A merchant wants to identify cross-sell opportunities by determining which products customers most frequently purchase after buying one of their top 5 best-selling items from the past 24 months.
The Challenge:
Need to analyze customer order behavior to find the single most popular next purchase for each of the 5 best sellers
Example: If “Dancing shoes” is a best seller, identify that “Dance shoe bag” is the most common follow-up purchase
Unclear how to filter and analyze this data within Shopify’s native reporting tools
Proposed Solutions:
Manual approach: Use ShopifyQL to export two datasets (customers who bought the top 5 items with purchase dates, and their complete purchase history), then use Excel/Google Sheets to filter out pre-purchase items and analyze subsequent buying patterns. This method is described as cumbersome and data-intensive.
Third-party tools: Two app vendors (Report Pundit and Better Reports) offered customized reporting solutions with dashboards to automate this analysis.
Status: The discussion remains open with no native Shopify solution identified; merchant appears to be evaluating third-party options versus manual data manipulation.
Summarized with AI on October 29.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
Hi there! I’m looking for some help on the best way to approach the following for upsell / cross sell purposes.
From ecommerce reports I have identified my top 5 best seller products over the past 24 months.
Based on customer order behaviour, I want to identify which is the next most popular product sold after a customer purchases one of the 5 best sellers. I need one product (the next most likely purchase) for each best seller.
e.g. Best seller product 1 (Dancing shoes) → Product most likely to purchase next (Dance shoe bag)
Please can anyone help with the best way to go about this, and how I can filter reports to give me the information I need.
@LPM456 , This requires extensive customization that default reports may not support. At Report Pundit, we can tailor a report for you in Google Sheets with custom dashboard. Your requirement involves analyzing the last 24 months of data, including identifying customers who purchased those 5 products and the subsequent products they bought. Essentially, we’re looking to determine which products customers are likely to buy next after the 5 best sellers.
Ciara here from Better Reports, I noticed you may not have found a solution to your question yet and thought I’d jump in.
Shopify does not provide a built-in solution for this type of report unless you are able to build a query using their ShopifyQL query builder to pull two reports:
A list of all customers who have purchased one of those 5 items in the past 24 months along with the earliest sales date for each of those products
A list of all customers who have purchased one of those 5 items in the past 24 months along with the quantity sold of any product they purchased in the past 24 months with the dates they purchased each product
You could export both data sets into Excel/Google Sheets and create a logic to ignore items that were purchased before the customer’s earliest purchase of one of the 5 items and look at purchases afterward.
It is a little cumbersome and can be data-intensive, depending on the size of your store and the number of customers.
If that approach doesn’t suit, at Better Reports, we’ve created similar analyses for merchants if you ever need any help!