Did your TPT sale work? You might be surprised! TPT Seller Tip 090

Summary:
This video for TPT sellers explains three ways to tell if a product update or store discount actually worked, especially in a highly seasonal marketplace. Mike Fuchigami walks through a New Year’s resolution resource case study, first comparing sales before and after the update, then comparing this year’s earnings to last year’s, and finally using a deeper “before vs. after this year” against “before vs. after last year” method. He demonstrates how this third method better accounts for seasonality and platform-wide changes, and introduces a free Google Sheet tool to run these comparisons and check whether discounts are boosting true earnings or just leaking money.

Video

Transcript

Hey TPT sellers, we constantly update our products. But how do you know if your change really made a difference? Well, you look at sales before and after you made the change. If you made more money after the change, then it worked. Maybe.

But what do you do if it’s a seasonal product or if there’s a site-wide sale? You would expect to have more sales after a certain date than before. Well, in this case, you can compare how much money you made this year versus how much you made last year. If you made more money this year, then your change worked, right? Maybe.

But what happens if the economy is tough and sales are down across the platform? Or what happens if your store is doing disproportionately well and your numbers are consistently higher this year than last year? Hi, my name is Mike Fuchigami and I’m the host of the SEOTpreneur YouTube community.

In this video, we’re going to look at three ways to tell if your TPT product update worked. First, we’re going to look at the simple before and after method. Then, we’re going to compare this year to last year. And finally, we’re going to go one layer deeper and compare before and after this year with before and after last year.

I made a game with points to make it easier to see if you’re winning. Make sure to watch the very end because I have a cool way for you to figure out if your store discounts are actually working. Let’s start with method number one. Compare earnings before and after you make a change.

This is what we usually do. You update a product, then you look at what happened afterwards. This works great if it’s an evergreen product in the middle of the school year. But if there’s a sale or if it’s a seasonal product, simply comparing before and after you make a change may not work.

In this video, I’m going to look at a New Year’s resolution example from my store as a case study. But you can think about any seasonal product in your store, or maybe you’re thinking about a product that you recently updated before a sale. So, I updated my resource on Monday, December 29th, 2025.

Before the change I made $53. After the change I made $334. So, that’s $281 more. That’s an increase of 527.8%. That’s awesome. But Mike, doesn’t that prove the change worked? Maybe. Maybe not.

Here’s why. A New Year’s resolution resource is a seasonal product. People tend to buy it more after December 29th than before. Before December 29th, people are focused on Christmas and the holidays. But afterwards, they start thinking about New Year’s resolutions.

So, my earnings after the change were always going to look bigger than my earnings before the change. And the increased earnings might not have anything to do with my update. Here’s the trap. If your product is evergreen, like a grammar resource that sells the whole year, looking at numbers before and after a change can actually tell you something useful.

But if your product is seasonal, before and after can’t always tell the seasons apart from your change. A back to school resource is always going to sell more in August than July. A holiday resource is going to sell more right before the holiday as opposed to right after the holidays finished. No one is buying Easter resources a week after Easter.

So, if your sales go up after you update a product, that doesn’t automatically mean your update caused the increase. It might, but it might also be the time of the year. So, method number one is useful because it can tell you what happened before and after your change. But it doesn’t account for seasons.

And TPT is a seasonal marketplace. So, let’s go to method number two. Compare earnings this year with earnings last year. I made my change on Monday, December 29th, 2025. The matching day the previous year is Monday, December 30th, 2024. We line up Monday with Monday because TPT sales change based on day of the week.

In my example, after I updated the New Year’s resolution resource, I made $334. But last year during the same time period, I made $756. So, now the story changes. Instead of thinking, “Woohoo! I made $281 more,” I might think, “Ah, I made less than last year. In fact, I made $422 less than last year. That’s a 55.8% drop.”

Now, the temptation is to look at that and go, “My change failed. Sales are down year-over-year. My update didn’t work.” But that’s not the whole story, either. Maybe the economy is different this year. Maybe people are buying less in general. Maybe my whole store is down.

Method two doesn’t account for any of that. It just tells you that the earnings are down year-over-year. Method one says, “You made more money after the change.” Method two says, “Yeah, but you made less than last year.” So, which one is right? Great question.

That’s why we need method number three. Method number three is to compare before and after this year against before and after last year. So, we’re not just asking, “Did I make more money after the change?” And we’re not just asking, “Did I make more money than last year?” We’re asking a different question.

Did this year improve more from where it started than last year improved from where it started? Here’s what I mean. This year, before the change, I made $53. This year, after the change, I made $334. So, this year, I made $281 more. That’s a 527.8% increase.

Now, let’s look at the previous year. So, if I look at the matching Monday, before that matching Monday, I made $202. After that matching Monday, I made $756. So, I made $554 more. That’s a 275% increase.

Now, look at these two numbers. This year, I improved by 527.8%. Last year, I improved by 275%. So, even though I made less total money this year, I improved from where I started. The difference is 252.8 percentage points. If this was a game, this product won 252.8 points.

But Mike, you still made less money this year. 334 is less than 756. How is this a win? Great question. Here’s what I mean. Think of it like a car race. This year, I started at mile 53. Last year, I started at mile 202. So this year, I’m starting way behind where I started last year.

And even though I’m driving faster this year, growing 527.8% versus 275%, I’m still behind on the scoreboard because I started further back. That’s why I think method number three gives us a better picture. We’re not just asking, “Did I make more after the change?” And we’re also not just asking, “Did I make more than last year?”

We’re asking, “Did I improve more this year than I improved last year?” And for this product, the answer looks like yes. Now, I know it’s still disappointing. We want to make more money this year than last year. But I think we have to start with where we currently are, not where we used to be.

I wonder if the question we should be asking is, “Did my change work?” as opposed to “Did my change work so much that I made more money than last year?” I mean, obviously that’s the best case scenario, but that’s not always possible. I made a Google Sheet tool that shows you all three methods visually.

Getting the data from TP is actually pretty easy. Analyzing the data is the hard part. So, if you have a question, let me know. I gave away this tool for free for a limited time to my email community. Hopefully, you got the message. If not, please sign up for my email newsletter.

Making YouTube videos takes a lot of work. So, I’m not able to always make a video on time to tell you about all the freebies. The email community is the best way to stay on top of all of my freebies and giveaways. At the beginning of the video, I talked about a way to figure out if your store discounts are working.

Lots of us are experimenting with the first-time buyer discount, or the abandoned cart discount, or the store follower discount. But how do we know if the store discounts are working? By using method three. Don’t just ask, “Did I make more money after turning on the discount?” And I don’t think we should be asking, “Did I make more money than last year?”

Instead, let’s ask, “Did I improve more this year after turning on the discount codes than I improved last year without the discount codes?” To help answer this question, I made a Google Sheet tool. You put in the date you turned on the discounts, you click the built-in links to get the data from TPT, you paste the data into the Google Sheet, and then you look at the points on the summary card.

If the discounts are working correctly, you should see more points for units sold, more points for conversion rate, and more points for overall earnings. If you don’t have more points for earnings, then the store discount may be leaking money. So, it might be time off this tap, even though your conversion rate is higher.

The store discount tool is free until Sunday. So, please share this video with your TPT besties. The link is in the video description. And make sure to sign up for the email newsletter, so you don’t miss out on future free tools. I’ll see you in the next one. Bye for now.