Four dashboards and no answer
You want to plan next season's designs, so you want to know which of this year's did well. Etsy shows sales by listing. Amazon shows sales by ASIN. Your Shopify store shows sales by product. Your print partner shows orders by product and variant. The same design appears as a T-shirt listing, a hoodie listing and a mug listing on each channel, with slightly different names.
You export everything to a spreadsheet and try to match rows by title. It takes a whole evening, and the result is still partly guesswork.
Sales are recorded by listing, not by design
The design is the thing you create and the thing you need to judge, but no channel knows what a design is.
- A design is spread across many listings, products and colours.
- Listing titles differ between channels.
- Some listings bundle several designs, such as a set of prints.
- Returns and reprints are recorded somewhere else.
- Costs per order depend on the partner and the destination.
So decisions about designs are made on impressions and the few listings you remember.
What not knowing costs
Good designs stay on too few products because you never noticed how well they did. Poor designs keep their listings, cluttering your shop and diluting your advertising. New designs follow what you think sold rather than what did. Advertising goes to listings, not to the designs that deserve it.
The evening spent matching spreadsheets is time you would rather spend designing.
There is a subtler cost as well. A design with plenty of sales can still be a poor earner once reprints, returns and expensive shipping destinations are counted, while a quieter design on a cheap blank may earn more per order. Looking at sales counts alone hides that, and it is exactly what a per-listing dashboard shows you.
The design sales report we build
- Every listing on every channel is linked to its design, product and colour, using the catalogue or a one-off matching exercise that you confirm.
- Orders are pulled from each channel's API and each line is tagged with its design.
- Costs come from your partners' order records, so margin is per line, not estimated.
- Returns, refunds and reprints are attached to the original order line.
- The report shows each design's sales, margin, return rate and trend, and breaks it down by product, colour and channel.
- Designs that sell on one product only, or one channel only, are listed as candidates to extend.
| View | Question it answers |
|---|---|
| Top designs | Which designs earn the most margin overall? |
| Design by product | Which products does each design sell best on? |
| Design by channel | Is a design strong on Etsy but absent from Amazon? |
| Slow designs | Which designs have not sold in a period you set? |
| Returns and reprints | Which designs or products come back most? |
The report shows what happened. Whether to retire a design you love is your decision; it just gives you the facts.
Planning with a design view
Before planning next season, you open the report and see this year's designs ranked by margin, not guesswork. One design sells well on mugs but was never put on tote bags. Another is strong on Etsy but absent from Amazon. A handful have not sold in six months across any channel. You extend the first, list the second and retire the third group.
When you run ads, you can point budget at designs that already convert, whichever listing they sit in.
Signs you are guessing about designs
- You match listings across channels in a spreadsheet.
- You cannot say which designs sold best this year.
- Returns are not linked to designs.
- Some good designs are only on one product.
- Old designs stay listed because nobody knows they stopped selling.