How can you discover what your customers really want? Ecommerce business owner Elyse Burns noticed several TikTok comments requesting stylish Kindle cases from her store, Elyse Breanne Design. She responded by designing e-reader wraps that quickly sold out—a great example of how paying careful attention to your customers can reveal trends. She now regularly taps into customer insights to launch trending products like pickleball paddles, academic planners, and desk mats.
What Elyse did was analyze trends, a process that can help you track shifting market trends and better understand customer needs. Here’s what makes trend analysis important, and how to conduct trend analysis to uncover insights, identify patterns, and predict customer behavior.
What is trend analysis?
Trend analysis is the process of identifying and interpreting qualitative and quantitative data points—like monthly sales data, website traffic, or social media engagement—to uncover patterns in customer behavior over time. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), you can discover valuable insights into what your customers want, when they want it, and why. Effective trend analysis is about preparing for what comes next; staying ahead of the curve and making smarter decisions that meet changing customer expectations.
Trend analysis often involves reviewing historical data patterns and market research reports. For example, reports from organizations like Gartner or Forrester could show how other companies are using emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to grow their business. After studying how similar businesses are using AI—like automating content creation or streamlining routine workflows—you then develop a plan to apply these innovations within your own operations.
Types of trend patterns
Data trends follow three distinct patterns: upward, downward, and sideways. Here’s what these terms mean, as well as trend analysis examples for each pattern:
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Upward trend. An upward trend shows consistent growth over time, such as an increase in products sold, growing positive customer sentiment, or higher engagement on social media. In Yelp’s 2025 trend report, the brand highlighted upward trends in searches for social activities like pasta-making classes (up 515%) and latte art classes (up 439%).
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Downward trend. Downward trends show a decline in customer interest, such as decreased foot traffic over time or lower sales. For example, while Labubus were incredibly popular at one point, Google Trends shows these little monsters are now in a downward trend—a 57% decrease in search over the course of a few months.
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Sideways trend. A sideways trend means there’s sustained, stable interest, such as small increases or decreases in the overall trend line. If there are products in your store that don’t have notable shifts over time in terms of interest or purchases—this could be evident with non-seasonal staples—that’s a sideways trend.
Why perform a trend analysis?
- Stand out from your competitors
- Make data-driven decisions
- Get ahead of shifting preferences
- Improve supply chain management
Customer tastes shift quickly—especially with trends constantly coming and going on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Here’s how data analysis can help you identify trends before they fizzle out, predict future trends, and make informed decisions about the long-term health of your business:
Stand out from your competitors
Trend analysis can unlock valuable insights about your competitors, helping you stay ahead of the competition. Shopify Analytics offers Benchmarks, a valuable tool for comparative analysis that generates a visual representation of how your shop stacks up to similar businesses on the platform, including conversion rate, average order value, and traffic sources. You can learn how similar companies are meeting—or falling short of—customer expectations and adjust your strategy accordingly. This could mean changing up your advertising strategy, carrying new products, or offering services your competitors don’t.
Make data-driven decisions
Examining relevant data, such as your ecommerce store’s web traffic, search queries of relevant terms, and social media engagement metrics on your platforms, can help you identify trends and hone your strategies accordingly. You can look into actual data with web traffic and search engine optimization (SEO) tools like Semrush, which perform sophisticated analyses into what people are searching for now. These tools help you measure the volume and overall trend of queries on Google to understand growth trends in your market.
KPIs to analyze include surging website or search traffic (on Google Trends, for example) and an uptick in social media mentions of the product. You can measure this with a social media listening tool, or by looking for higher-than-normal numbers of likes and comments on your brand’s posts.
Get ahead of shifting preferences
Using trend analysis methods can help you not only make decisions based on what’s popular now but also spot what’s coming next. Sites such as Google Trends, Trend Hunter, and Yelp Trend Tracker give small business owners valuable insight into currently observed trends and upcoming trends to look out for.
For example, a pet store owner could learn that a smart cat toilet is becoming very popular and see if there are similar products they can market. Maybe it’s not just this specific product that’s trending—it could mean that pet owners want the same smart tech for their furry friends as they have for themselves, signaling a future trend to capitalize on.
