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Shopify’s analytics and reports are a very powerful feature that gives you the means to review almost any customer interaction made within your Shopify store – from your store’s recent activity to insights into your visitors to your store’s transactions, and more.
But how can you actually take advantage of this abundance of information, and where should you start from?
To better understand and optimize customer experiences and marketing efficiency, we recommend starting with your sales data. Understanding the sales data available in Shopify can be the key element that makes or breaks your online store’s success.
In this article, we’re breaking down Shopify sales reports: you’ll learn how to leverage them to gain practical insights into your performance and get templates to save your time and grow your online store more efficiently.
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Sales reports in Shopify help you accurately track the orders that take place on your website, breaking down each sale (and return) into valuable data that you can use to improve your sales process and performance.
In Shopify sales reports, you’ll find data such as net and gross sales, average order value, repeat customer rate, customer lifetime value, and more. You can filter your reports by product, channel, month, location, etc.
Shopify sales reports allow you to track your data in real-time. Note that you might need to wait for a minute until the data updates or refresh your page to load it faster. Also, sales by discount reports take a bit longer to update: up to 72 hours.
To access your reports via different devices, follow the steps below.
To understand Shopify sales reports, you need to learn to speak Shopify first – there are some basic terms and definitions you should be familiar with. You can find the glossary on the platform’s official website, but we’re also giving you an overview.
Shopify provides powerful reporting tools for its users–they allow you to track much more than your average order value. You can learn a lot about how your customers buy, why they buy, and what you could improve for them, and adapt your strategy accordingly.
Note that Sales Reports are only available for Shopify, Advanced Shopify, and Shopify Plus Plan users.
There are 11 types of reports you can view in Shopify:
This report displays your total sales and number of orders over time. In Sales Over Time, you’ll see edited orders being shown as new ones, even though you didn’t really create a new order.
This report shows the breakdown of your total sales, but without shipping because shipping applies as a single charge for whatever the number of products in one order. That said, you won’t be able to see shipping taxes in the Sales by Product report.
What you will be able to see are: Product Vendor (if purchased from a third party), Product type, Product title, and Net quantity (returned items are removed).
If you see multiple rows for a product, or a dash instead of data, it means the original order has been changed or the data didn’t exist at the moment of creating the order.
This report displays the breakdown of your gross sales of your best-selling products, without the shipping cost. It gives you more detailed information than a regular Sales by product report.
In this report, you can see details such as Product title, Variant title, Variant SKU (the ID code of the variant), and Net quantity.
This report displays your vendors and the products you get from them. You can see categories such as Product vendor (the vendor’s name, which you have to click to see products provided by them) and Net Quantity.
If you made a sale after May 1, 2017, it will be displayed in this report. Sales by Discount reports show your sales grouped by discount name or code. It lets you see how often your customers applied discounts to purchase your products and helps you determine which ones have been the most effective in driving sales.
In this report, you will see the following items: Name, Discount applied, Discount type, Discount code, Automatic discount title, Orders, Script discounts, Shipping, Shipping script discounts, Shipping discounts.
This report displays your sales based on where your customers came from: direct traffic, search, email, social, or unknown.
Other than the traffic source, you can see the Traffic referrer host, the specific website of the referral. For example, if the source is Social, the website might be www.facebook.com.
This report displays the breakdown of your sales by country and region based on the billing address of your orders.
This report is only available to Shopify Payments users and displays the breakdown of sales by the currency your customers use at the checkout, if you accept different currencies. In the Total sales column, you will see the total sale value in your local currency.
This report displays the amount of sales for various sales channels you may be using. You will be able to see the Sales channel name (name of the channel or app the customer ordered through–Buy Button or Online Store) and Draft Orders (for sales that were initially draft orders). Unknown apps will be displayed under Other.
This report displays the breakdown of all orders a specific customer of yours has made over a certain time period. In the report, you can see the customer’s name and email address.
This report displays the change in the average order value over a period of time. It doesn’t contain returns, and if you select the Group by option, you can see the sales sorted and grouped by hour, week, month, etc.
Note that you can customize your sales reports by using different filters and editing features.
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.
If you’ve set your sales goals and created a strategy, the third big thing you need to do is decide how you’re going to measure your success. You need to choose relevant metrics to track in Shopify so you can accurately evaluate your performance.
Your Shopify KPIs can help you modify your strategy to be more efficient and make informed decisions. Your choice depends on your individual sales goals, but there are a few universal metrics that every business should have in their dashboard.
Editor’s note: Track goals and measure marketing and sales metrics in a single ecommerce reporting software, so you will never need to log in to multiple tools again.
Gross Sales refer to the total amount of Sales you’ve made within a specific time range. Discounts, Shipping Expenses, and Outgoing don’t count.
You can use this metric to compare the amounts between two months, quarters, or years and track your progress. It also helps you identify any hiccups in your sales pipeline so you can fix them, and even compare your numbers with your competitors.
