The Complete Guide to Shopify Reports

Every Shopify merchant understands that Shopify reports play a critical role in making important business decisions.

From providing sleek dashboards with high-level insights, to consolidating multiple rows of data for in-depth analysis, Shopify reports continue to be a merchant’s ally when analyzing their business activity (despite some limitations).

In fact, we hear the below statement often when assisting hundreds of Shopify merchants:  

“Without these reports, I wouldn’t have a clue what to do next.”

Not only does this statement prove a point, but during these conversations, we’ve noticed most Shopify merchants don’t know how to take full advantage of these reports.

And this can be a serious problem, especially in 2024 and beyond, considering that digital ad spend is set to reach a whopping US$835.82 Billion in 2026, up from an estimated US$522.5 Billion in 2021.

So to help merchants like yourself, we’ve created this complete (yes, we mean it) guide on Shopify reports covering every individual resource, how they can help you, and how you can take advantage of them.

What are Shopify Reports?

In Shopify’s own words, “Reports are compilations of store’s data displayed in both a graph and table format, and are organized into categories, based on the subject of the report.”

That’s a mouthful, so let’s break it down. A Shopify store produces a ton of data on a day’s activities. That data is raw and needs to be organized to make it useful. Reports exactly do that.

A Shopify report gathers your store data and categorizes under various data columns based on type. This could be the store’s total sales, net product quantity in inventory, the payout you received for a fulfilled order, etc.

A report contains a group of such data columns put together in a table or graph format. The report type determines which columns belong in it. Ex: A report on inventory has inventory-related data columns in it.

There is more to this (as you’ll learn later in this guide), but you get the idea. Essentially, Shopify Reports exist to give comprehensible views of critical store metrics like:

• Origins of your customers (to find out the source bringing in the most traffic)

• How they shop and interact with your products (to understand their purchase preferences)

• Advertising spend and acquisition (to gauge marketing campaign effectiveness)

• Profit, revenue and repeat purchase rates (for an overall look at store health)

• Website metrics (to determine its effectiveness)

• Number of visitors to your store (to check store growth rate and gauge brand popularity)

• Inventory insights into what’s being sold (to determine efficiency of inventory management)

• And much more

So, if you’re an ambitious store owner eager to grow your business, then the insights from metrics inside Shopify Reports can certainly help you identify business trends and make informed decisions.

Shopify Report Types

Shopify Report types or categories match the various aspects of a Shopify store. The image below is a screenshot of the report categories you’ll find:

You’ll find this drop-down menu when you click on that “Category” button in the reports dashboard. The check boxes let you choose the types of reports you want to view and access.

In the screenshot for example, the Finances category is selected. So the Shopify reports dashboard will show a list of finance reports.

Note the term “Finance” under the “Category” column confirming the report type and the “Last viewed” column next to it displaying when the corresponding report was last accessed.

Now, look to the right and you’ll see the “Created by” column filled with “Shopify”. It means that these are report templates created by Shopify itself, also called Shopify default reports. You just have to click on one to create that report.

There are also user-generated reports, also called custom reports, which you can create with additional features like filters and extra data columns. You can see those too in the list by clicking on the “Created by” button and selecting “Users” in the drop-down menu:

Now, the reports you’ve created will also be visible in the reports list. Check out this screenshot of finances reports showing a user report, pointed at by the “User 1” option in the “Created by” column.

Which Shopify Report Types Are In My Plan?

I have a lot of good news, and some bad here.

The good news first—Shopify lets you access all reports, whatever your plan may be. And the bad news—custom reports are restricted to Shopify Advanced and Plus plans. Hey, you can’t have it all can you? Besides, it’s better than the past, when your Shopify subscription plaan decided which reports you could access.

What our customers find most frustrating is, despite the reporting advantages (and a hefty price tag), Advanced and Plus stores still have limitations when it comes to generating custom reports.

It’s one of the many reasons why Shopify merchants come to us for their reporting needs (more on that later).

Now that we’ve been introduced to Shopify reports, let’s take a deep dive into each of these reports and understand how they can be used for your business.

Shopify Finance Reports

Let’s start with some tough questions.

Is your Shopify store breaking even with expenses, or are you breaking the bank? Is your e-commerce business thriving or hemorrhaging revenue?

These thoughts are probably at the top of your mind everyday. One of the best ways to find answers to these critical questions is through the Finances report.

A finance report is the most fundamental reporting resource for any business. You need to know your sales, taxes, and payments, as they determine if your business is successful or not. That’s why Shopify offers these reports in all of their plans.

At a high-level, Finances reports give you insights on your total sales by month, taxes and tips involved, and payments made. You can group them by day, week, month, year, and finally export them for further analysis.

To access Finances reports, go to the Analytics section in the Shopify admin sidebar, and click on “Reports”.

Shopify refreshes your Finance reports data every minute, so you can take comfort knowing that you’ll always have the latest activity from your store.

Shopify Finance reports are divided into 5 sections:

• Summary

• Total Sales

• Taxes

• Tips

• Payments

Let’s take a look at each of these sections.

Shopify Finances Summary

Shopify Finances summary

Among finance reports, the Finance summary report is the core finance report in Shopify and it provides crucial information on Orders, Products, Gross Sales, Discounts, Returns, Net Sales, Shipping, Taxes, Total Sales, and so on.

Each subsection is an amalgamation of key performance metrics, which are accessible and individually exportable. You can also tweak the Finances summary to your liking by using the All Channels or date range filters.

For example, if you need to find data from last year’s “Black Friday” campaign from one of your POS locations, you can apply the relevant filters and view the results instantly.

Now let’s look at the individual line items from each of the finance sections, starting with Sales.

Remember: every individual Shopify report can be exported as a CSV file. To do so, select the “export” option from the top right corner after choosing filters.

Sales

Knowing sales data is a fundamental requirement for any business. You need to constantly have this data at your fingertips. The Sales section of Shopify finances summary can help you with just that.

It displays a high-level summary of gross sales, discounts, returns, net sales, shipping, taxes, and total sales. It also enables you to analyze each of these line items individually. Let’s take a quick look at them.

• Gross Sales

Gross sales is the total revenue your business has brought from Sales within a certain time period before deductions.

When you get to the Gross Sales section from Sales you will find details of all your gross sales based on the order date, order number, product name, and total value of the sale.

For example, let’s say your sporting goods store needs total online gross sales from the last quarter.

You can get this report by choosing “Online Store” from the channels filter and selecting  “Last 90 days” from the date range. You may then export the data in a CLV format.

• Discounts

The Discounts section displays all discounts you have provided for orders or products in an order.

Suppose you start a Valentine’s day campaign offering a 15% discount off certain products. You can visit the Discounts section to review applied discounts and related net profit.

The Discounts screen includes order details like product line items, related discounts, returns (if any), and net sales from the discount campaign.

• Returns

Imagine you’ve faced some quality control challenges following a new product line launch. Shortly after a boost of new customer purchase activity, you notice quite a few orders have been shipped back to you, seeking refunds.

The next obvious step (aside from returning to the product drawing board) should be to review those orders involving returned merchandise.

And the best way to find this data is via the Returns report.

In this mission critical summary, you can find returned orders by date, associated products, and total value of each returned order, along with discounts, taxes, and shipping.

You can also find the value of goods that the customer returned to the merchant. They appear as a negative number on the date that the return occurred.

• Net Sales

Let’s pretend you’re having a discussion with your core sales team and want to focus attention on net sales from the last month.

You can easily find that juicy sales morsel in the Net Sales report, featuring an overview of total net sales (after gross sales, discounts, and returns are applied).

If you’d like to dig deeper at an order level to uncover hidden sales insights, simply click on any order to retrieve additional information.

• Shipping

For merchants delivering products across multiple ship zones or overseas, the Shipping section may quickly replace Fido as your new best friend.

