Variant Demand vs Sales

Variant Demand vs Sales compares the attention each variant gets with its share of its product’s sales. It shows which sizes or options visitors wanted, not just the ones in stock.

How It’s Calculated

Each row is one variant, such as a size or color of a product. The table lists up to 200 variants, with the largest Est. Lost Demand first, then the most Sessions Viewed.

The columns are:

• Variant: the product and option, such as Blue Widget — Medium.
• SKU: the variant’s SKU, when it has one.
• Sessions Viewed: sessions that viewed the variant.
• View Share: the variant’s share of all views of its product’s variants.
• Sales Share: the variant’s share of its product’s purchases. A purchase here is a session that added the variant and then bought.
• Demand Gap: View Share minus Sales Share. A large positive gap is a variant that visitors keep looking at and don’t buy.
• Add-to-Cart Rate: the sessions that added the variant divided by the sessions that viewed it. It can pass 100%, because a session can add a variant without viewing it.
• Peer Add-to-Cart Rate: the same rate for the product’s other variants.
• Inferred Stockout Days: days the variant behaved as if it was unavailable.
• Price Coverage: the share of the sessions with a price recorded for the variant.
• Est. Lost Demand: the add-to-carts the variant probably lost on those days, valued at its average price.

Sales Share counts any purchase by a session that added the variant, because das Pixel’s purchase event doesn’t list the items. It is an upper bound.

Inferred Stockout Days

das Pixel doesn’t read your Shopify inventory. It infers a stockout from behavior. A day counts when all of these are true:

• The variant had at least 5 viewing sessions that day.
• The product’s other variants together had at least 5 viewing sessions that day.
• The other variants had some add-to-carts that day.
• The variant’s add-to-cart rate that day was 25% or less of the other variants’ rate.

The comparison is always against the same product’s other variants, never against the whole store.

Est. Lost Demand adds up, for each such day, the variant’s views times the other variants’ add-to-cart rate, minus its own add-to-carts. It uses the variant’s average price shown.

It isn’t lost revenue, because not every cart converts. It is blank for a variant with fewer than 30 viewing sessions in the date range, and for a variant that has no price recorded, because those can’t be valued. Price Coverage shows which it is.

Some themes record a product view each time a visitor switches variant. On those themes, view counts run higher for the variants visitors click through. Compare View Share within a product, and treat the counts as a guide.

Summary Cards and Chart

The cards above the table are Variants, Sessions Viewed, Inferred Stockout Days and Est. Lost Demand. Variants is the number of rows.

The others add up the rows, so a session that viewed 3 variants counts 3 times in Sessions Viewed.

With Compare on, each card shows its change.

The chart compares View Share and Sales Share for the 10 variants with the largest gap, in either direction.

What Counts

• Visitors who declined analytics cookies, or who opted out of the sale or sharing of their data while Require Sale-of-Data Consent is on, aren’t recorded. Known bots are left out.
• Only events inside the date range count, and days follow your store’s time zone.
• Turn on Live to refresh the report every 30 seconds. Without it, a figure can be up to 10 minutes old.

A warning shows above the report when das Pixel saw less than 70% of your online-store orders in the last 30 days. This report has no Segment, Sales Channel or Filters control.

What Good Looks Like

There’s no target. If a variant has a high View Share and a low Sales Share, it may have been out of stock when visitors wanted it. Check Inferred Stockout Days.

Order reports show only what sold. Use the shares here when you plan how many of each size or color to buy.

What to Do About It

• A variant with stockout days: check your stock history in Shopify, and order more before the next season.
• A high Demand Gap with no stockout days: check the variant’s price, photos and options.
• A low Price Coverage: treat Est. Lost Demand as incomplete.

Variant Substitution shows when visitors switch from one variant to another.

Get AI Insight at the top of the report asks Copilot for a short read of it.

Where to Find It

• Variant Demand vs Sales: open Reports and look under Web Analytics.