That’s why it should be in your customer dashboard. With it, you’re able to see in a pie chart how the repeat buyers are distributed.

 

This may come in handy if you are considering strategies for loyal or new customers. For example, if you identify a lot of single purchase users in your “Number of orders per customer” dashboard widget, let’s track them and offer them discounts. On the other hand, if it looks like you have a lot of loyal customers with many orders, let’s reward them. This can be done in another type of WooCommerce user dashboard, which is using the Users Insights filers:

 

A quick glance over your most common billing locations can provide you good insights as well. You can use the Users Insights top WooCommerce billing location report to identify popular countries and cities.

Your WooCommerce customer dashboard is going to be more complete once you look at the payment methods and coupon usage. This gives you an insight on how payment options and discounts can affect your conversions.

 

And the last highlight of our WooCommerce dashboard is the best sellers section. There you can see which products are your top performers.

And this is only from the default WooCommerce plugin data. Users Insights also comes with support for the WooCommerce subscriptions and WooCommerce memberships extensions. Since a WooCommerce subscription is treated as a regular WooCommerce product the Woocommerce subscriptions data is automatically detected and displayed in the default WooCommerce reports. However for WooCommerce Memberships there is separate report dashboard that can be accessed via its own custom tab.

Of course there is the general WordPress custom dashboard report that include a lot of additional information about your WooCommerce store:

 

WooCommerce customer area

Additionally, there are other sections in the Users Insights WooCommerce reports that we haven’t mentioned, and that is the WooCommerce customer area or as we call it WooCommerce customer profile or WooCommerce account page.

This section of your WooCommerce dashboard will have a page for each customer where shop owners and shop managers can go through all the customer account details. Including order details data like orders they have placed, with the list of items they purchased and their payment details. But also a lot of other account details data like: name, email, date of birth, customer location, user role, page visited, custom field data, items in cart, items in wishlist, product reviews made and more. This provides a more complete view of each WooCommerce user and you can check their profile. There you may see all their orders, Wishlist products, reviews and any activity.

Since this is a WordPress admin dashboard it will be accessible only to the users with WordPress dashboard access and have logged in their accounts. Once login they can retrieve the data from the database for reports, analysis, and more!

Finally, if you want you can create your own filters and segments by using the Users Insights filters. This is for situations where you might want to drill down other reports from your user data and combine information from different reports. For instance, you may want to know the lifetime value of your repeat buyers from the US.

 

Conclusion

Today we investigated many aspects that go into building a good WooCommerce customer dashboard. We saw the basics of how a customer dashboard works, and how they can be useful. Additionally, we learned how to use Users Insights to build your own Customer Dashboard and find out more about your customer base.

We hope you enjoyed and see you again next time!