What’ll be your Shopify store’s average order value for the next 3 months (or the next 2 quarters? or the next 10 weeks)? Who are the top vendors that drive the most sales to your store, and how do they sell the most? How is your sales performance for a month compared to the same month last year? What’s the total discount amount you’re offering each month?
These are just a few of the many questions you may ask yourself but are unable to answer. But what if you knew the answer to all these questions without needing to spend much time or effort?
If you’re already on a quest to finding answers to these questions, read on, as we’ll be discussing the best possible ways to unearth these insights with Shopify sales reports.
Before diving into the sales reports, though, let’s first go over:
- What are Shopify sales reports?
- The importance of Shopify sales reporting
- How to create Shopify sales reports
- Common Shopify sales metrics & KPIs
- Essential sales reports for Shopify
What are Shopify sales reports?
Shopify sales reports provide insights into your business’ sales performance based on your online store’s data. There are a variety of sales KPIs available for you, such as total sales and average sales, to track and monitor how your business is performing.
Shopify offers a set of basic sales reports for starters. However, high-growth businesses may need more insights to drive and sustain sales. Thankfully, Advanced Analytics apps are engineered to deliver a wide range of prebuilt Shopify reports and unlimited custom reporting capabilities.
The importance of Shopify sales reporting
Maybe you just started your ecommerce journey with Shopify, or you’re still trying to figure out ways to further boost your online store’s sales. No matter what stage you’re in, you need to make the right decisions at the right time, based on data, to increase your Shopify sales.
Shopify sales reporting can help you make those right decisions by analyzing real-time store data, identifying underlying trends, forecasting future sales performance, and more.
How to create Shopify sales reports
Shopify itself offers a set of sales reports under the Reports module. However, to create advanced Shopify sales reports, you’ll have to install a modern BI app like Zoho Advanced Analytics, which allows you to analyze and monitor your store data.
Here’s how to create Shopify sales reports using the Zoho Advanced Analytics app:
- Install Zoho Advanced Analytics for Shopify.
- Select Zoho Advanced Analytics from Apps. All your data from Shopify will be synced and 15+ sales reports, along with order, customer, shipment, and inventory reports will be automatically generated.
- To create a custom report, click the +Create button in the top-left corner and select a view—chart, pivot, summary, or tabular.
- Drag and drop the required columns to the x- and y-axis fields and click the Click Here to Generate Graph button.
- Give a name to the report and save it.
With Zoho Advanced Analytics, you can create any number of custom reports from Shopify data, without limitations, by following the steps above.
Common Shopify sales report metrics & KPIs
For businesses of all sizes, it’s imperative to keep an eye out for particular sales metrics. These key metrics may vary from business to business based on their type and industry. Below are some of the most common ecommerce KPIs to monitor:
- Total sales and orders per month
- Average order value
- Number of active customers
- Returning customer percentage
- Fulfillment percentage
Essential sales reports for Shopify
Every sales report provides multiple insights to track and optimize your Shopify store. You already have all the required data from Shopify—you only need to extract key insights from the noise.
We’ve already covered 4 simple yet critical Shopify sales reports to grow your online store in one of our previous blogs. And here, in this blog, we’ll find answers to the questions that we’ve discussed through 4 more essential Shopify sales reports:
1. Monthly average order value
The monthly average order value (AOV) report shows the average order amount spent by customers each month. If the AOV trend is increasing, it means your business is performing better, as your customers are placing orders for a higher amount compared to previous months.
Keeping track of AOV for every month is a good practice, but what if you can forecast the AOVs for the upcoming months? Say, for the next 3 to 5 months?
Well, it’s finally time to find out the answer to our first question: What will your Shopify store’s average order value be for the next 3 months?
Here’s an interactive report showing the monthly average order value trend with forecast values (dotted lines).
As you can see, the AOVs for the next 3 months show an increasing trend. That’s nice!
However, the projected increase is very low—just 3 dollars per month. Now that you know there won’t be any considerable increase in AOV, you can devise strategies to improve it. For example, you can provide volume discounts or discounts to orders above a certain amount.
2. Sales by vendors
As a Shopify merchant, you may be sourcing products for your online store from multiple vendors. With the sales by vendors report, you can identify the top vendors whose products contribute to the majority of sales in your store.
So here’s the next report: Who are the top vendors that drive the most sales to your store, and how do they sell the most?
From the report above, you can see the top 10 vendors by sales—and now it’s time to identify how they sell more compared to other vendors.
To do that, you can drill down into any vendor and get their top-selling products.
- Right-click any data point in the Vendor Products report.
- Select Drill Down and click Show more columns and select Products and then Product Name to see the top-selling products by the vendor.
Based on these insights, you can check the customer reviews and cancelation rates for those products and then compare them with other vendors.
💡Tip: You’ll need to maintain a good relationship with these high-performing vendors, and you may even want to source some new products, work out discounted prices, optimize delivery time, and more, as your customers are already loving these vendors’ products.
3. Year-over-year sales
Businesses shouldn’t limit themselves by analyzing reports monthly or weekly to get a clear picture of sales growth. Comparing year-over-year sales will help you understand how your business has grown over the years and identify seasonality trends in sales in order to make decisions.
For example, if you’ve been seeing higher sales in a particular month every year and you didn’t see the expected spike this year, you’ll need to analyze and revalidate your sales beliefs. It could be because of a new competitor or some other reason.
That’s what we’re going to do to find out the answer to our next question: How is your sales performance for a month compared to the same month the previous year?
The report above shows that sales in July 2022 are less than that in July 2021 and July 2020. Now, you have to find out the reason for the lower sales compared to previous years and fix it to avoid generating fewer sales in upcoming years, too.
4. Overall discounts monthly trend
To acquire more customers and convert more orders, you may offer discounts to customers. These discounts are called amount off discounts. Businesses should keep track of discounts used by customers every month in order to better understand customer behavior.
And now we’re about to find out the answer to our last question by using the overall discounts monthly trend: What is the total discount amount offered each month?
The above is the overall discounts monthly trend report from our demo store. With this report, you get to see the total discount amount used by your customers, along with the average discount trend.
In addition to these insights, you can also drill down into product discount amounts and allocation method. For example, you can drill down the discount for April by product name and further down by the allocation method. With this insight, you can choose the best allocation method to offer optimal discounts, thereby driving sales.
And there are a lot more sales, order, customer, and inventory reports and dashboards available in our Shopify demo store, to help you get an idea of the insights that you can get from your online ecommerce store.
Shopify sales reporting with Zoho Advanced Analytics
With Shopify reporting, you can also create these reports for your Shopify ecommerce store. Zoho Advanced Analytics not only offers cool visualizations to analyze your Shopify data but also provides meaningful insights from that data, using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
You can install Zoho Advanced Analytics, a Shopify-certified analytics app, by starting your 15-day free trial and exploring Shopify sales reporting on your own.
Reach out to our Shopify analytics experts for a free personalized demo.
Have further questions or need clarification? Write to us at support@zohoanalytics.com
Good read! Thanks for the sharing!
Hi, Priyesh Thank you for your interest! Our support team will reach out to you.
is there someone who can help me in doing all the above mentioned points.