Compare this year to last year on the Trends tab

Ecommerce › Trends is your store's own history: every month of sales laid out year against year, and every product ranked by how many you actually sold. It answers the two questions a spreadsheet is usually opened for, "what does November normally look like" and "which of these is not moving any more", without opening one.

The month grid

Years run down the left, January to December across the top, and the shading gets stronger with the number, so a busy season shows up as a band of colour before you have read a single figure.

The four buttons above it change what every cell means:

• Revenue is what the products sold for, after any discount, before tax and before shipping.
• Units is how many items went out the door.
• Orders is how many orders came in.
• Avg order is revenue divided by orders. For a year it is the whole year's revenue over the whole year's orders, not an average of the twelve monthly averages, which would let one quiet January count as much as a busy December.

A blank cell is not a zero. Blank means TALISK_HQ has no orders for that month, usually because the history has not been imported that far back. A month that was imported and genuinely sold nothing shows a real 0. The line above the grid always says which range you are actually looking at.

The product list

Sorted by units, because that is the honest ranking of what your customers keep buying. Last sold is the column most people end up using: scroll to the bottom and you are looking at stock that has not moved, with the date it last did.

Click a product and the same month grid opens underneath it, scoped to that one product, so you can see whether it is seasonal or simply finished.

Why the numbers here do not match your books

They are counted from a different thing, on purpose.

Your Ecommerce overview and your profit and loss are built from money that has actually landed and been posted to your ledger. Trends is built from the orders themselves. An order placed in December and paid out in January is December here and January there. Sales tax, shipping and refunds are handled differently again.

So the two will not tie, and Trends is kept on its own tab with its own range for exactly that reason. Use Trends to see shape and seasonality; use the overview and your reports for what the business actually earned.

Why there is no margin here

TALISK_HQ records what a product cost you at the moment its order syncs. An order imported today from three years ago would be stamped with today's cost, so a margin worked out across your history would look precise and be wrong. Margin lives on Ecommerce › Products, over a period where the cost is the one that applied.

Bringing your history in

At the top of the tab there is one control. Pick how far back you want to go, 1, 2, 3 or 5 years, and press Import history. Before you choose, the screen tells you the exact range it will actually fetch for that choice, so you are never picking a number and finding out afterwards.

It runs in the background and you can leave the page. The newest months arrive first, on purpose: this year fills in within minutes while the older years are still coming, so there is something useful to look at straight away. The progress line says how many months are done and how many orders have arrived.

It does not change your books, your reports, or your tax figures. Only past orders and products come in. Past payouts are deliberately left alone, because those are the entries that post to your ledger, and pulling in years of them would push sales into periods your accountant has already closed.

Adding another year later

Once an import has finished, the same control offers Add another year. It carries on from the oldest month you already have, so nothing you already imported is fetched twice, and you can only go further back, never over the same ground again. If an import stops before it finishes, the screen says why and offers to pick it up where it left off.

Free accounts can import one year. Any paid plan goes back five.

How far back it goes

Shopify only lets an app read the last 60 days of orders until it grants extended access, and TALISK_HQ has that request in. Until it is granted, the control tells you so before you choose, and an import can only reach back that far.

That limit is about what an import can FETCH, not about what this screen holds. If your store has been connected to TALISK_HQ for a while, its orders have been syncing all along, and every one of those months is already on the grid. A store connected two years ago will see two years here whether or not the extended access has been granted. What the limit costs you is the years from BEFORE you connected. When the access is granted, Add another year is how you go back and get them.