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% Quantity

What share of the units you sold came from one product.

60 second readAppears on: Products

What it means

% Quantity is one product's share of every unit ordered across your catalogue in the period, written as a percentage. It counts units, not orders and not money — someone who buys three of the same item adds three, and the price of that item makes no difference to the number.

Its money twin is % Product Revenue% Product RevenueQuickly see which products drive most of your sales., a few columns over. The two rarely agree, and the gap between them is the point of having both: one tells you what your warehouse is doing, the other what your bank account is doing.

Show the math

Formula and a worked example

% Quantity = the product's units ÷ units across every product × 100.

The product's units is the total ordered in the period, counting every item on every order line.

The denominator is that same count added up across your whole catalogue, over the same dates.

Worked example. Your catalogue ships 40,000 units in the quarter. One product accounts for 4,800, so it reads 4,800 ÷ 40,000 = 12%.

Now the reason the money column disagrees. A €12 accessory sells 10,000 of those 40,000 units — 25% of your volume — and earns €120,000. A €300 item sells 1,000 units, reads 2.5%, and earns €300,000. The small percentage is the bigger business, and the big percentage is most of your picking, packing and postage.

It answers the question

Which products move the volume your operation is actually built around? Stock, storage, picking and postage all scale with units, and this is the only column that counts them.

Why it matters

Units are what your warehouse, your supplier and your courier see. A product at 25% of volume sets a quarter of your packing time, a quarter of your reorder cash and a quarter of your shipping bill, whether it earns 25% of your revenue or 5% of it.

It also finds where thin margin hides. A cheap, high-volume item can look harmless in a revenue report and still be the product driving your cost per order up, because every unit carries a pick, a box and a label regardless of what it sold for.

What good looks like

There is no published band for this column. The natural reference point is the even split: fifty products sharing volume equally would sit near 2% each, so read a row against that, then against the same product a quarter ago.

The judgement worth making is the comparison, not the level. Line up a product's share of units against its share of revenue. Roughly equal means it sells at around your average price. Far above means a cheap line consuming operational capacity; far below means a high-value line where a few lost customers move a lot of money.

How to improve it

LeverWhat you doExpectHow longWatch out for
Fast
Sell it in multiples
Offer a 2-pack or 3-pack of a product people already re-buyUnits per order rise on that line2–4 weeksMultipacks almost always carry a per-unit discount, so the revenue share moves less than the unit share and your effective price per unit falls.
Fast
Make it the add-on
Put the product on the cart page and beside its natural companionIts share climbs without new visitors1–2 weeksAttachment sells units, not baskets. AOV barely moves while your pick and pack cost per order rises with every extra item.
Slow
Fix what stops the repeat
Sort sizing, packaging or stock reliability on a product people buy once and dropVolume builds over quarters rather than weeks1–2 quartersReal money per unit, spent months before the extra volume arrives to justify it, and easy to credit to whatever else changed that quarter.
Slow
Cut the products nobody reorders
Delist lines that take stock and picking time and rarely sellEverything you kept reads higher1 quarterThe shares improved because the denominator shrank. Total units fall with the tail, so read the unit count rather than the percentage to know whether it helped.

Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.

Read it with

A share of units tells you what you shipped. Whether shipping it was worth doing is in the columns either side.

% Quantity + % Product Revenue% Product RevenueQuickly see which products drive most of your sales.

This is the pair the Products table exists for. Units share far above revenue share is a cheap line carrying your operation without paying for it; revenue share far above units share is a premium line where volume is small and each lost buyer costs a lot. Neither column alone tells you which kind of product you are holding.

% Quantity + % Returning Quantity% Returning QuantityWhich products earn loyalty and reorders.30% or more is healthy

Volume share says how much of your shipping this product is; the returning share says whether the same people keep buying it. A product with a large share of units and almost no repeat share is being sold to a new stranger every time, which makes its volume the most expensive kind you can have.

Common misreads

“This is our biggest product — it's 25% of units.”

Biggest by volume, which is often the cheapest thing you sell. Check the revenue column in the same row: a large unit share on a low-price item can sit alongside a very small share of the money.

“The share went up, so the product sold more units.”

Not on its own. The share rises whenever the rest of the catalogue sells less, or when you delist products. The Quantity column beside it holds the actual count, and that is the one to read first.

“% Quantity should roughly match % Product Revenue.”

Only for a product priced at your catalogue average. Everything cheaper reads higher here than in the revenue column, everything dearer reads lower, and that difference is information rather than an error.

Also called

Unit share · share of units sold · volume share

See yoursEvery product's share of units, sorted, next to its share of revenue and the share of those units bought by returning customers.

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