Here you’ll find shipping fees you’ve charged for each order. Transactions are organized by date and include shipping charge, discounts, and taxes.

• Taxes

Speaking of taxes, it can get a bit messy when you’re capturing sales on a state-by-state basis. That’s where Shopify makes things easier by identifying tax related to geographic region, amount charged to customer, and even the tax rate percentage.  

Shopify uses tax compliance tables to accurately identify how much sales tax customers should pay by state, county, and sometimes by city/municipality (when applicable).

Such minutiae comes in pretty handy when you’re reporting sales activity to various U.S. states and other global tax entities.

You can use this report to file your monthly, quarterly, and yearly taxes.

• Total Sales      

The final report from the Finance summary – Sales section is Total sales.

As the name states, this report summarizes total sales for a selected date range, along with a breakdown of important metrics for each order.

For example, if you need to compare gross sales and total sales from last year in your online store, this report will get the job done faster.

To find that information, select the time from the date range, select the sales channel, and view or export the data.

Payments

Your Shopify store may have embedded multiple payment methods to create fabulous experience and convenience to your customers. While it’s important to make your customers feel at ease in your store, it’s also equally important to know which of these methods are bringing the most revenue and which are less effective.

The Payments section of the Shopify finances summary provides this information at a high level and allows you to dig deep into the data of each payment channel.

For example, if you’re accepting Credit Card or Recharge as payment options during checkout, their total transaction amount will appear in this section. You can then get nitty-gritty details of each transaction by clicking on the payment method.

Liabilities

Many businesses, whether online or brick-and-mortar, offer perks to their customers quite frequently. One such perk is the enigmatic gift card.

Likewise, if you want to reward your staff for the exceptional service they provide, you may distribute gift cards to valued team members.

In both scenarios, money entering your pocket can leave just as quickly. Hence, these rewarding methods are considered as liabilities.

However, it’s very important to track the outflow of cash equivalent contributions or giveaways.

In the Liabilities section, you’ll find a summary of gift card transactions, along with inbound employee tips, that impact your overall accounting balance sheet.  If you turn a blind eye to the Liabilities section, you’ll do so at your own financial peril!

Now let’s look at each facet of the Liabilities section:

• Gift Card Sales

Imagine you’ve just opened an online Shopify store to sell men’s ties and formal wear.  Father’s Day is around the corner and so you decide to promote gift card purchases that good ol’ dad can use to buy the tie he really wants.

Now, once the promotion starts, it’s time to check those gift card sales to gauge the effectiveness of your campaign.

The best way to find this information is to visit the Gift card sales report. Then, filter the results by Online Store sales channel, choose last 7 days as a date range, and finally export your results if desired.

By default, the Gift card sales report is sorted first by date. However, you can also organize results alphanumerically by order number, customer name, gift card gross sale amount, quantity ordered, discounts offered, or by net sales value.

• Gift Card Balance

Ok, so you’ve distributed a few gift cards here and there, and customers are gobbling them up. Way to go!

Now, it’s time to know how those cards are being used and the remaining gift card balance after a purchase is made.

To find this information, just click on In the Gift card balance report from the Finances summary – Liabilities section, filter by desired date range, and view the results.

• Tips

Most successful entrepreneurs and e-commerce leaders are accompanied by amazing employees. Without them, they cannot be as successful as they are.

Every now and then your customers may be ecstatic by your staff’s quality service and want to tip them.

That’s when you can use the Tips report to find which staff members have received tips, and disperse relevant funds to them.

It’s also a convenient way to identify your team members that go above and beyond the call of duty.

Gross Profit

The Gross profit section displays all your net sales, cost of goods sold, and the gross profit.  For those seeking a quick refresher, gross profit is the profit a business makes prior to deducting costs related to making and selling products.

It’s an important measurement for any e-commerce business because it reveals how efficiently you use labor, supplies, and raw materials. Gross profit is also used as a primary factor when calculating critical metrics such as customer lifetime value.

Likewise, the Gross profit report displays Net sales and the Cost of goods sold (commonly known as COGS).

Total Sales in Shopify Finances

Now that we’ve covered most of Shopify’s Finances, let’s look at how everything adds up in the Total Sales report.

One could argue that Total Sales is a critically valuable, if not the most important sales indicator report. That’s why Shopify provides it right at the top of the Finances list.

Store owners can use Total Sales to easily review high level information.

For example, let’s say you’re a Shopify store selling dried fruit and want to check last year’s Christmas sales activity. You can come to the Total Sales section, select the dates, choose your channels, and export the desired report.

The Total Sales report is the sum of net sales, taxes, and shipping. It displays information of order date, order number, product name, SKU variant, gross sales, discounts offered (if any), returns, net sales, taxes, shipping costs, and finally total sales value.

You can also filter the report by channel if you only want to focus on POS, Facebook store, or other sales activity.

And that brings us to the end of Shopify Finances reports.

As you’ve seen, these reports are quite basic but quintessential to improve your online store. So ensure that you scan and gather critical data from these reports for improved decision making. If you need better finance reports for Shopify or need help with them, you can always reach out to us at Report Pundit.

Now let’s look at the next set of reports – Shopify Acquisition Reports.

Shopify Acquisition Reports

Acquisitions are the fuel for Shopify stores: the more customers you acquire, the more money you make. That’s why it is essential to track how acquisitions happen at your website, so you can double down on their success.

In Shopify’s own words, the acquisition reports let you “Increase visitor engagement by knowing where your visitors are coming from and measuring the success of your campaigns.”

To access Shopify acquisition reports, go to Analytics, click on Reports, and then choose any session type from the Acquisition list.

You can measure the success of your marketing campaigns by using three types of session reports:

• Sessions over time
• Sessions by referrer
• Sessions by location

Before we expand on each of these session types, let’s take a quick peek at how Shopify tracks online sessions and website visitors.

How Shopify Tracks Sessions and Visitors?

Shopify uses cookies to track sessions and visitors.  Nope, they’re not the kind stored in a cookie jar, nor will you suddenly have the urge to say, “me want cookies!”

Instead, cookies are tiny files saved on the device of a shopper, such as a computer or mobile phone, whenever the visitor browses your online store.

Cookies identify the device (the visitor) and track the duration of each session visit. A session generally expires after 30 minutes when there is no activity.

When the same person has multiple sessions, the total number of sessions will show greater than the number of visitors.  In other words, total session count doesn’t necessarily reflect how many unique individuals are visiting your Shopify store.

For example, if Mr. Arnold visits SuperBestCoolGizmos.com right now and then revisits an hour later, it’s counted as one visitor with two sessions. However, if Mr. Arnold returns to the website less than 30 minutes from now, Shopify records the activity as one visitor and only one session.

The precise recording of visitors versus sessions ensures your marketing acquisition reports are accurate.

Accuracy, Filters & Columns

Speaking of accuracy, Shopify presents data to its merchants only after performing multiple back-end tests. Post these tests any unwanted traffic is removed from your reports. Though it takes 48 hours for this process, the end results are crystal clear with no errors.

If you want to unleash the power of Shopify acquisition data, it’s best to understand both filter management and column controls. They play an important function in their ability to tell a more complete story about your customer website traffic.

For example, if you need session and visitor activity for a specific landing page, you can choose one of the landing page options from the Manage filters menu to select only that data.

Likewise, columns make it easy to display a specific customer attribute of your acquisition.

Let’s say you run a Thanksgiving promotional campaign across North America, but want to focus on customer conversion activity from Toronto, Canada., You can do this in four steps:

1. Go to Acquisitions > Sessions by location
2. Click Edit Columns menu and choose Conversion rate
3. Click Manage Filters menu, select Location – City, and type Toronto into search field
4. To view your Thanksgiving seasonal traffic, select a date range between 11/1 and 11/30

Now you’ll get website traffic data about your Toronto visitors during the promo campaign. Based on the insights you learn, you can always adjust columnar data views accordingly.

