To analyze the growth process and sales changes of a product, the basis for judgment is the review data of the listing.

The following will take a toy product as an example for analysis. The product listing has 2 sub-SKUs, “Mega Set” and “Peculiar Pets”, and there are 121 reviews in total.

After understanding the product listing page and sub-SKU variants, the operator can start to analyze the review data. The data to be captured is the review time corresponding to different variants.

The variant product of “Mega Set” generated a review on August 21, 2019, so the number of “Mega Set” reviews in the corresponding month (August 2019) in the Excel table will increase by one, and so on for other months. If the variant product of “Peculiar Pets” generates a review, the corresponding review cell value in the Excel table will increase by one.

Open the Excel table of “Product Review Data Analysis” to view the data. As of October 22, 2019, the variant product of “Mega Set” has generated 87 reviews, and the variant product of “Peculiar Pets” has generated 29 reviews, totaling 116 reviews, which is 5 reviews less than the 121 reviews shown on the listing page. This may be caused by the platform deleting reviews or the seller deleting variants.

After summarizing the number of reviews generated by the two products in different months into an Excel table, a data chart is obtained.

The “Mega Set” sub-variant has generated reviews since October 2018, while the “PeculiarPets” sub-variant has not started to generate reviews until July 2019. At the same time, the “Mega Set” sub-variant had a peak review period from December 2018 to January 2019, generating 23 and 27 reviews respectively. Through the above data table, the number of reviews generated by the two products “Mega Set” and “Peculiar Pets” in different time periods can be visualized into a visual chart.

The number of reviews for “Mega Set” shows a trend of rapid increase, then decrease, and finally gradually stabilize, while the number of reviews for “Peculiar Pets” shows a slow increase. Because the generation time of reviews is slower than the generation time of orders, for example, if a user places an order in October, he may not edit the review text until November or even December, so the fluctuation of the sales volume of the product can be inferred based on the change in the number of reviews of the product listing.

Because December 2018 to January 2019 is the peak period of reviews for the “Mega Set” sub-variant, this time period is moved forward 1~2 months, that is, the beginning of October 2018 to the end of December 2018 is the peak period of product orders. Secondly, because the sub-variant “Peculiar Pets” began to generate reviews in July 2019, the listing time of the sub-variant “Peculiar Pets” should be from the end of May 2019 to the beginning of July 2019, that is, the sellers of this toy category began to prepare for the peak order period in 2019 at the end of May 2019. Combining the above information, the following conclusions are drawn.

1 The peak order period of this toy category is from early October to late December each year.

2 The best growth period for listings in this toy category is from early June to early October each year.