Discovering PaySketch
PaySketch is an analytics application that adds the power of business intelligence to traditional methods of business and market analysis used by PayPal merchants. It empowers businesses to take a deep dive into their business transactions, analyze data sets with easy to understand trends and charts, and follow actionable indicators for better performance and efficiency.
In a nutshell, PaySketch brings enterprise level analytics to life for sales, payments, products and customers – for individuals and businesses using PayPal.
Why we built PaySketch
It started with a simple idea – to stay updated with what’s happening in our PayPal account. We wanted a desktop application, like Thunderbird and Outlook for emails, which could automatically pull in all existing transactions, stay up to date with newer ones, and let us perform simple actions like sending a payment or issuing a refund. Like we did for emails a decade ago, one still needs to login to their PayPal account to check for their balance, new sales, payments etc.
One of the related problems has been speed – and we really can’t put the blame on PayPal for this. With the sheer amount of transactions data and payment that PayPal processes, we really can’t expect their website to be showing us data in split seconds.
Analytics didn’t exist. Businesses really want to know whats selling and what’s not. What are the sales numbers and how much has been paid in fees and chargebacks. Who are the most valuable customers and where does the most spending happen. Figuring this out from PayPal transaction history was impossible – an export of transaction history in CSV format and writing Excel formulas is the limit to which you can imagine making the most sense, if any.
Securing data was a prime factor. Unlike email clients which store data on computers in decipherable formats, transaction (financial) data is sensitive and must be secured.
So it boils down to 4 important factors:-
- A desktop client for PayPal that can automatically check for new sales/payments/customers/transactions. Similar to how things work with email clients, PaySketch allows users to perform basic PayPal actions and gives them access to PayPal transaction history data, even when they are not connected to the internet.
- Speed needs to be given top priority. The application should almost instantly connect to the internet to fetch new data. Accessing any existing or new data should be blazing fast.
- Analytics and reporting platform built ground up, specifically for PayPal merchants. It should allow users to slice and dice the data by email addresses, date ranges, names, currency code, status, types, products and other innumerable factors. Historic trend charts, graphs, highlights and indicators form the basis to help merchants analyze various facets and perform better in their business. In sum, the application should deliver business intelligence for PayPal merchants which is both meaningful and actionable.
- Security for financial transactions is a must and we made sure that the highest level of encryption standards are used to do so. All communication between the application and PayPal happens over secure protocols and the stored data is secured with military grade encryption techniques.
Who can use PaySketch
PaySketch has been crafted for merchants who sell goods or services using PayPal as the payment gateway. One could be selling tangible or intangible products, services such as IT or anything that falls under a permitted category by PayPal – PaySketch will take into account every single transaction that happens to and from your PayPal account.
To use PaySketch, one needs to have a PayPal Premier or Business account. Personal/individual account holders don’t get the flexibility to sell things and nor do they get the tools like API access, which is required to establish a connection between your PayPal account and PaySketch.
Dashboards
PaySketch’s real-time, in-depth analytics reveals current events along side historic trends for each segment of the business. To help discover opportunities by drawing focused conclusions, the application is segmented into dashboards which reflect concentrated information about various business functions. Each dashboard hits the spotlight on important verticals such as sales, payments, customers and products which together form a unified product and help take directional actions.
Summary Dashboard
The summary dashboard is a quick status and health check report of your business. It shows high level actionable indicators which help you act fast by drawing conclusions and take quick decisions based on the drawn statistics. Learn More
Transactions Dashboard
The transactions dashboard gives you a quick glance at the transaction history associated with your PayPal account. Learn More
Sales Dashboard
As one of the most important dashboards in PaySketch, it shows complete sales transaction data along with details, trends and highlights. Learn More
Payments Dashboard
This dashboard reflects all payments and subscription charges that have been charged to your PayPal account. Learn More
Customers Dashboard
This dashboard shows complete details about the most valuable assets of your organization – the customers. Learn More
Products Dashboard
The products dashboard is one of the most information intensive places in the application. It segments each attribute of sales by products and shows in-depth analytics, trends and details for each one of them. Learn More
Settings Dashboard
This dashboard lets you connect PaySketch to your PayPal account, secures access to your data and lets you configure useful options which drive the way PaySketch updates and presents information. Learn More
Search Dashboard
Here you can slice and dice the transactions to filter them by particular attributes. The dashboard allows users to search for and filter transactions by using upto 9 different filters in combination. Learn More
Reporting Dashboard
This dashboard lets your users create Financial Summary and Sales reports across any date range. Users also get the ability to download and archive the reports in CSV and PDF formats. Learn More
How does it help
Our focus lies in helping over 8 million# individuals and businesses who use PayPal to accept payments and have no access to any form of accounting, reporting, analytics or business intelligence whatsoever. PaySketch finds its place in the business backbone. It is built specifically for the post purchase segment of a business workflow, because merchants need a way to analyze sales before they could formulate and take focused business decisions for future. Without having the right context, organizations may be putting in too much efforts for products which don’t contribute as much to the overall revenue or might not be on alert for a slow and steady decline in sales of their best selling products.
One can have faint guesstimates, but it is very hard to imagine having trends, or precise numbers or even answers to basic questions such as:-
- What are the peak sales days/weeks. Does sales pickup or take a slump during certain days of the month?
- Which are the best selling products and which ones don’t perform so well. How long has the organization dragged the low performers and should they even be sold anymore.
- Which products have not had an ROI for the allocated marketing budget.
- What are the peak order timings – so that the online store is never down for maintenance and support staff is on vigil during those hours.
- How many chargebacks have been filed and how much business losses have been incurred due to them.
- Which products might need more marketing or have a problem resulting in low sales.
- What monthly subscription charges are being paid.
- Products or services that need to be refund the most. Identifying the products for which businesses receive a large number of refund requests and contacting buyers can help recognize the exact reason, a fix to which can result in lower refund requests and thus, higher revenue.
We believe that merchants can really benefit if they have a tool that helps analyze the strong and weak points about their business.
This can only happen if there is a post sales study and analysis engine like PaySketch in place.
Here are a few other cool things that merchants can do using PaySketch:-
- Can send money or payments in a second
- Respond to refund requests in 1 click
- Can print shipping labels and mark items shipped for reference, from within the application
- Email buyers just to say hi or help solve a problem
- Find and reward the most loyal/returning/paying customers
- and there is a lot more…
Screenshots
Take a look at the dashboards that form the foundation of PaySketch. A view into the product will allow you to imagine the possibilities of taking your business to new heights.
Get PaySketch
We are sure that you understand the value that PaySketch will bring to your business. You can try PaySketch for free or unleash the full power of PayPal Analytics and Reporting by getting its software license.