Your Guide to Shopify Reports

Each time a customer makes a purchase or interacts with your store in any way, lots of analytical data is generated. Shopify scrupulously notes down each detail and presents them to you in the shape of Shopify reports. Some are available out of the box in your analytics dashboards, and others can be generated at will. With the abundance of information at your disposal, it would be a shame not to use it to your advantage.

Shopify reports – what’s available with your plan?

Many Shopify reports are considered a premium feature and, as such, are not available with the lowest plans. Advanced ($229/month) and Shopify Plus plans (starting from $2,000/month) offer the full set of analytics but the regular Shopify plan ($79) doesn’t lack far behind.

Lower plans (Lite and Basic) come only with limited analytics but you can access the Analytics dashboard regardless of the plan you’re on.

The full plan comparison table looks as follows:

Plan / Reports available	Shopify Lite	Basic Shopify	Shopify	Advanced Shopify	Shopify Plus
Finances reports	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Product analytics	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Live view	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅
Acquisition reports	❌	✅	✅	✅	✅
Inventory reports	❌	✅(4 / 5 available)	✅	✅	✅
Behavior reports	❌	✅ (5 / 6 available)	✅	✅	✅
Marketing reports	❌	✅ (1 / 5 available)	✅	✅	✅
Order reports	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅
Sales reports	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅
Retail sales reports	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅
Profit reports	❌	❌	✅	✅	✅
Customer reports	❌	❌	✅ (5 / 7 available)	✅	✅
Custom reports	❌	❌	❌	✅	✅

Shopify reports – where to find them?

All reports reside in your dashboard, under Analytics -> Reports.

You can also lookup various statistics under the Dashboard tab and track the current visitors of your store via the Live View tab (available for Basic Shopify and higher plans).

How to export Shopify reports?

On each report’s page, you’ll find an Export button in the top-right corner.

With it, you can download a .csv file containing a given report, usually with even more details than visible in the dashboard. These files can then be uploaded into any tool for processing data (Google Sheets, MS Excel) or, when it makes sense, import it into, for example, accounting software.

Plenty of the data can also be exported automatically for you, on schedule. We’ll touch on that several times throughout this article.

What are Shopify professional reports?

You may encounter the term “professional reports” advertised by Shopify as one of its premium perks. What are they?

Shopify professional reports are nothing more than the more advanced reports available with Shopify and higher plans. These include more granular reports about your products – sales of individual items, sales over different periods of a year (this can be useful for seasonal items), additional tax reports, or more detailed information about how your customers interact with your store.

We’ll explain what each of these reports contains in the following chapters.

Shopify acquisition reports

Availability: Basic plan and higher.

Acquisition reports are about the people that have visited your store over a certain period. The numbers are shown for:

• Visitors to your site (more specifically, devices they used as desktop and mobile visits by the same person would be treated as two visits)
• Sessions generated by these visitors (each session ending after 30 minutes without any activity or at midnight UTC, whichever comes first).

The number for the former is generally higher as some tend to visit your store more than once in the reporting period.

Reports are available for sessions over a specific period, as well as those for a specific referrer and location.

Shopify behavior reports

Availability: Basic plan and higher, except for Online store cart analysis report — those are available only with Shopify plan or higher.

Behavior reports touch on how users behave once they have already landed in your store. These reports are there to help you improve conversion and give customers a smooth experience of the checkout process.

The following reports are available:

• Online store conversion over time – shows the percentage of sessions that ended up with a purchase of any size (the contents of the cart or the quantity don’t matter)
• Online store speed – shows how fast your store loads for visitors. Site speed directly influences your rankings in search results and the conversion, so it is something to treat seriously.
• Product recommendation conversions over time – Shopify has a feature that lets you promote certain products by recommending them in a designated section of your store. If you use it, here is where you check how such positioning converts.
• Top online store searches & Top online store searches with no results – Here you can look up the top queries visitors typed into a search bar on your store (provided you have one, of course). The latter report returns only the queries that didn’t return any result.
• Sessions by landing page and by device – these reports show, respectively, the first page that users land after entering your store and the type of device they used to do so.
• Online store cart analysis – finally, this interesting report shows you the most common pairs of products that customers added to their carts in your store. It will show, for example, that customers adding Yerba Mate to their cart often complement it with a set of green teas. This, as a result, can be an interesting idea for selling products together or suggesting them in the “Consider also…” section. Note: this report shows only items added to a cart and ignores whether they were eventually bought or not.