Now that we understand how acquisitions work, let’s review three different Sessions reports available within the Reports > Acquisition section.

Acquisition – Sessions Over Time

Powered by a sleek and appealing visual dashboard, Sessions over time displays the number of sessions and visitors by selected time range. You can use the Group by dropdown menu to analyze activities by hour, day, week, or month.

• Sessions by the hour

By selecting Group by hour, the dashboard displays total session visits by hour during a 24-hour period. For example, the graph output starts Jan 27th at 12:00 PM and shows sessions by hour until 12:00 PM the following day.

By focusing on hourly session insights, you can make granular changes or revisions to your online store to improve user experience, offer free shipping, etc.

Grouping sessions by an hour can also help you analyze website traffic during time-sensitive marketing campaigns like Cyber Monday, where you’re likely to create a 6:00 AM – 4:00 PM special discount offer.

• Sessions by the day

When you group your report by the day, you can see the traffic and sessions for a specific day within the date range selected.

For example, if you ran a special valentine’s day campaign last year between February 12 to February 14, you can select these dates and check the sessions and visitors data for each of these days.

• Sessions by the week

Every online store merchant needs to track the number of sessions coming in each week. It provides insights into weekly growth.

In the session over time report, you can view session data for each week by selecting Week in the Group By drop down menu. This data can be especially helpful during holiday seasons when you run targeted campaigns.

• Sessions by the month

As the name suggests, you can view the number of sessions and export the data by the month. It is a critical metric as it helps you gauge month-on-month performance.

Acquisition – Sessions by Referrer

Sessions by referrer display the various geographic and referral origins of your Shopify store visitors. Do they come directly by typing your website address? Are they inbound visitors from social media sources?  Did they find you via keyword search? This powerful report succinctly answers each of those questions.

This screen is important to Shopify owners; you might have multiple channels for your marketing efforts. It’s essential that you understand which marketing channel is paying off, and those that need improvement.

Once again, you can select desired filters to fine-tune referrer origins or edit columns to view session records (ie bounce rate, page views, etc) you find more helpful.

The Sessions by referrer report is a valuable instrument to monitor influencer or affiliate marketing, as it requires well-defined attribution to analyze the ROI.

Acquisition – Sessions by Location

The Sessions by location report, as mentioned earlier, shows you visitor and session activity from each geographic city, region, and country. If you need customer acquisition details from a specific part of the world, then this report is quite helpful.

For example, let’s imagine you run a merchandise store and you run a campaign to sell a new line of merchandise in New York. To understand the visitors and sessions you received from this campaign, you can choose the filters and date range of the campaign, and voilà, you will have my report.

With that said, we’ve reached the end of our topic of acquisition reports for Shopify. Next, we’ll move on to customer behavior reports.

Shopify Behavior Reports

Understanding shopper behavior remains an integral part for any e-commerce business. You need to know how shoppers interact with your site, so you can make necessary changes to improve their shopping experience.

With the help of Behavior reports, you can gain insights about:

1. Where visitors are spending more time in your online store
2. How to improve website navigation
3. Which products are getting the most attention
4. How to position products more effectively in your Shopify store
5. How to upsell to your target audience
6. How to plan promotional pricing and product combos

By gaining these insights, you can maximize sales growth as you learn about customer needs.

To access customer Behavior reports, go to Analytics and click on Reports in the sidebar.

With that said, let’s look at the different types of behavior reports available to Shopify merchants.

• Online store conversion over time
• Top online store searches
• Top online store searches with no results
• Product recommendation conversions over time
• Sessions by landing page
• Sessions by device
• Online store cart analysis
• Online store speed

Online Store Conversion Over Time

A conversion happens when a visitor to your Shopify store performs a desired action. The event could be anything you’re aiming for, like a purchase, or an email newsletter signup. Keeping tabs of the number of conversions regularly is vital to understand customer interest in your brand and their intent.

The Online Store conversions over time report the conversion counting for you over a selected period of time.

You can group conversion activity by hour, day, week, month, hour of day, or day of week. By accessing the Manage filters menu, you can set custom conditions to limit results by browser type, landing page, referring website, and more.

You can also further change your visible records by customizing columns with the Edit columns menu. For example, if you want to check the bounce rate of conversions against a device type, you can choose the respective filters & columns to display the data.

By default, the Online store conversion over time report provides the following information:

• Sessions – number of total visitor sessions spent at your Shopify store
• Added to cart – The number of sessions where customers added products to their cart.
• Reached checkout – number of sessions where customers had checkout activity (key press, mouse click, etc) during checkout.
• Sessions converted – The number of sessions where a customer purchased the product.
• Conversion rate – total percentage of sessions resulting in a customer purchase.

There’s one important thing you should remember when accessing behavior reports: it takes up to 48 hours for Shopify to update the latest insights, as data activity is refined by Shopify’s own systems.

Top Online Store Searches

The Top online store searches report displays exactly what you’d expect: the search terms and keywords used to find products in your Shopify store. You’ll be able to determine what visitors actually search for versus what you believe they may want.

For example, if you’re running a designer footwear store and your users specifically search for “Nike” shoes, then that keyword will appear in this report.

Based on these findings, You can make improvements to your Shopify store that can increase sales, like adding new products, suggesting products based on related keywords, and more.

Top Online Store Searches with no Results

Top online store searches with no results report shows you products and keywords that visitors searched for but did not return any results. This data can help you in many ways.

Let’s say you are an online bookstore and your customers constantly search for “mental health” books in your store; however, they can’t find any. It may be wise for your business to start adding related publications to your online catalog. For example, your book sales may improve when you start sourcing well-known authors in the mental health genre.

Product Recommendation Conversion Over Time

For starters, please note that this report is only available for vintage Shopify themes. Vintage themes refer to the old theme architecture prior to July 2021. Since then Shopify has released a new theme architecture.

For vintage themes, Shopify offers a recommended products option that displays an auto-generated list of product suggestions at your online store.

To enable this option, you need to head to the Online Store option in the left side menu, choose Themes, and then choose Edit Code from the Actions drop-down menu.  Once you customize your store settings, you can start introducing new products to your customers.

As a default, the Product recommendation conversions over time report has the following data points,  along with a handy visual  dashboard:

• Clicked – number of times a recommended product was clicked
• Added to cart – number of times customers added a recommended product to the cart
• Purchased – number of recommended product purchases
• Clicked to purchased conversion rate – percentage ratio of actual purchases vs product clicks only

Helpful to remember: the total number of clicks can (and will likely) exceed the total number of conversions (purchases).

For example, if you’re running a digital gadgets store, you may find that a product gets over100 clicks but only 10 conversions. In this scenario, you should probably look at the product details and other related information to check why the click is not converting to a sale.

Sessions by Landing Page

Sessions by landing page displays the total number of sessions and unique visitors to each page of your Shopify store.

Often, a customer starts their journey at your website from a landing page. Generally, a landing page refers to the ad copy which promotes your product. Some customers may also start their journey at a product page or blog page.

It’s important to note that Shopify uses the phrase “landing page” in a functional context.  When they say “landing page”, they mean any first page that a visitor encounters, or LANDS at, when arriving at your Shopify store.

It’s ideal to add heat map tracking to understand how your website visitors navigate various web pages. Heat maps track the engagement of users and show you where a customer is spending most of their time on your site.

Gaining this information can help you improve your online store for better engagement and experience. Though Shopify does not have a built-in heat tracking mechanism, you can install third-party apps from the app store to enable this feature

Sessions by Device

As seen in the above screenshot, Sessions by device displays devices used by people as they visit your Shopify store. Mostly, these devices are desktops, mobiles, or tablets.

