Track Unique KPIs with Shopify Custom Calculation Reports

Every Shopify store owner has unique business needs, and standard reports don’t always provide the level of detail required for in-depth analysis. Whether you want to calculate profits with custom formulas, analyze shipping costs more effectively, or create advanced sales performance metrics, having the flexibility to customize your reports is essential.

Custom calculations allow you to go beyond basic Shopify reporting and tailor insights to match your store’s operations. Whether it’s profit margins, complex tax breakdowns, average order value trends, or inventory forecasting, custom calculations help you extract the exact data you need to make informed decisions.

Let’s go through how Shopify custom calculations work, why they matter, and how it is helping you manage your store data.

What Are Shopify Custom Calculations?

Merchants often need custom calculations to streamline operations, analyze sales, and make active business decisions.

With custom calculations, you can apply formulas to existing data fields, allowing you to:

• Multiply, add, or subtract columns (e.g., (Order Quantity) * (Product Price) = (Gross Sales Value) 
• Extract specific portions of data (e.g., pulling the first three characters of a shipping code)
• Generate unique fields beyond Shopify’s limitations, such as images, comments, or gross profit and tax breakdowns

Why Are Calculation Fields Important?

Every business is different. Some stores need profit calculations, while others need order-specific details like line-item properties, delivery addresses, or customer comments. Shopify’s default fields don’t always cover these requirements, which is why calculation fields are crucial.

Example: 

Imagine a store that ships products internationally. Each order has a shipping code with multiple variables. Instead of manually filtering each one, a custom report can extract just the first three characters, making data analysis much faster and more efficient.

We understand that store owners need custom data to improve their analysis. That's why we offer on-demand custom columns customized to each store’s requirements.

What Are Calculated Fields?

A calculated field is a custom data field created by applying a formula or a custom calculation to existing data fields. Thus, you will get the exact data you're looking for, whether it's the sales number, performance indicator, or decision-making point.

Here are some custom fields we have created for merchants to help with store operations, financial analysis, and decision-making:

1️. Gross Profit Calculation

Helps merchants track actual earnings by subtracting the cost of goods sold (COGS) from revenue.

2. Profit Margin Percentage

Provides a percentage-based view of profitability, helping store owners set better pricing strategies.

3️. Average Order Value (AOV)

 Helps in understanding customer spending patterns and optimizing marketing efforts.

‍4️. Shipping Cost per Order

Useful for budgeting and identifying cost-saving opportunities in logistics.

5. Discount Impact Analysis

Shows the percentage of revenue lost due to discounts, helping merchants adjust promotions wisely.

6. Refund Rate

Helps track the percentage of refunded orders, useful for identifying product or service issues.

How Third-Party Apps Help with Custom Calculations

Third-party apps make Shopify’s reports smarter and more flexible by allowing you to create custom fields, perform calculations, and extract specific data from the Shopify API.

Here’s how we help:

•  Summing Up Custom Fields: Consolidate two columns of data together and add up order quantities, product prices, or any data fields to give you the exact insights you need.

• Extracting Specific Data: Shopify doesn’t always show all the details you need. We can extract information like customer comments, notes, staff names, or delivery addresses directly from the Shopify API.

• Gross Profit Breakdown:  Shopify doesn’t provide a direct way to calculate gross profit. With A third-party app, it helps you generate a detailed breakdown of your profits, factoring in costs and revenues.

•  Custom Formatting & Filtering: We can help you extract a portion of a text field, apply filters to large datasets, or format data in a specific way.

A Case Where Custom Columns Were on Demand

One of our clients needed to extract specific characters from customer notes, but Shopify didn’t offer a way to do this. Some notes contained 1000+ words, and they only needed the first few sentences.

And guess what? With our app, we created a custom extraction formula that filtered and displayed only the relevant portions of text, saving his hours of manual work.

Conclusion 

With custom calculations, you can say goodbye to manual data extraction and time-consuming spreadsheets. Whether you need to track profit margins, analyze shipping costs, or break down sales by category, our app does all this for you. Get reports that are accurate, efficient, and built around your business needs so you can spend less time on numbers and more time making decisions for your store, without the worry of errors or outdated data.

You can take control of your store’s data in the way you want.