Originally published August 3rd, 2023
Last updated May 20th, 2025
Shopify is a great platform to start, grow, and manage your online store, offering robust analytics & reporting tools to give sellers insights into how they’re doing and what they could do to build their business. For any ecommerce business looking to improve conversion rates, these analytics tools are essential for driving growth.
Data doesn’t lie, but you need to know how to understand and use the data if you want to get the most out of it. With the right metrics, you can optimize your marketing strategies, refine your customer experience, and boost profitability across your shopify store.
Shopify Analytics tracks conversions:
- Sessions converted
- Add to cart clicks
- Reached checkout
To help store owners make informed decisions, it also provides access to real-time shopify analytics through a user-friendly dashboard.
And collects all kinds of customer and order data:
- Average order value
- Online store conversion rate
- Online store sessions by device type
- Online store sessions by location
- Online store sessions by traffic source
- Online store sessions from social source
- Repeat customer rate
- Sales by social source
- Sales by traffic source
- Top landing pages
- Top products by units sold
- Top referrers by session
- Total online store sessions
- Total orders
- Total sales
- Sales attributed to marketing
By monitoring customer behavior and total sales, ecommerce store owners can make strategic improvements to their store’s performance and checkout process.
Shopify also generates multiple reports:
- Acquisition reports
- Behavior reports
- Customer reports
- Finance reports
- Inventory reports
- Marketing reports
- Order reports
- Profit reports
- Retail sales reports
- Sales reports
- Custom reports
- Product analytics
These reports provide valuable insights for entrepreneurs who want to streamline operations, improve customer satisfaction, and increase customer retention. Understanding your sales data allows you to build a stronger online business.
It’s a lot, but it’s all intended to give you visibility into every aspect of your business, your customers, and your opportunities. This type of data analysis is critical for ecommerce companies who want to make smarter, faster, and more informed decisions about pricing, marketing, and product development.
3 Game-Changing Shopify Reports
All of the Shopify reports are valuable and intended for different purposes. We chose these three as a starting point. Whether you’re focusing on sales channels, attribution, or cart abandonment, these reports are key.
Customer Reports
Depending on the Shopify plan you have, you see reports that not only show who your customers are but what kinds of customers they are, such as:
- Customers over time
- First-time vs returning customer sales
- Customers by location
- Returning customers
- One-time customers
- At-risk customers
- Loyal customers
What You Can Do With Customer Reports
Understanding your customers is critical for your marketing efforts. Nearly 30% of budgets are wasted on targeting the wrong customers with the wrong strategies.
Knowing your customer lifetime value helps you tailor marketing efforts more effectively. Use customer journey insights to enhance engagement and turn new customers into loyal customers.
Use your Shopify Analytics to show your customer purchasing behavior, then target them with an email. Thank a loyal customer for their business and offer them a free gift or discount. Invite one-time customers back with a promotion. Ask at-risk customers what your company can do to make their experience better. You get the idea.
Marketing Reports
Want to see if your marketing efforts are working? Shopify Analytics will help you tie marketing strategies to conversions so you know if you’re moving the needle.
- Referrers and interactions
- Sales attributed to marketing
- Sessions attributed to marketing
- Conversion by first interaction
- Conversion by last interaction
- Attribution model comparison
You can even combine this with third-party Shopify apps for enhanced functionality and more detailed real-time insights.
What You Can Do With Marketing Reports
Marketing spend ranges from 6-20% of an eCommerce company’s gross revenue. Make sure your spending is resulting in sales. Strong conversion rates are a sign that your marketing channels and marketing strategies are working.
The Marketing Report helps you see which marketing channels are worth continuing to invest in and which ones you can scrap. You can focus your energy and dollars on the channels bringing you the most return on your investment, even doubling-down on those high-velocity ones. These reports offer a strategic edge to entrepreneurs looking to grow their ecommerce store with customer support and marketing innovation.
Inventory Reports
If you can’t maintain the right levels of inventory, then you either risk a stockout and lost customers or cash flow tied up in unsold inventory. Inventory Reports tell you:
- Month-end snapshot of inventory
- Quantity & percentage of inventory sold each day
- ABC analysis by product
- Product sell-through rate
- Days of inventory remaining
Inventory reports provide deep insight into customer preferences, helping you align your stock with actual sales trends and reduce overhead.
What You Can Do With an Inventory Report
The power of an Inventory Report isn’t in a single report; it’s in a series of reports that show you inventory and customer trends.
The Inventory Report will help you forecast inventory for the future (seasons and holidays included), plan for the unexpected (supply chain issues), identify customer preferences and purchase behavior (what inventory is selling and what isn’t and when), save money on warehouse fees (time it with actual sales), and ensure stockouts never happen (so customers stay loyal). These reports are particularly useful for Shopify store owners looking to optimize their inventory and improve profitability.
Don’t Stop There
While these featured Shopify analytics and reports are highly beneficial for any eCommerce seller wanting to grow their business, all of the Shopify data gives you a different perspective into the health of your business, the risks, and the opportunities that await you. Take time to know each report, building your own custom reports if you still have questions.
By leveraging these tools, store owners can take greater control over key metrics and make data-backed improvements. Whether you're trying to improve your store conversion, lower your bounce rate, or enhance search engine visibility through better content strategy, Shopify's reports and analytics help drive success.
And when it comes time to get working capital to invest in inventory and marketing efforts, let the eCommerce experts at Onramp get you cash when you need it, without all the red tape. Our model is tailored to your business, so we don’t get paid until you do. Learn more at Onramp.com