This report lends insight about how customers interact with your online store. If you’re  selling commercial furniture, chances are this report will reveal plenty of desktop devices used by your target audience (business owners).

On the other hand, if you’re selling swimsuits, a larger percent of website visits will come from mobile devices.

Based on this report, you can build marketing campaigns and website improvements that cater to desktop device users, mobile users, etc.

Online Store Cart Analysis

While it may give limited insight, this report can reveal the most popular product combos added to cart during the last 30 days.

For example, if you’re a natural foods store, you may find customers adding organic coffee and stevia to the cart often together.

You can use these observations to create a helpful “customers also purchase” section for your online product listing, or to create targeted email campaigns reminding users about abandoned cart items.

Shopify Customer Reports

“Customer is the King” – You may have heard this saying quite often. While they may not have royal blood, making them a top priority is good for business.

Knowing each customer and treating them with value can pay dividends in the long run. In fact, it’s wise to think of each customer as a potential brand ambassador.

That’s why Shopify Customers reports are so important. They reveal how many customers you’ve acquired, retained, and even lost over time.

They’re also essential when compiling analytics summaries such as customer cohort analysis, which helps determine the longevity of your e-commerce business.

Although Shopify Customer reports are less comprehensive than customized reports, they are friendly tools to help uncover your customer data.

Before we dive deeply into the blue trenches of Customer reports, there are a couple of safety checks, or Shopify limitations, we need to mention:

1. Excluding First-time vs Returning Customer sales reports that refresh instantly, all Customer reports do not refresh the latest data for at least 12 hours. You’ll likely experience  some delay if you seek real-time data results.
2. Customer reports only display records for up to 250,000 customers. If you need data for customers beyond this number, you’ll want to use Google Analytics.

Alright, now that we’ve mentioned some of Shopify’s limitations, let’s look at different report types you can access. To get to these reports, go to the Analytics in the sidebar menu, choose Reports in the drop down and scroll to customer reports.

• Customers by location

• One-time customers

• Returning customers

• First-time vs returning customer sales

• Customers over time

• Customers by Predicted spend tier

Customers by Location

In the Customers by location report, you’ll see all newly added customers based on their geographical location. Shopify defines customers as any visitors to your website who do any of the following: purchase product(s), register for an account, or people who start the checkout process but may have abandoned their cart.

You can select new customer activity by date range, which will display the following results:

• number of new customers added by region.
• number of orders placed by those customers.
• Total amount spent including discounts, taxes, refunds, and shipping costs.

One-Time Customers

The One-time customers report displays data of customers who placed only one order from your Shopify store (where the preset filter Is returning is No).

You can view the following information for each customer:

• Name
• Email address
• Permission for marketing promotion – which means the customer has given you permission to send marketing promotional material to them.
• Orders to date
• Total spent to date (taxes, shipping, refunds, and discounts applied)

This data is quite helpful when you are trying to reactivate inactive, or even hesitant shoppers.

For example, if you’ve had 100 customers who just bought once in the last quarter, you can probably run a promotional email campaign targeting them with one-time 10% off discount coupons. This could give them enough motivation to make a second purchase.

Returning Customers

Returning customers are the lifeblood of your sales. According to Yotpo, 14.77% of all e-commerce transactions come from repeat customers. Shopify’s Returning customers report shows you data on customers who’re placing two or more orders.

For each customer, you’ll get the following details:

• Name
• Email address
• Permission for marketing promotion
• First order date
• Last order day
• Orders to date
• Average order value
• Total spent to date

This information will help you determine your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP is the type of customer that will most likely buy your products.

You can then create necessary promotional campaigns to target your ideal customers or make changes to your store to improve customer acquisition.

First-time vs Returning Customers Sales

When it comes to e-commerce sales, the First-time vs returning customer sales report is arguably one of the most important reports Shopify has to offer.

Whether you’re selling digital downloads or physical goods, comparing one-time vs returning customer sales always provides actionable insights such as which type of customers are buying the most from you.

In this report, you will find the number of orders placed by first-time customers, right alongside returning customer activity. You can group these sales by hour, day, week, month, quarter, year, hour of day, day of week, or month of year.

Like many other Shopify reports, you can filter results based on customer or shipping attributes, and display which records you’d like to appear by editing columns.

Customers Over Time

The Customers overtime report shows the total number of first-time and returning customers who placed orders in your store over time. This report is cumulative, meaning the numbers increase over time based on previous reporting periods within the date range.

Once you choose and confirm your desired date range (along with filters and columns based on your need), this report will display the following:

• The month of data
• Customer type (First-time or Returning)
• Number of customers (including grand total)

Customer by predicted spend tier

The Customer by predicted spend tier report helps you stop rolling the dice on high value customers to target for maximized customer lifetime value and ROI. It predicts the value of each customer in a chosen cohort, so you know what they’re really worth to you. You save a ton of time, money and other resources on chasing the wrong kind of customer with your marketing.  

The details you get from this report are:

• customer name
• the predicted spend tier
• email subscription status
• the date the customer placed their last order
• the number of orders that they have placed
• the total amount that they have spent, including taxes, discounts, shipping, and any refunds

And that brings us to the end of Shopify customer reports. Using these reports effectively will help you gain significant insights into your customers, enabling you to make better decisions to draw and retain more of them.

Shopify Inventory Reports

Without your inventory, you cannot run your business!

It’s important to capture how much of your inventory is being sold and sitting idle on a day-to-day basis. That’s where Shopify Inventory reports play an important role.

These reports help you effectively monitor the movement of your inventory. You can easily track changes, replenish your stock levels, and forecast demand as needed.

To access these reports, go to Analytics in the left side of Shopify’s admin panel, followed by clicking Reports.

However, you should know that it takes 12 to 72 hours for changes in your inventory to reflect in these reports. So let’s look at the different reports available in Shopify’s inventory section:

• Sell-through rate by product
• Days of inventory remaining
• ABC analysis by product
• Percent of inventory sold
• Average inventory sold per day
• Month-end inventory snapshot
• Month-end inventory value

Sell-Through rate by Product:

The Sell-through rate by product report shows the pace at which you sell inventory against the amount of inventory shipped to you, over a given period of time.

Like most Shopify reports, adding record filters and data columns is a breeze and lets you experiment with inventory location activity, percent sold, and more. For example, you can filter the results based on a specific brand and check if the inventory needs to be restocked based on the purchases.

You can also gain critical insights such as which inventory is being sold and which is not being sold. You can then create strategies to clear off inventory sitting on the shelf for too long.

Days of Inventory Remaining

The Days of inventory remaining report displays how many days your inventory will last, based on product sales activity and amount of inventory left.

The dashboard groups inventory availability into 4 major buckets:  inventory with 0 days remaining, 1-30 days, 31-90 days, and 90+ days.

In the above screenshot example, 200+ products have 0 days left before they’re out of stock. In other words, these are the out-of-stock products, so it’s important to replenish these items ASAP; just make sure to look at prior sales history to gauge demand.

The Days of inventory remaining report uses a simple formula to calculate inventory scarcity:: ending quantity of remaining inventory divided by average number of items sold per day.

Although a simple formula powers this report, neglecting the remaining inventory can create a complicated mess for your e-commerce business.

ABC Analysis by Product

Shopify’s ABC analysis by product report is a well-known report type in the world of inventory management.  This report is quite insightful because it’s an effective method to determine the value of your stocked merchandise based on customer demand, the cost to purchase, and overall risk.

The ABC analysis by product report  assigns grades over a 28-day period as shown below:

Grade A – items that produce  80% of your revenue

Grade B – items that produce 15% of your revenue

Grade C – items that produce 5% of your revenue

By analyzing inventory via ABC analysis, you’ll know which products should be given more attention compared to those that are a lower priority. Based on a clear understanding of your inventory’s value, you can prioritize record accuracy and the tight control for Grade A products. On the flip side, Grade C products can be liquidated to make room for more profitable inventory.