Visitors by landing page report on Shopify

Staying with the Behavior reports for a few more moments. The landing page report is particularly interesting. It shows the very first page that visitors paid a visit to upon entering your store.

It’s particularly interesting from the marketing perspective. Seeing that plenty of your guests start from the blog gives you a confirmation that your content strategy works. Perhaps it’s a good idea to increase your efforts (write more, work on SEO, etc) and compare the result over time.

This report is also handy if you drive traffic to specific landing pages with ads. From the dropdown list, you can add various columns to see the percentage of visitors that, for example, subsequently added to a cart, reached a checkout, or bounced.

Knowing that, for example, the last Google Ads campaign brought you 500 visitors, you can understand better if they ended up purchasing from you or they remained just visitors. Not seeing expected results here may be a good motivator to rethink your targetting or try out a different channel.

Finally, this report is excellent for comparing several different campaigns, assuming each was directing visitors to individual landing pages.

Shopify marketing reports

Availability: Shopify Lite plan doesn’t get any of these reports while Basic Shopify only gets Sessions attributed to marketing. The full set of marketing reports is available for Shopify and higher plans.

Marketing reports let you track the results of your marketing campaigns. With them, you can see how much of your sales are generated by specific channels. Or even particular campaigns. You can also compare traffic flowing into your store from social media, search, directly with links, and any other channel.

You’ve got five reports available, depending on the Shopify plan you’re on.

• Sessions attributed to marketing and Sales attributed to marketing — these two reports present, respectively, the number of sessions and sales that your store generated resulting from your marketing efforts. To fall into the marketing category, the traffic needs to be generated with Shopify’s built-in marketing tools or come through links with UTM parameters.
• Conversion by first interaction and Conversion by last interaction — both reports present the conversation rate depending on the source of the traffic. We’ll touch on the difference between the first and the last interaction in a second.
• Attribution model comparison – finally, here you can compare the order values between the first and last interaction.

Customers can enter your store through different sources (called referrers). They can click through links in ads, open product pages included in newsletters, enter the store’s address directly into the browser, etc. Some people could be doing plenty of that if they’re interested in your offer but not quite convinced at first about making a purchase.

To make it easier for you to pinpoint what generated traffic and sales, Shopify introduced two more categories:

• First interaction — are the sources that brought a customer to your store for the first time
• Last interaction — are the sources that brought a customer to your store AND this session generated in a sale

In some cases, a source (for example, a Facebook Ad) could be both the source of the first and last interaction. In other cases, these can be different. It gives you a pretty good insight into many issues, for example, channels that drive the awareness but don’t convert.

Shopify finances reports

Availability: All financial reports are available for users of all plans.

Finance reports touch on the numbers behind your orders. There are five reports available, the main one being the Finances summary. It gives you an overview of all sales, payments, liabilities, and actual profit, with a separate report for each one of the items.

Separately, you can look into reports detailing Total sales, Taxes, Tips, and Payments.

Net sales and total sales, for example, are the key value you should be looking at when evaluating the profitability of your business. It’s also what your accountant will want to extract from Shopify to do proper bookkeeping. Net sales are Total sales, excluding taxes and shipping fees:

Total sales = gross sales – discounts – returns + taxes + shipping

Net sales = gross sales – discounts – returns

Note that the amounts presented in the payment and finance reports don’t always match. That’s because some orders could have been placed, but the payment is yet to be received. So, for example, a sale could have been made in September but the payment followed in October. Long term this should all add up, but it’s something to keep in mind.

Shopify sales tax reports

Regardless of what and where you sell, you’ll likely need to pay sales taxes on all your sales. That’s something you’ll need to take care of yourself as Shopify won’t do it for you. They also won’t file or remit any taxes for you, sadly!

Your general tax setup resides in your Shopify dashboard. Click on Settings in the bottom-left corner, and then click on Taxes. There, you can set and view the individual tax set up for each country. Or even the states that you sell in.

The taxation methods differ based on where your customers are. But are also based on the volume of sales for each destination. Be sure to consult a qualified financial professional when setting up your store. So that the reports you generate are accurate.

The report outlining the list of taxes paid sits in Analytics -> Reports -> Finances summary -> Taxes. You can export it as a .csv file in the usual way.

