Shopify Reports and Analytics: Beginner’s Guide (2026)

Shopify reports are data summaries that show how your store is performing. They track metrics such as traffic sources, visitor locations, campaign results, and popular product searches.

These reports can answer questions about your business, customers, and marketing efforts. For example, you can review last year’s Black Friday Cyber Monday campaign to see which channels drove the most sales.

This guide covers the Shopify reports available to merchants and how to use them to understand store performance.

Understanding Shopify Analytics and reports

Shopify Analytics is Shopify’s built-in system for reviewing store performance. The analytics dashboard summarizes key metrics, and Shopify reports let you examine specific metrics in more detail.

Reporting tells you what happened. Analysis helps explain why. For example, if traffic rose 2% week over week, break down the result by referral source to identify which channels drove the increase.

Shopify merchants processed $100.7 billion in gross merchandise volume during the first quarter of 2026, up 35% year over year. Shopify Analytics lets stores examine their share of that activity and trace performance to a traffic source, product, or campaign.

Shopify Analytics is available on all Shopify subscription plans, with core web analytics features included across plans and more advanced reports and analytics capabilities available on higher-tier plans.

Where can I find my Shopify reports?

Log in to your Shopify admin and select Analytics to open the overview dashboard. Select Analytics > Reports to access pre-built reports covering areas such as sales, customers, inventory, and marketing.

The Shopify analytics dashboard

The Shopify analytics dashboard has an at-a-glance view of store performance through customizable metric cards. Sales, session, and fulfillment data update within about one minute. You can change the date range, compare periods, or click a card title to open its related report.

Shopify also generates “insights” that flag notable performance trends. Stores that averaged at least 10 orders per week over the previous six months can receive daily insights. Metric targets let you set a numeric goal for a defined period and track progress from the dashboard.

Live View displays store activity in real time. Stores can use it to monitor sales during high-volume events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Types of Shopify reports

Shopify groups its default reports by the store activity they measure. The following table summarizes the categories covered below.

Acquisition reports

Acquisition reports focus on visitors to your store and these key metrics: 

• Sessions over time: Shows visitors and sessions over a selected period.
• Visitors over time: Shows unique online store visitors over time.
• Sessions by referrer: Shows whether visitors arrived directly, from search, or through a referral.
• Sessions by location: Shows the countries, regions, and cities where visits originated.

Shopify calculates visitors and sessions using cookies. One cookie identifies the device, and another tracks session length. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight UTC. One visitor can therefore generate multiple sessions.

Behavior reports

Behavior reports focus on the actions your visitors take, providing a wide variety of insights that can help you create better promotional bundles and more effective targeted upselling, such as:

• Conversion rate breakdown: Shows how sessions move through the shopping and checkout funnel.
• Conversion rate over time: Shows the percentage of sessions that produce a purchase over a period of time.
• Product recommendation conversions over time: Tracks clicks, cart additions, and purchases from product recommendations.
• Searches by search query: Shows the terms customers enter in storefront search.
• Searches with no results: Shows search terms that return no products or pages.
• Sessions by landing page:Shows where visitors begin their store sessions.
• Sessions by device: Shows the devices used to access your store.
• Web performance reports: Track loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.

Customers reports

Customer reports give you information about your customers, such as their average order count, average order totals, and expected purchase value. Here are the types of customer reports you can generate: 

• New customers over time: Shows how many new customers placed orders over a period of time.
• New vs. returning customers: Compares first-time and returning customer counts.
• Customers by location: Groups new customers by their shipping location.
• Returning customers: Shows customers with at least two orders.
• One-time customers: Shows customers with one order.
• Customer cohort analysis: Tracks repeat purchasing and retention by acquisition period.
• Predicted spend tier: Groups customers by their predicted future spending.
• RFM customer analysis: Groups customers by recency, frequency, and monetary value.