Percent of Inventory Sold

As the name suggests, Percent of inventory sold helps you to identify how quickly product SKUs sell within a date range you choose.

To illustrate, let’s say you sell sporting goods and regularly stock Baseball Glove A, Baseball Glove B, and Baseball Glove C. You’d like to see how Christmas affects your baseball glove inventory, so you choose a report date range between November and December of last year.

You learn that 20% of your Baseball Glove A inventory sold around Christmas time, but Baseball Glove B and C inventory only depleted 5% at that time.

Report results are categorized by product title, variant title, SKU, quantity sold, starting quantity of the SKU, and percent sold. You can also customize and streamline this report by adding filters and new columns.

Average Inventory Sold Per Day

For every stocking Shopify merchant, it’s important to know how many products are sold each day and how much inventory remains.

By using the average inventory sold per day report, store owners can check to end inventory and total quantity sold on a given day.

Think of this report the same way you’d look for a “check engine light” to appear in your car. Each time you drive, you scan the dashboard to ensure there’s no mechanical red flags requiring your attention.

When you scan the Average inventory sold per day, you’re briefly checking available inventory and quantity sold so you can prevent out-of-stock red flag situations.

Month-End Inventory Snapshot

The Month-end inventory snapshot report is helpful when conducting month-end inventory reconciliation, and for performing regular inventory audits (to ensure your physical inventory matches what is shown in Shopify and vice versa).

If you physically stock products, you’ll access this report often.  It can also be a useful tool for those tracking safety stock levels.

Month-End Inventory Value

The Month-end-inventory value report, like the Month-end inventory snapshot, features sold inventory levels.  However, this report only includes products with costs previously added to Shopify.

This report is useful for financial reconciliation when comparing numbers between Shopify and accounting software, ERP systems, etc. It’s an extremely important report for your accounting staff.

And that brings us to the end of all reports you can find under Shopify inventory reports.

Shopify Marketing Reports

If you have a product or service that you sell online, then you need to market it to attract the right customers.

Marketing is a critical need for most businesses,  and recently it has become a typical part of day-to-day operations.  Marketing campaigns, whether they’re organic or paid, are a healthy part of your store’s growth strategy. Therefore, you’ll need a way to measure these efforts.

In Shopify, it becomes a little easier because of the marketing reports.

To access these reports, choose Analytics in the left side admin panel, click on Reports, and scroll down to the Marketing reports section.

To analyze your marketing performance, effectiveness, and total conversions (purchases),  you can take the help of the below reports:

• Sessions attributed to marketing
• Sales attributed to marketing
• Conversion by first interaction
• Conversion by last interaction
• Attribution model comparison

Before we begin, remember to integrate tracking software like Google Analytics, Optimizely, Crazy Egg, and other tools into your Shopify store.   You should also enable sales channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Handshake to make best use of Shopify’s marketing reports.

Without these integrations, Shopify’s marketing reports will offer limited value. You can also find 1,500+ marketing apps at the official Shopify App Store to help along the way.

Next, we’ll review each marketing report offered to Shopify merchants.

Sessions Attributed to Marketing

Suppose you spent $10,000 and ran an intensive marketing google ads campaign to acquire new customers during the summer.

Now you’d like to know how many people visited your store and the number of successful conversions (purchases) based on your campaign.

The Sessions attributed to the marketing report offers a convenient summary of total visitors and sessions from your marketing campaign, and total sessions that placed an order (converted).

This report also provides details such as the marketing event type, marketing event target, and UTM campaign content.

You can further customize the report by using filters and editing columns.

Sales Attributed to Marketing

If Sessions attributed to marketing shows you the number of converted sessions (i.e. visits), the Sales attributed to marketing focuses on successfully placed orders  and total sales made by your marketing campaign.

In other words, Sales attributed to marketing reveals whether you’re getting the best promotional bang for your buck.

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The Sell-through rate by product report shows the pace at which you sell inventory against the amount of inventory shipped to you, over a given period of time.

Like most Shopify reports, adding record filters and data columns is a breeze and lets you experiment with inventory location activity, percent sold, and more. For example, you can filter the results based on a specific brand and check if the inventory needs to be restocked based on the purchases.

You can also gain critical insights such as which inventory is being sold and which is not being sold. You can then create strategies to clear off inventory sitting on the shelf for too long.

Days of Inventory Remaining

The Days of inventory remaining report displays how many days your inventory will last, based on product sales activity and amount of inventory left.

The dashboard groups inventory availability into 4 major buckets:  inventory with 0 days remaining, 1-30 days, 31-90 days, and 90+ days.

In the above screenshot example, 200+ products have 0 days left before they’re out of stock. In other words, these are the out-of-stock products, so it’s important to replenish these items ASAP; just make sure to look at prior sales history to gauge demand.

The Days of inventory remaining report uses a simple formula to calculate inventory scarcity:: ending quantity of remaining inventory divided by average number of items sold per day.

Although a simple formula powers this report, neglecting the remaining inventory can create a complicated mess for your e-commerce business.

ABC Analysis by Product

Shopify’s ABC analysis by product report is a well-known report type in the world of inventory management.  This report is quite insightful because it’s an effective method to determine the value of your stocked merchandise based on customer demand, the cost to purchase, and overall risk.

The ABC analysis by product report  assigns grades over a 28-day period as shown below:

Grade A – items that produce  80% of your revenue

Grade B – items that produce 15% of your revenue

Grade C – items that produce 5% of your revenue

By analyzing inventory via ABC analysis, you’ll know which products should be given more attention compared to those that are a lower priority. Based on a clear understanding of your inventory’s value, you can prioritize record accuracy and the tight control for Grade A products. On the flip side, Grade C products can be liquidated to make room for more profitable inventory.

Percent of Inventory Sold

As the name suggests, Percent of inventory sold helps you to identify how quickly product SKUs sell within a date range you choose.

To illustrate, let’s say you sell sporting goods and regularly stock Baseball Glove A, Baseball Glove B, and Baseball Glove C. You’d like to see how Christmas affects your baseball glove inventory, so you choose a report date range between November and December of last year.

You learn that 20% of your Baseball Glove A inventory sold around Christmas time, but Baseball Glove B and C inventory only depleted 5% at that time.

Report results are categorized by product title, variant title, SKU, quantity sold, starting quantity of the SKU, and percent sold. You can also customize and streamline this report by adding filters and new columns.

Average Inventory Sold Per Day

For every stocking Shopify merchant, it’s important to know how many products are sold each day and how much inventory remains.

By using the average inventory sold per day report, store owners can check to end inventory and total quantity sold on a given day.

Think of this report the same way you’d look for a “check engine light” to appear in your car. Each time you drive, you scan the dashboard to ensure there’s no mechanical red flags requiring your attention.

When you scan the Average inventory sold per day, you’re briefly checking available inventory and quantity sold so you can prevent out-of-stock red flag situations.

Month-End Inventory Snapshot

The Month-end inventory snapshot report is helpful when conducting month-end inventory reconciliation, and for performing regular inventory audits (to ensure your physical inventory matches what is shown in Shopify and vice versa).

If you physically stock products, you’ll access this report often.  It can also be a useful tool for those tracking safety stock levels.

Month-End Inventory Value

The Month-end-inventory value report, like the Month-end inventory snapshot, features sold inventory levels.  However, this report only includes products with costs previously added to Shopify.

This report is useful for financial reconciliation when comparing numbers between Shopify and accounting software, ERP systems, etc. It’s an extremely important report for your accounting staff.

And that brings us to the end of all reports you can find under Shopify inventory reports.

Shopify Marketing Reports

If you have a product or service that you sell online, then you need to market it to attract the right customers.

