WooCommerce announced the publishing of a New Dashboard for WooCommerce. It’s a ‘feature plugin’ that introduces a new dashboard for WooCommerce from which store owners can manage and monitor all key reporting metrics.

This is similar to WooCommerce Product Blocks, which started as a feature plugin and will now be part of WooCommerce core, dev team officially stated.

The Features as Plugins model was introduced in WordPress 3.7 as a way for features to be developed for inclusion in WordPress core. The model allows a feature to be built, tested, refined and polished before it is considered as a merge candidate.

WooCommerce has explained on the official blog that they are doing something similar: “When we are building new features that introduce a significant change, and require substantial testing, we release them first as a Feature Plugin.”

There are many benefits for WooCommerce in this approach and one of them is that “WooCommerce community can play a primary role in developing WooCommerce platform”.

Here are a few things about the new Dashboard of WooCommerce:

Store owners can view charted data directly from the Dashboard via 14 different data points, and select any chart to load an associated report for deeper analysis.

Store owners can also select a custom interval for charts, depending on the date range selected.

Customize the dashboard

No two stores are the same and, as such, store owners require reports that fit their needs. With WooCommerce Admin, you can configure reports accordingly, and settings are stored on a ‘per user basis’ so the dashboard will look the same when you return later, even if you access it on your mobile device.

12 New and improved reports

We have reworked existing reports in WooCommerce to be more useful and introduced a new report for product variations to help store owners better monitor and understand their business.

They enable you to:

• Quickly filter data
• Compare date periods
• Get easy access to key data points
• Download reports in CSV format.

New reports available in WooCommerce Admin are:

• Revenue report
  • Provides a broad overview of the financial status of a store.
  • Reports gross revenue, refunds, the value of coupons used, taxes collected, shipping costs, and net revenue for a selected date range
• Orders Report
  • Reports the total number of orders, net revenue, the average order value, and the average number of items per order for a selected date range
• Product Report
  • Displays and compares sales information for a given time period by product
• Stock Report
  • Displays the store’s entire product catalog by products that are in stock, low stock, and out of stock.
• Product Comparison Report
  • Performs highly customized analysis of sales data by comparing the performance of different product/s and variation/s over a specified date range.
• Category Report
  • Filters by all categories, a single category, category comparison, viewing top categories by items sold, and top categories by net revenue.
• Coupons Report
  • Compares multiple coupon codes to display how many orders used coupons and the total amount discounted.
  • Uses advanced filters to compare coupons, and a few preset filters to displays Top Coupons by Discounted Orders or Amount Discounted using preset filters
• Customers Report
  • Displays Customer Data: Name, Sign Up date, Email, number of Orders, Lifetime Spend, Average Order Value, Last Purchase Date, and Country.
  • Provides a look into all customer data for a store, listing all registered and unregistered customers along with pertinent data about each customer such as email address, number of orders, lifetime spend, and average order value.
  • Allows searching the customer table by customer name, country, username, and email address.
  • Segments customer data with custom filters, e.g., number of orders, total spend, and average order value.
• Tax Report
  • Compares tax report data by different tax codes
  • Compares multiple tax codes, and displays data on how much tax was collected for orders and shipping
• Order Report
  • Filters order data for a given time period by order status (i.e., pending and complete), product (orders with or without certain products), coupon codes (coupon codes were/were not used on orders), and new and returning customers.
• Downloads Report
  • Allows filtering of Downloads by product, username, order number, and IP address

Advanced Filters

A set of advanced filters allow store owners to extract greater detail from new reports, including:

• Numeric Filters allow the addition of filters to report based on numeric inputs. The filter supports matches for more than, less than, and between inputs of numeric values.
• Customer Name Filter is an autocomplete filter that allows for the creation of filters based on orders for a particular customer.
• Email Filter is an autocomplete filter powered by the customer REST API endpoint and allows quick filtering of reports by customer email.
• Country Filter is also an autocomplete filter that allows for the creation of filters based on the country or countries of customers.

A New Activity Panel

Finally, WooCommerce is introducing a new Activity Panel that provides persistent store management tools to quickly:

• Fulfill orders
• Manage stock
• Manage inventory
• Manage store notifications.

According to the official release, it includes a new Inbox notification feature to address a widespread WordPress problem – notification overload! The new Inbox cleans up all notifications relevant to managing a WooCommerce store, ensuring that store owners only get what’s important and in one central location.

The Activity Panel also makes use of a new API and new REST API endpoints for developers to add notifications specific to their extensions, which will then present themselves in the Inbox. More information about the new API and the REST API endpoints available can be found at Activity Panel Inbox.