The formula: Product Price x Quantity Sold = Gross Sales
Net Sales refers to the overall amount of registered Sales without Discounts and Returns.
It’s recommended to use this metric in comparison with Gross Sales, so you can track how much you earn, and how much you take home. If the difference between your Gross and Net Sales is too big, you may be losing too much money into Discounts and Refunds.
The formula: Gross Sales – Discounts – Returns = Net Sales
Average Order Value refers to the average amount of money a customer spends on a single order. The higher this metric, the better your profit margins–your business has an opportunity to grow.
The formula: Total Sales/Number of Orders = Average Order Value
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) refers to the worth that a customer has for your business during the time they engage with it (buy from you).
As customer retention is far more affordable than gaining new customers, this metric can give you insight into how much you should focus on optimizing your customer experience for higher lifetime value.
The formula: (Average Value of Sale x Number of Transactions x Retention Period) x Profit Margin
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) refers to the amount of money it costs you to convert a Prospect into a Loyal Customer. Businesses should aim to reduce this cost as much as possible and optimize customer acquisition so they can generate higher profit.
The formula: (Marketing Costs + Sales Costs)/Number of New Customers Acquired = CAC
Returning Customer Rate refers to the percentage of customers who have made more than one purchase in your online store. This percentage may depend on many factors, such as customer satisfaction and even your industry, which affects how often people buy products in your niche in general.
However, a large portion of online stores keep this percentage between 20 and 30%.
The formula: (Number of Customers who purchased before/Total Number of Customers) x100
Databox offers a simple integration with Shopify so you can easily visualize your data and have all the necessary information at a glance.
To connect your Shopify store with your Databox account, open Data Sources in Databox and click on New connection. Enter Shopify in the search field and select the Connect button. Authorize Databox in the Activation window that pops up by typing in your shop’s URL (without the my.shopify.com part). If you have another shop, you need to connect it separately.
When you first connect Databox and Shopify, you will be able to see around 36 months of historical data, depending on the metric.
Popular metrics used in Databox dashboards for Shopify stores are:
…and more.
Here’s an example of a popular use case:
Reporting on Customer Lifetime Value
You need four Calculated Metrics in Databox to create this report: Purchase Frequency, Average Order value, Customer Value, and Customer Lifetime Value that practically build upon each other.
You can calculate the Customer Lifetime Value by multiplying Customer Value by Average Customer Lifespan. Shopify suggests three years for newer stores.
With Databox, you gain access to free ecommerce dashboard templates so you don’t need to create them from scratch. Here are just some of the Shopify template we offer:
The Online Sales Overview dashboard unites Shopify, Facebook Ads, and Google Analytics and gives you a powerful overview of your online sales performance.
You can track metrics such as e-commerce conversion rate, amount spent (in Facebook Ads), abandoned checkouts, net sales, gross sales, and net quantity by top products.
Measuring these metrics can help you answer some important questions about your online store: what your top products are, how much an average user spends on your products, how your current results compare to your previous months’ performance, and more.
The Shopify Store Overview dashboard allows you to get an at-a-glance overview of your online store’s performance.
It helps you quickly identify important answers: how many orders you receive daily or monthly, how much do you issue in discounts or refunds, how many repeating customers do you have, how well is your shopping cart set up, and more.
The metrics available in this dashboard are, for example, number of orders, net sales, discounts, unfulfilled orders, new customers, gross sales by top products, total customers.
The Shopify Conversion & Loyalty Analytics dashboard allows you to measure your success in converting first-time customers into loyal buyers.
It helps you evaluate your customer retention strategy and identify any weak points that you can improve.
Tracking metrics like average order value, e-commerce conversion rate, or transactions per user will help you find out how much you earned from repeat sales, what your conversion rate is, and average revenue per user, and more.
Is your store profitable? Do you have an opportunity to grow? Are you building a loyal customer base?
You can only answer these questions if you regularly monitor your store metrics and KPIs. But that might be a challenge if your metrics are all over the place–data tracking becomes a time-consuming nightmare and you’re not sure what you’re looking at anymore.
That’s why Databox came up with a perfect solution.
By connecting your Shopify account with Databox, you gain instant access to over 4,000 metrics and over 70 integrations that allow you to track your success in a streamlined manner, all in one place.
And if you don’t want to use our free templates, you can build your own customized dashboard in just a few minutes.
Want to know more? Join over 20,000 businesses that already enjoy tracking their online store growth with Databox and sign up for a free trial today.
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At Databox, we’re obsessed with helping companies more easily monitor, analyze, and report their results. Whether it’s the resources we put into building and maintaining integrations with 100+ popular marketing tools, enabling customizability of charts, dashboards, and reports, or building functionality to make analysis, benchmarking, and forecasting easier, we’re constantly trying to find ways to help our customers save time and deliver better results.
Stefana Zarić is a freelance writer & content marketer. Other than writing for SaaS and fintech clients, she educates future writers who want to build a career in marketing. When not working, Stefana loves to read books, play with her kid, travel, and dance.
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