If you need a more detailed report on orders and taxes charged with each, you’ll want to approach it from a different angle.

How to export orders with tax information?

To generate a sales tax report, you’ll need to first download all your orders from a specific period.

Go to the Orders tab, then More filters, and select the dates or choose from the available filters.

A file will download. You will then want to import it to your desired destination. To do that in Google Sheets, click on File -> Import, and upload the file you’ve just downloaded. Then, click on Import Data.

Once you have it imported, find the Taxes column where the total amount of tax charged is displayed.

A more convenient way may be to import orders automatically into Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. With a tool like Coupler.io, you can decide how frequently the data needs to be fetched. It can be done once a month, but you can even choose to refresh the report every hour so that the accountant can look into the tax report at any time, without worrying that it’s outdated.

Coupler.io doesn’t require any coding skills. Set up the the Shopify to Excel integration to check it out.

While setting up, you can also decide which fields will be imported and make your spreadsheet easier to explore. To do so, in Source settings, go to Advanced settings, and in the last field (Fields) enter the names of fields you want to include in your import.

For example, we can include the following fields as shown in the screenshot below:

id, current_total_tax, current_total_tax_set.presentment_money.currency_code, financial_status, taxes_included, customer.tax_exempt

Then run the importer and you’ll get a table like this:

Leaving the Fields field empty will import all available columns.

Credit card reports on Shopify

For each online payment you make, you pay fees to either Shopify or third-party payment providers (e.g. PayPal). It’s worth generating a credit card report to see your payments in any given period.

If you use a third-party provider, Shopify won’t be able to create a report for you. You should be able to do that yourself from within your dashboard on PayPal, Amazon Pay, or elsewhere.

When using Shopify Payments, the report is available in your Shopify account. Go to Settings -> Payments -> Payment Providers, and then View Payouts. You can export the report as a .csv file, the same as all the other reports.

If you accept payments through several providers, you can see the breakdown in Reports -> Finance -> Finances Summary.

Shopify profit reports

Availability: Shopify plan or higher

When you add or edit a product, Shopify automatically calculates the profit you make on selling it as well as a profit margin. The only requirement is that you enter the Cost per item.

With Shopify reports, you can extract information about profits associated with each of your products. There are two reports available

• Profit by product – which is quite self-explanatory
• Profit by product variant SKU – is a more granular report that shows profits on each of the product variants
• Profit by Point of Sale location – here, the profits are summarized for particular points of sale

If you frequently change your rates or add/remove products regularly, it may be easier to keep track of profits/margins in an external spreadsheet. Rather than export data manually after each change, it would make sense to automate such exports.

A more convenient way may be to import orders automatically into Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. With Coupler.io, you can decide how frequently the data needs to be fetched. It can be done once a month, but you can even choose to refresh the report every hour so that the accountant can look into the tax report at any time, without worrying that it’s outdated.

To connect Shopify to Google Sheets, follow the steps outlined in our Shopify Export Orders guide. Instead of orders, choose to import products.

Then run the importer and open the spreadsheet with your product data. To calculate your profit, subtract the inventory.cost column value from the price column value. Here’s a simplified spreadsheet:

If you require a more advanced method, check out the formulas we came up with when writing our article on Dropshipping on Shopify. The method described there automatically calculates profit and profit margin for each new upcoming order.

Shopify sales reports

Availability: Sales reports are only available for Shopify, Advanced Shopify, and Shopify Plus plans.

Sales reports document the sales of your products, obviously. There are 11 of them available in Reports section of your dashboard.

Although sales reports are similar to payment reports, there can be discrepancies between the two. For example, if a customer purchases an item at the end of May but only pays for it well into June, the sale will count for May while the payment will appear on the June balance.

Shopify total sales reports

You’ll find the Total sales report under Finances reports -> Sales -> Total Sales.

Whenever the term ‘total sales’ pops up in reports, it’s worth remembering what it includes and excludes.

Total sales include all gross sales, taxes, and shipping charges. Any discounts and returns are subtracted.

For example, if the gross price of a product is $100, taxes amount to $25 and shipping is $15, the total sales on record for this order will be $140.

Historic sales reports from Shopify

The best way to obtain the historical sales reports is with the Sales over time report, available in Reports -> Sales. There, you can select any period of time or pick from several suggested date filtering criteria.