Marketing is a critical need for most businesses,  and recently it has become a typical part of day-to-day operations.  Marketing campaigns, whether they’re organic or paid, are a healthy part of your store’s growth strategy. Therefore, you’ll need a way to measure these efforts.

In Shopify, it becomes a little easier because of the marketing reports.

To access these reports, choose Analytics in the left side admin panel, click on Reports, and scroll down to the Marketing reports section.

To analyze your marketing performance, effectiveness, and total conversions (purchases),  you can take the help of the below reports:

• Sessions attributed to marketing
• Sales attributed to marketing
• Conversion by first interaction
• Conversion by last interaction
• Attribution model comparison

Before we begin, remember to integrate tracking software like Google Analytics, Optimizely, Crazy Egg, and other tools into your Shopify store.   You should also enable sales channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Handshake to make best use of Shopify’s marketing reports.

Without these integrations, Shopify’s marketing reports will offer limited value. You can also find 1,500+ marketing apps at the official Shopify App Store to help along the way.

Next, we’ll review each marketing report offered to Shopify merchants.

Sessions Attributed to Marketing

Suppose you spent $10,000 and ran an intensive marketing google ads campaign to acquire new customers during the summer.

Now you’d like to know how many people visited your store and the number of successful conversions (purchases) based on your campaign.

The Sessions attributed to the marketing report offers a convenient summary of total visitors and sessions from your marketing campaign, and total sessions that placed an order (converted).

This report also provides details such as the marketing event type, marketing event target, and UTM campaign content.

You can further customize the report by using filters and editing columns.

Sales Attributed to Marketing

If Sessions attributed to marketing shows you the number of converted sessions (i.e. visits), the Sales attributed to marketing focuses on successfully placed orders  and total sales made by your marketing campaign.

In other words, Sales attributed to marketing reveals whether you’re getting the best promotional bang for your buck.

This report also displays any target you’ve set as a “marketing event target”. As you can see from the above screenshot, a recent Google Shopping campaign last year generated 99 orders and $8,000+ in total sales.

Conversion by First interaction

Conversion by first interaction is a handy Shopify report for marketing funnel awareness.  The first interaction is a way to identify the single-click action a customer takes when they first learn about your company.

The first interaction is a type of attribute tracking strategy that contrasts with the last interaction. First interaction assumes the very first time a customer learns about your product, that’s the referrer source (i.e. searched a keyword on Google and then visited your website, placed an order later, etc).

Example: a customer searches for basketballs on Google and visits your website based on the keyword results. Two days later, they see an ad about your website on Facebook and return to your website to place an order. The first activity, Google, is the referrer source in a first interaction scenario.

The last interaction looks at the very last activity a visitor had just prior to placing an order at your store (we’ll discuss the Last interaction in the next report section).

Conversion by Last Interaction

Any conversion (purchase) attributed to the last interaction a customer has with your store will appear on the Conversion by last interaction report.

For example, let’s imagine someone visiting your online store based on an Instagram ad. They add a few products to the shopping cart, but don’t place an order. A couple days later, you send them an email about the items waiting in their cart, so they return and finally make a purchase (convert).

For our above example, the referrer for first interaction will be Instagram, but the referrer for last interaction (appearing in this report) will be your email campaign.

Attribution Model Comparison

The Attribution model comparison report shows you a comparison between orders from your customers’ first and last interactions. You can derive the number of orders and the average order value between these two marketing attribute methods.

Generally speaking, the last interaction is the event that typically receives the most credit as the referrer source for purchase; it’s also the easiest to measure. However, first interaction data is a great model to evaluate which sources are generating traffic within a short buying cycle.

The benefit of the Attribute model comparison is to more accurately determine which referrer sources perform well; if the first and last interaction order totals match for a referrer source, then it’s likely those purchases can be fully credited to that external resource.

And that brings us to the end of marketing reports. Hope you’ve gained some insight into how to use them.

Shopify Orders Reports

As an e-commerce merchant, you need to know how and when orders are placed, how they’re fulfilled, how they’re returned, and how much fuel you’ve got on a day-to-day basis.

With Shopify’s Order reports, you’ll easily find this information. These reports give you details about order frequency, order volume, fulfillment information, shipping data, and product returns.

To access these reports, choose Analytics in the left side admin panel; then click on Reports.

Here are some of the order reports you’ll find:

• Product orders and returns
• Orders over time
• Fulfillment, shipping, and delivery times
• Fulfillment over time

Alright, let’s take a look at these reports individually.

Product Orders and Returns

As a Shopify store owner, you’ll need to know which products sell the most and which are returned more often. In a nutshell, the Product orders and returns report is exactly what you’d expect it to be..

This visual chart style report indicates the quantity of each product sold and how many are returned within a select time period.

Did you know that the average return rate for products ordered online is 30%? Any return percentage less than this means you’re on the right track

Suppose you’re an electronic gifts seller who received 50 orders during the month of March for a new smartwatch model. By April, almost 20 of those orders were returned by customers. This makes your return rate 40%.

The Product orders and returns report consists of the following:

• Product title: name of the product in your Shopify store
• Ordered quantity: quantity of product ordered
• Returned quantity: quantity of product returned
• Return rate: percentage of product returned

You can add filters and columns to further streamline data, and then export it via CSV file.

Orders Over Time

This report shows all the orders within a time period.

Whenever you need a visual trend that displays how many orders are placed between dates, then this is the report that gets the job done.

By default, the Orders over time report displays the average units ordered, average order value, and quantity of items returned within a selected date range.

Fulfillment, shipping, and Delivery Times

The Fulfillment, shipping, and delivery times report is a critically important logistical resource in your Shopify arsenal. It shows you the collective time required for a product to be fulfilled, shipped, and delivered to customers from the moment an order is placed. This is an excellent tool to optimize your overall fulfillment and delivery time since Shopify gives you a chart-based performance view that easily identifies anomalies.

You can group data based on daily and hourly incremental periods. Shopify’s visual dashboard shows the average time needed to fulfill orders within the selected date range.

Three key parameters this report displays are as follows:

• Time to fulfill – Time is taken to fulfill the orders. Example: it took 2-3 hours to fulfill 25 orders after they were placed.
• Time to ship – Shows time taken to ship products to customers. For example, it took 1 day on average to initiate shipment for the last 20 products.
• Time to deliver – Shows time taken to deliver products. Example: it took 3 days on average to deliver products to a customer’s location during the last month.

Though these reports provide high-level insights into your fulfillment process, you may need better data to track when each of your orders are fulfilled successfully. Unfortunately, these reports are not available on Shopify but you can access advanced delivery reports to track each of your shipments from Report Pundit. It integrates flawlessly with your Shopify platform to derive insights that you’ve never seen before.

Fulfillment Over Time

The Fulfillment over time report highlights orders that were fulfilled, shipped, and delivered during a selected time frame. If you need a high-level visual summary about your shipping operations, then this report gets the job done.

Based on logistical insights from this report, you’ll be able to make necessary adjustments due to order handling issues, carrier problems, and more..

With that said, we’ve completed our review of  Shopify’s order reports. To learn more, check our extensive guide to order reports.

Shopify Profit Reports

Everyone knows that e-commerce success is measured by profit, but not everyone knows how to leverage the profit you have.

In Shopify, Profit reports help store owners figure out profit centers easily. These reports  reveal product cost, margin, and profit for each SKU and location.

To find these reports, go to the Analytics section, then click on Reports.

Profit reports are further divided into three categories:

• Profit by product
• Profit by product variant SKU
• Profit by point-of-sale location

Before getting into these reports, remember to add your product costs for each SKU in the Pricing section of the Products admin screen. Without this information, you won’t gather accurate insights from Shopify profit reports.

