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If you’re a Shopify store owner, managing your online store can be complicated. There’s lots of data about your store’s performance that can help you improve the way it runs. And Shopify reports can help you navigate through that data and learn how your customers are arriving at your site, what they’re interested in buying, how much they’re spending, and more.
If you don’t use these reports (or don’t realize the benefits of using them in the first place), you are leaving money on the table. That’s why, in this guide, we’ll show you how to unlock the power of Shopify reports for your business by walking you through the top features.
Let’s roll the blog!
Shopify reports are a collection of meaningful data for your store that you can use to improve its performance. They’re gathered and presented to you by Shopify each time a customer interacts with your store. At first glance, Shopify reports may look like a spreadsheet filled with charts and numbers, but there is more that meets the eye.
Shopify reports are based on the action-driven approach to business analysis. Shopify offers you broad insight into your business and provides you with information that would help you make business decisions that could positively your store’s performance.
Related: 15 Shopify Integrations to Supercharge Your Store
Once you have created your Shopify account head to the analytics section of your dashboard. All Shopify reports are located under the Analytics section of your shop admin: Analytics –> Reports.
Related: Shopify Guide: Best Shopify Features, Metrics & Tips for Dashboards & Reporting
Whether you’re a new online store owner or have been in this business for years, you will find Shopify reports incredibly useful. Shopify reports give you valuable data and insights about your products and customers, which will allow you to make informed decisions about your marketing campaigns, product design, sales strategy, and more.
To improve the performance of your online store, it’s vital to have access to useful and actionable data. But, with so many metrics available to track, it may be hard to determine which ones will actually help you move the needle. That’s why we have created a concise Shopify dashboard template that only tracks the most important metrics for analyzing the core elements of your ecommerce store, such as:
Now you can benefit from the experience of our Shopify experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for monitoring your online store’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in ecommerce reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Shopify account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Acquisition reports in Shopify give you insight into your traffic sources, acquisition, and sales performance. Shopify acquisition reports are available for sessions over a specific period, or for a specific referrer and location.
Shopify Behavior Reports allow you to analyze key metrics tied to the performance of your store and its visitors. Analyzing behavior reports can help you boost your conversion rate, and give you insights on how to optimize your checkout process.
Here are the specific reports available within Shopify behavior reports:
Visitor by landing page report on Shopify shows where visitors land first once they visit your store. This report is especially useful to marketers as it gives some insight into your current content marketing and SEO strategy.
Shopify marketing reports can help you track and measure your marketing efforts. The reports tell you how much of your sales are attributed to specific channels or particular campaigns. You can compare how much traffic flows into your store from different channels, and much more.
Within these marketing reports you have the following reports available:
With these reports, you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, understand how successful they are, and what you need to do to improve performance.
To measure both, ecommerce and website metrics (eg. from Google Analytics) along with Shopify, use our robust marketing reporting software.
You can think of Shopify Finances Reports as your financial statements. They offer a comprehensive overview of the income and expenses on your orders and give you more insight into your sales and money flow.
Reports available within Shopify finances are:
The core financial metrics we recommend you to track within these reports are total sales and net sales.
The most important Shopify finances report is the Shopify finance summary, where you can see your sales, payments, liabilities, and actual profit. A separate report for each one of the items is available.
As an online seller, tax is a big part of your business. It’s also something you may not know all that much about. Good thing is that sales taxes on Shopify stores are paid when you sell or post a product or service, depending on your business setup. In the US, Canada, and EU, you need to specify the rates that apply to each location as well as charge the customer.
If you notice in the Analytics –> Reports –> Finances summary –> Taxes report, there’s a column named ‘Amount’. This is the total amount of sales tax you’ve paid during the reporting period. You can use this to create segmented reports.
Credit card report on Shopify is a good way to know your transactions, who paid, and how much they paid. The report has also information such as your average order value and the average number of days it takes to get paid. You can view this report in two different places: Settings –> Payments –> Payment Providers, then View Payouts.
If you accept payments through several providers, go to Reports –> Finance –> Finances Summary, to see the breakdown.
The profit reports on Shopify are a great way to keep track of your profit. Shopify Profit Report is created to help you measure your gross and net profits by product, product variant, and point of sale location. These reports will help you analyze and keep track of daily, weekly, or monthly changes in your profit margin.
Do you want to find out which products are the most profitable? When you add or edit a product, Shopify automatically calculates your profit and profit margin for it. You just enter the Cost per item, and Shopify does all the rest.
