Sales by Title:
Path, from the left navigation menu: [Reports section] > Sales by Title
This report is an open-ended report into the sales (across all time) of all the titles you’re offering in your store. The figures in this report include every type of sale you might make – be it on your own website or that of an affiliate. In this regard, this list is the definitive account of your audio-book business’ sales.
To make it easy to identify your star-performers (that is, those titles which have sold the most copies since you first began trading) the list is ordered with the best-sellers (in unit-sales terms) at the top, so immediately you’re going to see your ‘star products’, right at the top of the list.
Note: whilst some (less expensive) titles may have sold huge quantities (and so appear at the top of the list) you should remember that there will be titles further down the list which are more expensive, but have sold fewer copies (these titles may be just as, or more, important to the success of your audio-book business) in sales value terms.
To load the "Sales by Title" page, in order to view sales figures by title for any given month, you need to select the link entitled "Sales by Title" under the Reports section of the left navigation menu, as shown here:
Fig. 2.7.1.1: The "Sales by Title" link from the left navigation menu:
This will load the ‘sales by title’ page, shown below:
Fig. 2.7.1.2: The "Sales by Title" page from which you can view sales figures by title for any given month:
What information is contained within this report?
The sales figures for your audio-book business are presented neatly here in a tabular format, with the following fields of information to make it easy to understand the full sales picture.
Title
The title column lists the individual audio-titles contained within your audio-book store. For each of the titles listed, there will be additional information (in the same row of this table) about that title’s sales.
Note: If an individual title has made no sales at all, then it will not appear within the ‘sales by title’ list – only titles with a minimum of one sale will be listed here.
Sales
In this column you will see how many individual copies of each title have been sold since you started trading. Remember, this value includes not only the sales directly off your audio-book store website, but also sales off your affiliates’ sites.
The other important thing to remember here is that selling huge quantities does not alone make titles successful – the price has an enormous effect on how ‘successful’ a title might be considered, and so should be taken into account when viewing these sales figures.
For example, you may see that you’ve sold 100 units of a title at only $1.00, yet further down the list, you find that there is a title which has sold only 20 units, but at $10 (total sales of $200). Clearly the first title is more ‘popular’ at its low price-point, but the second title would appear to be more ‘profitable’.
Price
The price at which the audio-book was sold is shown in this column. As mentioned above, this should be taken into account when considering how ‘successfully’ a title is performing in your audio-book business. This price is the price that the customer bought at, and is before any discount/commissions are paid.
Discount
Any discounts you offer to your customers will appear in this column. If, for example, you sold a product for $10.00, and to drive sales you issued a ‘coupon code’ for 10% off, the price would appear (in the Price column) at $10.00 and the discount would appear in the Discount column at $1.00 (the 10% discount off the sale price).
Commission
The commission column is the really important part! This column shows, for the total sales of each title, the total commission payable to you, the Spoken Network Partner.
Remember, that as a starting point, you receive 30% of the revenues from the sale of each product. Add into this scenario your affiliates, and your share will reduce by a minimum 10% (or more, if you’re offering your affiliates more than 10% of your share to motivate them further!).
The Commission column therefore takes account of the percentage that you take, less any commissions you are paying out for affiliate referral sales. This is what you 'take home’ from the individual title sales.
Printing this report:
You will find that, if you print this report in a landscape orientation (selecting, File, Print and then ‘Properties’ to change your printer’s default paper orientation) then the report will sit neatly in the page.
It is generally regarded as good accounting practice to keep some kind of off-line copy of your sales records. so try and get into a habit of printing suitable periodic sales reports from time to time, and filing them securely.
Tip: The latest version of Internet Explorer (v7) includes much-improved printing support that makes laying out your web-page to print a snap. Worth downloading as it will improve your report printing if it is your browser of choice.