Inventory reports

A Shopify inventory report tracks stock levels and product movement. It can cover month-end quantities, sell-through rates, and estimated time to stockout. This can inform demand forecasting and purchase orders. These are the reports a Shopify store owners can generate:

• Month-end inventory snapshot: Shows the available quantity of each product variant at month-end.
• Inventory sold daily by product: Shows average daily sales by product variant.
• Products by percentage sold: Calculates the percentage of each variant sold from the total starting inventory during a period of time.
• ABC product analysis: Grades variants by revenue contribution over the past 28 days.
• Products by sell-through rate: Shows the percentage of available inventory sold.
• Inventory remaining per product: Estimates how many days current inventory may last.

Marketing reports

Marketing reports can show you which marketing channels are generating the most traffic, sales, and overall value based on how visitors interact with your store. Within Shopify Analytics, you’ll be able to see reports on:

• Sales attributed to marketing: Shows sales connected to trackable marketing activity.
• Sessions attributed to marketing campaigns: Shows sessions generated by campaigns and UTM links.
• Performance by referring channel: Compares results across marketing channels.
• Performance by marketing activity: Breaks down performance by individual marketing activity.
• Performance by UTM campaign: Compares campaigns using their UTM parameters.

Compare campaign costs with new-customer orders to calculate customer acquisition cost.

Order reports

Order reports provide information on your order volume, shipping times, and returns. They can give you insight into bestselling products, customer satisfaction, and even defective merchandise. These are order reports you can generate: 

• Orders and reversals by product: Compares ordered units with units removed from orders.
• Orders over time: Shows orders received during a selected period.
• Shipping and delivery performance: Measures fulfillment, shipping, and delivery times.
• Orders fulfilled over time: Shows fulfilled, shipped, and delivered order counts during a selected period.
• Shipping labels over time: Tracks purchases and costs for labels bought through Shopify during a selected period.
• Items bought together: Shows product combinations from processed orders.

Profit reports

Profit reports show valuable information about the costs, margins, and profit of your online store. Create the following reports: 

• Average profit margin by market: Compares profit metrics across markets.
• Gross profit by product: Shows gross profit for each product.
• Gross profit by product variant: Shows gross profit for each product variant.
• Gross profit by POS location: Groups gross profit by retail location.
• Profit margin by order: Shows profit margin for orders during a selected period.

Shopify reports profit only for products and variants that had a recorded cost per item at the time of sale.

Retail sales reports

Retail sales reports provide store data for retail analytics. Businesses can use them for point-of-sale data analysis and track retail metrics such as sales by location. These reports are available to store owners who sell in person:

• POS total sales by product: Shows POS sales for each product.
• POS total sales by product variant: Breaks down POS sales by product variant.
• POS total sales by vendor: Groups sales of products from different vendors by POS location.
• POS total sales by product type: Groups product-type sales by POS location.
• Total sales by POS location: Compares sales across retail locations.
• POS total sales by staff member: Shows sales attributed to staff at the line-item level.
• POS staff sales total: Shows sales processed by staff at the register.

Sales reports

Shopify sales reports show order values by date, product, channel, or customer. They include sales and sales reversals but do not track the movement of payments. Sales appear on the order date, and reversals appear on the date they are processed. Store owners have access to a wide array of sales reports: 

• Total sales over time: Shows orders and total sales over time.
• Total sales by product: Breaks down product sales, excluding shipping.
• Total sales by product variant: Breaks down gross sales by product variant.
• Total sales by vendor: Groups sales by product vendor.
• Total sales by discount codes: Groups order sales by applied discount.
• Total sales by referrer: Groups sales by the referring website.
• Total sales by billing location: Groups sales by billing country or region.
• Total sales by currency: Groups sales by checkout currency for Shopify Payments stores.
• Total sales by sales channel: Compares sales across sales channels.
• Sales by customer name: Shows orders and sales by customer.
• Average order value over time: Tracks changes in average order value over time.