In Shopify, there are 11 sales reports that indicate how well your store is performing. These reports can help you determine if sales are going up or down and other key metrics like how often customers are returning to your store or where they’re coming from. Sales reports are often overlooked, but they’re useful in tracking sales performance and spotting trends.
Total Sales is a Shopify report that gives you a complete picture of your online business’s sales. This report shows you how much money came into your Shopify account from all sources: sales, refunds, discounts, and more. Shopify uses the term ‘total sales’ to describe this unambiguous number.
The total sales report can be found under Finances reports –> Sales –> Total Sales.
One of the most important aspects of running a business is being able to analyze your business’ growth trends over time. If you want to know past sales, there is an easy way of getting it: The Historic Sales Report.
Shopify retail reports show you how your business is doing offline. However, note that this report is only available if you activated a Point of Sale as a sales channel on your store.
Are you monitoring your inventory carefully? Shopify inventory reports help you keep track of the remaining inventory and give you insights into what sells and what doesn’t. Each report has its own unique features, but most of them give you sales insights, such as:
Shopify PoS reports offer a lot of useful insights about daily sales, stats related to net sales, average order values, top products, and more.
Shopify order reports help you analyze the volume of orders placed, shipped, delivered, or returned. The information available within these reports include:
Given Shopify’s limited shipping functionality, it’s up to you to determine where you want to store your shipping data. But you can get shipping insights from other reports we’ve already discussed. The best way to calculate shipping expenses is by exporting orders from a selected period as a .csv file and then uploading them into your favorite tool, such as Excel.
You also have an overview of the shipping total right from the Reports dashboard on Shopify. Navigate to Finances Summary –> Total sales, and select the desired period.
Shopify doesn’t offer a standalone products report, but it can give you insights about individual products.
Navigate to Product –> All products, and click on the product you want to analyze. Find Insights and click on View Details.
A menu will pop up with this information:
You can learn more from the other actual reports.
The standard reports are sufficient for most businesses and the product-specific report will allow you to gather information about sales by product type. For even deeper analysis, you can create a custom report.
Navigate to Analytics –> Reports and create a custom report by clicking the green button in the top-right corner. Select Sales over time as Report template. On the next screen, choose Product type from the dropdown menu, and type in the desired query.
It’s very useful to have a report that lists all of your refunded products. You can use it for identifying the reasons for refunds, doing an inventory check, and so on. Follow the steps as in the previous one to create a custom report. Click Manage filters, and set up the criteria as in the screenshot:
One of the most common questions that we get asked is “How do I generate accounting reports in Shopify?” The answer is – you don’t. Shopify does not offer separate account reports for bookkeeping entries. However, it does have a built-in feature called Reports, which allows you to create reports on sales and refunds breakdown, taxes collected, and so on. You can create custom reports for specific time periods, like this one below:
Shopify reporting is already very powerful and insightful. You don’t need to do any of the calculations yourself — tracking the KPIs of your store is as simple as exporting the data into your favorite spreadsheets tool.
When applied to Shopify companies, KPIs are used to assess overall progress against strategic objectives, as well as gauge the performance of individuals within an organization. The main difference between KPIs and metrics is that while metrics are used to monitor and measure the status of a business process over time, KPIs are used to evaluate and compare the performance of different businesses.
Most KPIs have thresholds that can trigger an action. For example, if your conversion rate falls below 2% for two weeks in a row, you might want to consider taking action.
Shopify reports have everything you need to analyze data from your store. Within the reports section, you’ll find a variety of different reports that you can use to analyze your store. There are some very basic eCommerce reports that will give you valuable insights into your business, and then there are other more advanced reports that can help you dig deep and uncover new insights or answer questions you didn’t know you had.
What’s great is that all of Shopify’s built-in reporting tools are easy to understand, so you don’t have to worry about missing out on critical information or being overwhelmed by what it all means. By analyzing data from Shopify Reports you can discover:
Consider this easy process to get you going:
For example, we suggest starting with an overview dashboard before going deeply into data.
When you’re looking for meaningful information, you have to know what questions to ask about your data before you start analyzing it. Here are some that might help you get started:
Now let’s go to analyzing specific report categories:
Acquisition reports in Google Analytics or any other analytics software are not the same as Shopify acquisition reports. The Acquisition reports show you the number of visits, visitors, and sales you got from each source.
This report shows the number of visitors and sessions during the specified time period. Find it under Acquisition in the Reports overview:
From here, you can play around by clicking the data table’s column headers to sort ascending or descending. Or dig deeper by choosing the default time period, like comparing the last 90 days to the 90 days prior, and so on.
This Shopify report shows the number of visitors & sessions referred by source. It’s located at Acquisition in the Reports overview as well.
