Shopify Analytics: the 6 reports worth your time

Go to Analytics → Reports in a Shopify admin and you’ll find dozens of pre-built reports, sorted into categories like Acquisition, Behavior, Customers, Inventory, Marketing, Orders, and Sales. They’re available to every merchant on every subscription plan, which is generous of Shopify and also part of the problem: nobody opens a report library that deep on a Monday morning. Most sellers check the sales summary on the home screen and never scroll further. Six reports underneath it are worth a regular look. Here they are, in the order worth checking them.

1. Total sales over time

Under Sales, this is the one number that tells you whether the week was normal before you go hunting for reasons it wasn’t. Set the range to this week vs. last week, not the default 30 days: a month-long view smooths out exactly the swing you’re trying to catch. If this number is flat or down, everything below exists to tell you why.

2. Total sales by referrer

This breaks revenue down by the site that sent the visitor: search, social, direct, email, a specific ad platform. Instead of guessing whether your Instagram push worked, you can see whether it did. A source that’s quietly become your biggest earner deserves protecting; one you’ve been spending time on that shows up near zero is a sign to stop before you spend more of it there.

3. Conversion rate over time

Visits are only half the story; this report tells you whether the people who show up buy. For stores that qualify, it also carries a Benchmarks comparison right inside the chart: your conversion rate against the median, 25th, and 75th percentile of stores similar to yours, grouped by order volume, primary market, and the product categories you’ve sold in the past 30 days. Instead of wondering whether “1.8% conversion” is good or bad in the abstract, you get an answer built from stores that actually resemble yours — not an industry-wide average pulled from a blog post.

4. New vs returning customers: counts, not revenue

Of the people who ordered this period, how many were buying for the first time, and how many had bought before? That’s all this report measures — counts, not revenue. A shop where nearly every order comes from a new customer is running on acquisition alone, which is the most expensive way to grow. Watching that split move over a few months shows whether the people you’re winning stick around, or whether you’re refilling the same bucket every week. If you want the revenue side of that question, Customer cohort analysis (a few rows down in the same category) shows sales by the group a customer first belonged to.

5. Products by sell-through rate (under Inventory)

Sell-through rate shows what share of a product’s stock sold in a given period. It catches two problems the sales reports above won’t: a product that’s selling fine in absolute terms but slowly, tying up cash it doesn’t need to, and a product running low that you haven’t noticed because its total sales still look healthy. It’s the inventory-side twin to checking whether your bestseller is really your most profitable product: a strong sales number can still be hiding a problem underneath it.

6. Average order value over time

AOV climbing while order count holds steady means people are buying more per visit — a bundle, an upsell, a shipping threshold that’s nudging basket size up. It’s worth noticing what caused it and repeating that on purpose. This report carries the same Benchmarks comparison as conversion rate, so you can tell whether your AOV is strong or just looks that way against nothing to compare it to.

The five-minute weekly read

You don’t need all six every week. Most weeks, four questions cover it:

• Is this week’s sales number up or down vs. last week?
• Did the top traffic referrer change?
• Is conversion rate holding, and where does it sit against the Benchmark?
• Any product running low, or stalled on the shelf?

That’s the habit. Everything else in the report library is there for the week something looks off and you need to dig in, not for the five minutes you spend every Monday.

One honest limit

Shopify’s reports are genuinely good — for Shopify. The moment a product also moves through Etsy, a print-on-demand line, or a second storefront, you’re back to opening a different report library for each one, the same way Etsy’s own Stats page only ever shows you Etsy. Welra reads what Shopify tracks alongside every other channel you sell on and puts the numbers that actually moved this week in one report, so the Monday read doesn’t depend on remembering which admin panel to open. The first report is free, or take a look at a sample report first.