You can then save it as a custom report or export it as usual.

Shopify retail sales reports

Availability: Retail sales reports are only available for Shopify and higher plans.

Retail sales reports focus on sales done offline, in brick-and-mortar stores. If you don’t have a Point of Sale activated as a sales channel on Shopify, you won’t be able to see this report. If you do, however, you’ll find it on the Reports page. Same as all the others.

Each report is exportable for a selected period in a traditional way.

Shopify inventory reports

Availability: All reports are available to users on the Basic plan or higher, except for ABC Analysis (Shopify plan or higher)

Inventory reports help you keep track of the remaining inventory as well as give you insights into what sells well and what doesn’t. You’ll find them at the bottom of the Reports page. The available reports are:

• Percent of inventory sold — shows the percentage of each product in your store that was sold, compared to the initial stock level.
• ABC analysis by product — this interesting report grades each of the products based on their contribution to the overall revenue, A-graded products being top-selling ones.
• Average inventory sold per day – the average number of items sold daily
• Month-end inventory snapshot – the quantity of each product at the end of any given month
• Month-end inventory value – the same as above, just with the value of unsold products

You can export Shopify data, including inventory levels, at any time in a standard way. The disadvantage of this approach is that, as Shopify admits itself, “it can take 12-72 hours before inventory changes appear in reports”. At that point, many of the numbers can be already outdated or worse, long sold out.

For that reason, a far more useful way to pull inventory levels would be with Coupler.io. This way, you can always fetch the latest numbers from your store. The imports can be run automatically, on schedule, with each new import initiated even every hour.

We describe this particular case in our article on exporting from Shopify to Google Sheets but if you prefer, you can also pull your inventory reports into Microsoft Excel and Google BigQuery.

Shopify PoS reports

The most basic reports about sales in a particular PoS can be found in Profit reports.

More detailed analytics are only available to users of the Shopify POS Pro service.

If you’re one of them, you can access insights about daily sales as well as more detailed stats related to net sales, average order values, top products, or even top staff members.

Shopify order reports

Availability: Shopify plan or higher

Order reports let you analyze the volume of orders placed, shipped, delivered, or returned. These reports focus more on fulfillment, helping you understand your performance over time. They’re available from the Reports page as usual.

The available reports are:

• Orders over time — shows the total volume of orders coming in, in any chosen period of time
• Product orders and returns — here, you can view which of your products were sold and returned the most
• Fulfillment over time — this report shows the volume of orders that were fulfilled, shipped, and delivered in a specific period of time
• Fulfillment, shipping, and delivery times — as the name suggests, this report shows the median (or typical) time that it took to fulfill, ship, and deliver an order, starting with the time of order receipt

Shopify shipping reports

Shopify doesn’t offer shipping reports per se. Instead, there are various shipping details you can pull through other reports we’ve already discussed.

If you’re after calculating shipping expenses in any given period, your best bet may be to export orders from a selected period as a .csv file and then upload them into your favorite tool, such as Excel. You’ll see all shipping fees charged on top of orders in column J.

You can also lookup the shipping total right from the Reports dashboard on Shopify. Go to Finances Summary -> Total sales, and then select the desired period.

If you want to track your shipping times, find the reports that we described in the Shopify orders reports chapter.

Shopify product reports

Availability: All plans

Technically, Shopify doesn’t offer a standalone products report. You can, however, view insights about individual products directly from the dashboard.

Go to Product -> All products, and then click on the product you want to focus on first. To the right, find Insights and click on View Details.

A menu will pop up, showing you the sales over the last 90 days, channels that these sales were attributed to, and, for example, the split between new and returning customers.

You can learn plenty more from the actual reports from your store.

• Shopify inventory reports show the volume of sales for a particular product and give a very useful ABC analysis of all your products.
• Shopify sales reports also show sales by product
• Shopify profit reports focus on profits per product, including any variants

You can also schedule regular imports of all your product details using Coupler.io, with no coding required.

Shopify reports on sales by product type

You may want to view a report for a particular product type. Plenty of information about product sales is available via Shopify sales reports. If you need something more custom, it’s time to create a… custom report.

Go to Analytics -> Reports and create a custom report by clicking the green button in the top-right corner of the screen. Select Sales over time as Report template.

On the next screen, choose Product type from the dropdown, IS, and type in the desired query. All orders matching the criteria will be returned once you’ve saved them.