Improve supply chain management
When you combine trend analysis with your supply chain management, you can anticipate demand and respond proactively. For example, if you run a health and fitness retail store, you can monitor Google Trends to spot steady growth in searches for a specific brand of pre-workout supplements. With a social listening tool like Sprout Social, you can check that the buzz around the supplement is driven by satisfied customers or influential endorsements rather than negative press. You can then coordinate with suppliers to stock the product before demand peaks, ensuring you’re ready when customers come calling.
Types of trend analyses
These are the most common types of trend analysis:
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Consumer trend analysis. Consumer trend analysis looks at what motivates consumer behavior, or why they’re buying what they’re buying. Customer feedback and social media engagement can alert you to changes in motivation and attitude, so you can stock and advertise accordingly.
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Seasonal trend analysis. Seasonal trend analysis shows how data shifts in response to external factors like seasonal fluctuations or weather data patterns. For example, formal wear sales spike during peak wedding season—a predictable pattern that regularly influences customer behavior.
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Temporal trend analysis. Temporal trend analysis is when you examine a particular time period (not necessarily a season), tracking changes and observing meaningful trends. For instance, a boutique shop owner can examine sales for their candles over the past month, the past six months, or the past fiscal year, looking for trends to inspire next year’s marketing campaigns.
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Geographical trend analysis. Geographical trend analysis is when you analyze customer data based on location. For instance, if you’re considering opening a store in another state or country, you can use geographic statistical methods of trend analysis to compare local trends to those in your current location.
How to perform a trend analysis
- Set a clear goal
- Identify your data sources
- Select an analytics tool
- Analyze and visualize your data
- Determine trends
Here’s how to use trend analysis to better understand what’s popular and why for your business:
1. Set a clear goal
First, define your objective. For small businesses, it might mean predicting which new products might sell well during an upcoming season or deciding whether to increase or reduce inventory based on customer demand during a certain time of year.
2. Identify your data sources
Next, identify your data sources. There are two main types: quantitative data (measurable numbers) and qualitative data (insights that answer “how” or “why”). Quantitative data includes metrics like items sold, conversion rates, website traffic, and social media engagement. Qualitative data can come from customer feedback, surveys, or sentiment analysis.
Before you begin your analysis, make sure your data is clean, organized, and ready to use. Let your analytics tool help or manually remove duplicate data points, fill in missing fields, and correct any errors.
3. Select an analytics tool
Invest in a customer analytics tool that can perform an analysis of your customer data and create easy-to-understand charts, showing what’s trending. SEO tools like Semrush, for example, can help you determine trends based on popular search queries. A social listening tool such as Brandwatch measures sentiment on social media, giving you context into whether people are talking about a topic positively or negatively.
Shopify Analytics uses live metrics to populate a visual dashboard, so you can easily see what’s popular with your customers. You’ll be able to better understand what your customers want and determine current and future trending products.
4. Analyze and visualize your data
Use your data analysis tool to crunch the numbers. For example, Shopify Analytics can perform a regression analysis—a statistical method predicting outcomes using relationships between independent variables (factors you can control, such as price or ad spend) and dependent variables (measurable outcomes like revenue, web traffic, and customer satisfaction).
Your data analysis tool can then turn all of that data into a visualization, allowing you to see at a glance how trends are shifting over time. Instead of reading a spreadsheet, you can see a chart showing the sales trends for specific products in your store. Or with social listening tools (such as Brandwatch or Sprout Social), you can generate a graph that breaks down customer sentiment into positive, negative, or neutral. The results can help you make informed decisions based on current and future trends.
5. Determine trends
Look for trend lines in the visualizations. For retailers, this could be something like an increase in ecommerce site searches for a certain style of shoe. It could also look like seeing a sharp spike in social media engagement (such as mentions, likes, and comments) around a product you carry, signaling it’s time to highlight this in your marketing.
Trend analysis FAQ
What is trend analysis?
Trend analysis is the process of using data points, such as monthly sales data, website traffic, and social media engagement, to discover patterns in customer behavior.
What are the key steps in trend analysis?
First, define a clear goal for what you plan to accomplish with trend analysis. Next comes identifying data sources and selecting a data analysis tool. Once you’ve gathered relevant data, your analysis tool can turn that into a visualization, allowing you to identify trends.
What are the 3 types of trends?
The three types of trends are upward trends (or bull market), downward trends (or bear market), and sideways trends (or rangebound market).
What is the best way to show trend analysis?
The best way to show trend analysis is by presenting data in a visualization, like a chart or graph. Tools like Shopify Analytics can turn data collection into a visual dashboard, clearly showing how trends evolve..