As you can see, in this case, Google search is the most popular referral source.
The referral source is broken out by referral name. Use the column header sorting to end up with something like this:
Now, as you can see Facebook is the top social referral source.
This report provides you with a simple visits overtime report. You know who is visiting your site and how often, but you also know where they’re coming from. This is a valuable insight for further decisions regarding where to invest your money.
This Shopify report shows the number of visitors and sessions from various countries. It’s report is located at Acquisition in the Reports overview as well.
If you know which countries people are accessing your store from, you can use these to run ads more efficiently. Additionally, maybe you want to put some ad spend on a country that has potential.
Shopify behavior reports focus on your visitors’ actions (behavior).
Shows the search terms your visitors use when looking throughout your site:
This report is located at “Behavior” in the “Reports” overview:
This report can help you to figure out:
As the name indicates, this report shows popular search terms that return no results. It’s located at “Behavior” in the “Reports” overview as well:
You can use this report to understand the following:
This report shows the pages visitors first arrive to your store on. It’s located at “Behavior” in the “Reports” overview as well:
This allows you to see at a glance where you’re appearing in search engine results, and which landing pages drive the most traffic from search engines. If you’re not seeing your business on page one of Google, this report can help you identify opportunities for optimization and acquisition.
This report shows device types being used to access your store. It’s located at “Behavior” in the “Reports” overview as well:
This report can help you with:
Shopify’s built-in reports can help you understand the success of your marketing campaigns. They can tell you how well your recent marketing efforts are doing and where you might want to make changes.
This report shows the number of visitors generated by a UTM marketing campaign. It’s located at “Marketing” in the “Reports” overview.
UTM parameters are added information to links that provide a wide view of marketing efforts.
You’ll see the following parameters most often:
Filters are a great way to narrow your results to the key information you’re looking for.
For example, if you want to see what percentage of your sales are coming from mobile devices, you can type “is” into the operator box and then “Mobile” into the values box. Shopify will then give you the results that fall into that specific category.
Find a “Manage filters” button at the top left of your data tables:
Some reports offer additional filtering options, like the search bar reports:
But filters aren’t the only tool available to you in reports.
You can also use columns to add or remove data points from a report, which is useful when you have too much data to make sense of at once (e.g. adding the number of orders you made per day). Columns allow you to add and remove specific numbers from your report, like adding an extra column for a number of orders per day or changing a graph into a table.
By clicking the “Edit columns” you’ll see a dropdown menu with available columns:
Some reports offer additional columns options, like the search bar reports:
In the example of visitors by device report, we added some filters and columns additionally.
One filter isolates mobile and one isolates visitors using iOS. The final data table shows information about mobile iOS users.
One column shows the version of iOS, one shows how long the average session duration is, and one shows the number of checkouts.
As you saw throughout this guide – data is power. This concept has never been more true than it is with Shopify reporting. The ability to turn data into information and knowledge can be the difference between growing a business and forgetting what you sell.
Databox has free Shopify report templates to help merchants get the most out of built-in Shopify reports. Let’s take a closer look at a few examples
This free Shopify Store Overview Dashboard template can help you get a quick overview of the performance of your online store. Metrics cover everything from gross sales, orders, shopping cart overview, to top products sales, total customers, and more.
This free Online Sales Overview Dashboard template below will help you get the most out of Shopify’s built-in sales reports as well as Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, and other e-commerce analytics tools. Additionally, the dashboard includes a graph that shows the performance of your sales including audience overview, shopping cart overview, and average order value.
In this free Shopify Conversion & Loyalty Analytics Dashboard template, you’ll find key metrics such as sales, revenue, and e-commerce conversions. You can also see how your team is performing against goals and identify areas where you need to make improvements.
The best way to get the most out of Shopify reporting is to automate it — and the best way to do that is with Databox. Automating the data collection process ensures that no data is ever missed, and it frees up your time for other more important things, like focusing on your product and growing your overall business.
The first step to getting the most out of Shopify reporting is not what you might think.
Rather than trying to remember or go back to check the reports in your eCommerce dashboard, you can automate Shopify reporting and improve your online store monitoring with data visualization. Once you set up ecommerce reporting software like Databox, you can track conversion rates, engagement, and performance trends at a glance. The visualizations are automatically updated as new information is collected. This results in a continuous, data-driven approach to improving and optimizing your store.
Sign up for free and see how fast your online business will improve.
Grew up as a Copywriter. Evolved into the Content creator. Somewhere in between, I fell in love with numbers that can portray the world as well as words or pictures. A naive thinker who believes that the creative economy is the most powerful force in the world!
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