Shopify reports on products refunded

Shopify doesn’t offer a report on refunded products out of the box but it’s also very easy to generate it. Follow the steps as in the previous chapter to create a custom report. Hit Manage filters again and set up the criteria as in the screenshot below:

Shopify accounting reports

Shopify doesn’t offer a separate list of accounting reports. However, there is an abundance of reports in different categories that you can easily generate, export, and use for bookkeeping purposes. Most likely you’ll find the following handy:

• Sales tax reports
• Net and gross sales reports
• Profit reports

From the Reports page, you can also create any custom report and view, for example, all the taxes collected for a specific period.

If you wish to look at the fees you’ve paid to Shopify, either for a subscription, transactions, or other reasons, this report resides elsewhere. Go to Settings -> Billing, and at the bottom of the screen choose View statement of charges.

Shopify KPI reports

If you wish to track certain KPIs of your store, plenty of information is already at your disposal — with the existing reports and any custom ones you can create. At that point, all you need to do is export this data into your favorite spreadsheets tool and perform any needed calculations.

As we explained earlier in the article, it can be done manually via the export button available above each report or automatically, via a Shopify to BigQuery, Google Sheets or Excel integration.

For example, to track the average order size, export your sales report and divide gross sales by the number of orders. To calculate the conversion rate, export both acquisition and behavior reports and divide the number of visitors by the number of conversions.

Track abandoned carts in a separate menu, available in Orders -> Abandoned checkouts, from where you can also export the available data.

These are just a few examples but whatever KPIs matter for your business, most likely you can easily calculate them with the existing reports or anything custom you can build in two minutes.

Shopify advanced reports

You may come across the term “Shopify advanced reports” but won’t find such a thing in the dashboard. Chances are, though, that you already use them.

Back when Shopify introduced reporting in 2013, they introduced two levels of reporting that were available to users depending on the plan they were on. Lower plans received standard reports, such as sales, acquisition, product analytics, etc.

On top of those, users on more expensive plans could create custom reports and add them to their dashboards. These were called Advanced Reports and were nothing more than the Custom Reports currently available on Shopify and higher plans.

How to set up automatic Shopify reports?

For tracking various KPIs of your business or for any other purpose, it often makes sense to export the data. You can do it manually with the ‘Export’ buttons and upload new .csv files to refresh the data. It’s far easier to set up automatic reporting into your favorite destination, for example, Google Sheets.

One way to approach that is with Coupler.io. Currently, you can’t yet export reports (let us know if you’d like to do that, and we may introduce it).

You can, however, export orders, products, and customers and build sophisticated dashboards based on that. It’s excellent for tracking new orders, monitoring fulfillment levels, inventory, profits, margins, and many other data types.

Consider also taking your reporting one step further and visualizing the important metrics of your business. Check out our Shopify to Data Studio tutorial and see how easy it is to build sophisticated charts without any coding.

Automatic daily reports with Shopify

As we talked about in the previous chapter, you can’t yet export Shopify reports with Coupler.io. You can, however, pull a lot of data that these reports are built upon and create your custom reports outside of Shopify. This way, you can generate reports on sales, profits, margins, statuses, and many others.

While setting up a Coupler.io importer, you may choose to auto-refresh the data at specific intervals. If you like to start a day with a fresh report, you may, for example, set for an importer to run Monday to Friday at 8 am.

By the time you get to a report, the latest data will be pulled, all calculations will be performed, and you’ll have the latest overview of your business. What a way to start a day!

What is the benefit of having Shopify reports?

The most important thing from the vendor’s perspective is tracking sales, order fulfillment levels, inventory, financials, etc. Plenty can be supervised directly from the respective tabs in Shopify. It doesn’t, however, give you a complete overview of your business.

With reports, you can look at your past performance, see short- and long-term trends, and spot many interesting opportunities. You can extract any data you need, visualize it, and feed it to other analytical services.

Marketing reports are invaluable. They tell you how customers find your store, what drives their buying decisions, and how your campaigns perform. They also help find bottlenecks and understand better things like abandoned carts or low conversion at certain stages.

Finally, often you will need to generate such reports – to send to your accountant, to evaluate the profitability of certain products, evaluate approaches, or to simply look at the most important metrics while you sip your coffee in the morning.

Take advantage of them, and it will take your business to the next level.

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