You may consider this as a major drawback with Shopify profit reports, as they lack dynamic reporting capabilities and it definitely needs a lot of improvement. It’s one of the primary reasons that merchants come to us to get custom Shopify profit reports.

Another major drawback is that it’s hard to track profit from each transaction through these reports. You may want to consider advanced profit reports and transaction reports provided by Report Pundit to analyze your profit and loss.

Now that we’ve mentioned the drawbacks, let’s move on to the three available profit reports.

Profit by Product

The Profit by product report shows you the gross profit made for each product within the selected date range. Friendly reminder:  this data only appears if you entered product costs into Shopify’s admin system prior to order transactions.

Let’s pretend you offer 100 unique watches for sale at your online jewelry store. You open the Profit by product report and select a date range of the last year.  This report tells you both the gross profit (amount) and margin (percentage) you made on each watch.  When you sort the Gross margin column, you’ll easily identify watches that were the most and least profitable last year.

Along with profit-based data, you can get information on net quantity, net sales, and cost.

Net quantity shows you the number of units sold after refunds (ordered quantity minus refunded quantity). Net sales gives you the sale amount you have received excluding shipping & taxes during the selected period. Cost shows the cost of all the units sold.

You can always use filters and columns to extract more meaningful data for your unique needs.

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Suppose you have multiple vendors who provide you with products, then this report helps you check which vendor’s products are performing best at your retail locations.  

It also displays the net quantity, gross sales, discounts, returns, net sales, taxes, and total sales for each product vendor.

Retail Sales by Product Type

Let’s say you have a clothing store where you sell t-shirts, denim jeans, and personalized jackets.

While there may be multiple brands, sizes, and variants, you’d still need to know overall sales for each product type from your retail locations. In general, reviewing retail sales by product type helps in-person retailers to determine how certain KINDS of products are selling at their location(s).  For example, your personalized and one-of-a-kind clothing store sales indicate that denim jeans were the most popular product type sold last month.

That’s when “retail sales by product type” can be quite handy.

It displays the total sales for each product type along with the POS location name, net quantity, gross sales, discounts, returns, taxes, and net sales.

Retail Sales by POS Location

If you have stores across 5 different retail locations (neighborhoods, cities, etc), then this report will show total sales for each individual location.

It displays gross sales, discounts, returns, net sales, shipping, taxes, and total sales from each of the stores.

You can further drill down the data using the filters and columns.

Retail Sales by Staff at Register

Tracking sales staff performance at POS registers for retail stores is a unique need.  It’s not something you’d expect to track in an e-commerce platform like Shopify, but they do cater to hybrid retailers (those selling online and in-person).

So, if you need to know the sales made by each staff member at a specific store, then this report can get you that information.

It shows the name of the staff, location, and percent of sales made by that person for a selected time period.

Retail Sales by Staff at Register (Daily)

When you’re calculating staff commissions or bonuses, daily registered sales reports are critical.  It’s also beneficial to ensure employees are keeping up with monthly sales performance goals.

It shows the sales done by each staff member on a daily basis at different retail locations.You can get data on the name of the staff, location name, and the percentage of sales made by the staff.

And that brings us to the end of all the different retail sales reports you can find on Shopify.

Shopify Sales Reports

Shopify’s Sales section pinpoints the health of your e-commerce performance:  you can track products and customers, determine whether sales channels are growing, stable, or in decline.

You’ll want to analyze the sales coming in from all channels; Shopify Sales reports will help you do just that.

To access Sales reports, go to Analytics via the Shopify admin screen and click on Reports.

Here are various sales reports that you’ll get:

• Sales over time
• Sales by product
• Sales by product variant SKU
• Sales by product vendor
• Sales by discount
• Sales by traffic referrer
• Sales by billing location
• Sales by checkout currency
• Sales by channel
• Sales by customer name
• Average order value over time

Profit by Product Variant SKU

While the aforementioned Profit by product report focuses on product profitability,  Profit by product variant SKU provides even more granular profit data for each product SKU variant..

For example, if you’re running a shoe store and sell different sizes of the same shoe, then you can come to this report to view profit made for each size variant sold.

Because this report focuses on individual SKU variant profitability, data includes variant SKU records, as well as net quantity, net sales, cost, gross margin, and gross profit.

Profit by Point of Sale Location

If you have retail store locations, then this report gives you gross profit for each POS (Point-of-sale) location. You can also view profit for a specific location by using filters and then export data for further analysis.  Like all Shopify profit reports, this screen is only helpful if you’ve previously added your product costs to the admin system.

And that brings us to our conclusion about the three profit reports offered by Shopify.

Shopify Retail Sales Repor

Shopify’s Retail Sales Reports exist for one reason:  the demands of brick-and-mortar retailers go beyond the scope of typical e-tail operations. Staff sales management, POS transactions, and sales register activity are unique needs faced by physical stores. These reports let you easily analyze your sales and performance at each location. And they do not include any of your online sales.

To find these reports in Shopify, go to analytics, click on reports and scroll down to retail sales reports.

It’s important to note that only retailers who sell face-to-face will have access to these reports. Retail sales reports take advantage of Shopify’s POS payments channel. You must also have a Standard Shopify plan or higher to access this type of report.

Here are the various retail sales reports available to merchants who sell in person:

• Retail sales by product
• Retail sales by product variant SKU
• Retail sales by product vendor
• Retail sales by POS location
• Retail sales by staff at register
• Retail sales by staff at register (daily)
• Retail sales by staff who helped with sale

Let’s begin exploring what each of these reports do for face-to-face sellers.

Retail Sales by Product

The Retail Sales by product report gives you details of all product sales for POS locations without including shipping revenue (not applicable for in-person sales).

This report includes product type, the title of the product sold, and the net quantity of each item sold after deducting returned merchandise.

You should note that any changes made to the product details when ordering products will result in a few disparities within these reports. To ensure there is no confusion, you should double-check that all product details are correct while placing an order.

Retail Sales by Product variant SKU

As the name suggests, the Retail sales by product variant SKU report show gross sales for each SKU sold in person, excluding shipping costs. It reveals which product variants are performing well at your physical retail locations.

To illustrate: if you sell Apple iPhones at an electronics expo, you can check which iPhone models (32GB, 64GB, etc) were sold in person.

By default, the Retail sales by product variant SKU report features these records: product title, variant title, variant SKU (ID or model number) net quantity sold, and others

Retail Sales by Product Vendor

Suppose you have multiple vendors who provide you with products, then this report helps you check which vendor’s products are performing best at your retail locations.  

It also displays the net quantity, gross sales, discounts, returns, net sales, taxes, and total sales for each product vendor.

Retail Sales by Product Type

Let’s say you have a clothing store where you sell t-shirts, denim jeans, and personalized jackets.

While there may be multiple brands, sizes, and variants, you’d still need to know overall sales for each product type from your retail locations. In general, reviewing retail sales by product type helps in-person retailers to determine how certain KINDS of products are selling at their location(s).  For example, your personalized and one-of-a-kind clothing store sales indicate that denim jeans were the most popular product type sold last month.

That’s when “retail sales by product type” can be quite handy.

It displays the total sales for each product type along with the POS location name, net quantity, gross sales, discounts, returns, taxes, and net sales.

Retail Sales by POS Location

If you have stores across 5 different retail locations (neighborhoods, cities, etc), then this report will show total sales for each individual location.

It displays gross sales, discounts, returns, net sales, shipping, taxes, and total sales from each of the stores.

You can further drill down the data using the filters and columns.

Retail Sales by Staff at Register

Tracking sales staff performance at POS registers for retail stores is a unique need.  It’s not something you’d expect to track in an e-commerce platform like Shopify, but they do cater to hybrid retailers (those selling online and in-person).

So, if you need to know the sales made by each staff member at a specific store, then this report can get you that information.

It shows the name of the staff, location, and percent of sales made by that person for a selected time period.