Shopify also provides finance reports for payments, taxes, gift cards, and gross profit. The Taxes report lists sales tax by region, type, and rate. Eligible US stores using Shopify Tax can also access jurisdiction and transaction data when reconciling sales tax before filing.

Custom reports

Custom reports let you modify a default report or create a new data exploration from a blank slate. From Analytics > Reports, select New exploration, then add the desired metrics, dimensions, filters, and visualization.

The ShopifyQL query editor lets you retrieve specific store data using Shopify’s commerce query language.

You can also use metafields as dimensions and filters in Reports and Explore. Shopify Analytics can analyze selected product, variant, customer, and order metafields.

Shopify reporting apps

Though Shopify includes a wide array of out-of-the-box reporting tools, it can also integrate with third-party reporting apps for stores that need more specialized tools. 

Shopify reporting apps are available in the Shopify App Store and cover a wide range of needs. Popular options are:

• Report Pundit: Custom Reports
• Data Export IO: Report
• BeProfit – Profit Analytics
• Report Toaster: Custom Reports
• Mipler – Advanced Reports

How to analyze Shopify reports

This section covers four parts of the Shopify analysis process:

• Reports vs. analysis
• Asking the right questions of your data
• What’s a good X?
• Start where the value is

Reports vs. Analysis

Reports are the tip of the iceberg. They track what happened through basic ecommerce metrics. Analysis goes below the surface to uncover insights about why it happened and what to do next.

Analysis can reveal:

• Answers to important business questions.
• Problems that are costing you money.
• Changes that may improve user experience or conversion rate.

Shopify’s own insights can flag notable trends in sales, sessions, and fulfillment on the Analytics dashboard. These insights can point you to an area worth investigating in a deeper report.

Asking the right questions of your data

A strong analysis question can lead to a decision. Before investigating, identify what you could change based on the answer. If the result would not change an action, narrow the question.

Start by:

1. Reviewing your daily Shopify insights.
2. Recording the metrics, time period, and parts of the store involved.
3. AskingSidekick to investigate the change and break down the result.

Use the same review criteria each time to reduce subjective bias:

• Friction: Identify steps that make it harder for visitors to buy.
• Distraction: Find elements that pull attention away from adding a product to the cart or checking out.
• Motivation: Check whether the offer gives visitors enough reason to continue.
• Relevance: Remove content that does not aid the purchase decision.
• Comprehension: Confirm that visitors understand the product’s value and the next action.

What’s a good X?

Benchmarks provide context for conversion rate, average order value, and cart abandonment. 

But your own baseline also matters. A 2% conversion rate might be a stretch goal for one store and a step backward for another. Compare current results with your store’s history and business goals.

Shopify’s metric targets let you set a numeric goal for a metric such as gross sales, orders, or conversion rate. You can apply a filter, such as a product or sales channel, and track the target from the Analytics dashboard.

Start where the value is

Consider examining areas with the largest revenue opportunity, such as:

1. High-volume, low-value pages. These pages attract a lot of traffic but generate little revenue. An old blog post can be one example.
2. Low-volume, high-value pages. These pages receive less traffic, but bring visitors closer to buying. Your checkout is one example.
3. Your sales funnel. Map the route from homepage to collection page, product page, cart, checkout, and purchase.

A simple funnel might record:

100 collection-page visitors → 50 product-page visitors → 40 cart additions → 20 checkout starts → four purchases

Let’s say the largest drop occurs between the collection and product pages, however, raising the number of completed purchases from four to six would increase orders by 50%. Review both the visitor loss and direct revenue impact when choosing where to investigate the funnel.

Analyzing and optimizing your business with Shopify reports

Use Shopify reports to track progress toward a specific business goal. After choosing the metric that best reflects that goal, apply filters and adjust columns to pinpoint where performance changed. 

Test one change based on what you find, compare the result with your baseline, and record the outcome. That result can inform the next question you investigate.