Retail Sales by Staff at Register (Daily)

When you’re calculating staff commissions or bonuses, daily registered sales reports are critical.  It’s also beneficial to ensure employees are keeping up with monthly sales performance goals.

It shows the sales done by each staff member on a daily basis at different retail locations.You can get data on the name of the staff, location name, and the percentage of sales made by the staff.

And that brings us to the end of all the different retail sales reports you can find on Shopify.

Shopify Sales Reports

Shopify’s Sales section pinpoints the health of your e-commerce performance:  you can track products and customers, determine whether sales channels are growing, stable, or in decline.

You’ll want to analyze the sales coming in from all channels; Shopify Sales reports will help you do just that.

To access Sales reports, go to Analytics via the Shopify admin screen and click on Reports.

Here are various sales reports that you’ll get:

• Sales over time
• Sales by product
• Sales by product variant SKU
• Sales by product vendor
• Sales by discount
• Sales by traffic referrer
• Sales by billing location
• Sales by checkout currency
• Sales by channel
• Sales by customer name
• Average order value over time

Sales Over Time

You can call the Sales over time report your master sales report.  Shopify utilizes a lovely line graph to plot how sales activity shifts by incremental time periods.

You can export sales data for a specific date range and can also group results by date, week, month, and year to check trends.

For example, if you want to know sales made on each day over the last month, you can select the date range and then group it by Day to see the relevant results.

The Sales overtime report also displays total orders, gross sales, discounts, returns, net sales, shipping costs, taxes levied, additional fees, and the total sales.

As with most Shopify reports, you can further add custom filters and data columns to key in on desired records.

Sales by Product

The Sales by product report shows the quantity of unit sales in your Shopify store by individual product and includes related details (title, vendor, type).

This report features a color-formatted total sales summary, easily identifying high volume sales merchandise at a glance.

It also displays a breakdown of each product’s sales revenue, including gross sales, discounts applied (if any), returned merchandise, and adjusted net sales.  Net sales and Total sales will have identical records for those merchants who don’t collect sales tax.

Important note:  if you sell multiple variations (SKUs) of the same product, only the parent product data will appear in the Sales by product report (although SKU variants are included in totals).

Sales by Product Variant SKU

Unlike Shopify’s Sales by Product Variant SKU report which summarizes products sold as a whole, the Sales by product variant SKU report is favorable for those with multiple product SKU offerings.

Suppose you sell fruit beverages, each beverage may have smaller and larger sizes, or SKU variants. It’s important for Shopify store owners to review sales performance for each variant.

As a Shopify merchant, your willingness to explore this report at the product SKU level will help you better manage your sales strategy.

Sales by Product Vendor

For those Shopify merchants selling products from multiple vendors (or brands), the Sales by product vendor report will be really helpful.

It shows the net quantity, gross sales, discounts, returns, net sales, taxes, and total sales for each vendor.  This report helps you analyze sales performance by vendor/brand, which makes it an effective tool when discussing purchasing activity with various wholesale suppliers.

And as with most Shopify reports, you can customize these reports further by adding filters and columns.

Sales by Discount

It’s a common occurrence for e-commerce businesses to offer discounts during special seasons, holidays, and special events.

However, after promotions are over,, you’ll need to know how many sales you’ve made. That’s when the Sales by discount report comes in handy. It displays sales based on the discount provided within a selected time period.

You can then export this report to analyze the performance of each discount offer.

Sales by Traffic Referrer

Most online retailers don’t depend on sales activity coming from just one source. There will be multiple traffic referrers such as Facebook, Google, direct traffic, and more…all contributing to the bottom line.

The best way to track sales channel activity from these referrers is with help from Shopify’s Sales by traffic referrer report.

Let’s say you run a paid Google ads campaign, along with an Instagram ad at the same time, you can compare how each advertising campaign is performing and then adjust your spend budget accordingly.

You can then decide which platform is working best for your products.

Sales by Billing Locati

If your business serves customers across multiple states/provinces or countries, then the Sales by billing location report can be very helpful. Harnessing this information can be quite helpful for your next sales campaign.

For example, if you sell snowboards online, you can check which customers purchase most based on their Billing region  (i.e. Colorado, British Columbia, etc). You can then target ad campaigns for those locations.

Using this report, you can also easily check total orders, gross sales, net sales, and total sales for each geographic location.

Sales by Checkout Currency

Imagine you’re a jewelry merchant selling products across both North and South America. It’s likely that those customers won’t be paying you with the same currency.

Obviously in such scenarios, you’ll need to know which currencies are used by your customers across multiple countries.

That’s when you can use the Sales by checkout currency report and get the necessary insights. This report is only visible to merchants accepting Shopify Payments as a payment method (third party payment processors will not appear in this report).

Sales by Channel

If you generate sales through multiple methods like retail locations, online stores, and others, then the Sales by channel report is a helpful overview.

For example, if you’re a keto dietary retailer that has  a brick-and-mortar store, you’ll benefit from a sales report that captures both online and physical store activities.

Sales by Customer Name

The Sales by Customer Name report can be extremely useful when you want to identify your most or least loyal/active customers by sales activity.

Suppose you want to focus on customers with sales over $500 during the last year.  You can come to this report, add necessary filters, and fetch the relevant data.

You can then use the results to run targeted email campaigns focused on upsell opportunities.

Average Order Value Over Time

The last report we’ll be discussing from Shopify’s Sales reports is Average order value over time.

Average Order Value over time, or AOV, calculates the average amount spent by customers per order. Shopify provides an attractive line graph to plot AOV over time increments: by hour, day, week, month, hour of day, or day of week.

If your customers purchase single, low-priced items from your Shopify store, this report will visually display the results. Or if your customers later purchase multiple items and/or high ticket merchandise, you’ll see an upswing in record results.

With that, we’ve looked at all the sales reports available from Shopify.

Shopify Custom Reports

Finally, we’ve reached custom reports.

There’s no question that all the Shopify reports mentioned until now have their own uses, and are quite important in their own ways.

However, every Shopify store owner will need a custom report every now and then.

Though custom reports are available for Advanced Shopify or Shopify Plus stores, they have their limitations. Here’s a quick guide on Shopify Reports that cover the various limitations.

For example: let’s say you’re looking for Potential revenue lost due to an abandoned cart. It’s nearly impossible to customize your Shopify reports to acquire this insight.

But with Report Pundit added to your store, you can create this report in a jiffy.

Well, if you cannot take our word for it, you can double check with 1000+ merchants who vouch for us and left fantastic reviews in the Shopify AppStore. (BTW we’re a leader in the Store Management category in the app store).

Also, you won’t need to pay $2000+/month for a Shopify Plus plan to access our custom reports.

However, if you still want to create custom Shopify reports on your own, you’re welcome to do so.

To create a custom report, go to the Reports section in Analytics from the admin screen; then select Create custom report. You can then create unique reports based on your needs.

Here’s how you can do it:

• To modify a default report, customize it by adding filters and editing columns; click Save as and give the report a name.
• To modify a custom report, make changes to filters and then click Save report. Alternatively, you can click Save as to create a duplicate of the custom report with a different name.

Your store’s staff can see all reports that you modify or create, or they can duplicate and edit those reports.

And that’s how you create custom reports in Shopify!

By the way, if you want to learn more about custom reports, read our extensive Shopify custom reports article.

Congrats! You now know Shopify Reports end-to-end.

I am sure you’re full of energy after reading such a short article!

Nonetheless, you’re now fully aware of all reports available in Shopify, what they do, and how you can use them to scale your business.

If that’s the case, please share your comments at the bottom. We’re happy to answer any questions.  

With that said, we at Report Pundit want to thank you for taking the time to view our extensive guide.  

Till we meet again in our next article, I wish you the best in your eCommerce journey!