If you run an online store on Shopify, you should be meticulous in the financial and sales aspects to track your business down to the last cent. Luckily, the Shopify sales dashboard will allow you to do that, and many more things so you can stay on top of your business day in and day out.
The Shopify dashboard is the platform’s highly advanced reporting tool that gives you real-time data about your Shopify store performance so you can make data-driven decisions. More importantly, you can configure your sales dashboard on Shopify so you can pull out job-specific reports that are crucial for decision-making
As such, whether you’re a one-man team or you’re employing a number of people in several departments, your sales dashboard is up for the task of giving the most accurate information about your business.
In this article, we’ll talk about the Shopify dashboard and we’ll teach you how you can configure it to suit every reporting needs of your business. Plus, we’ll be listing down some high-performing third-party sales dashboard apps that you can use if you want more flexibility for your business.
What Is A Sales Dashboard On Shopify
Source: Shopify Blog
The Shopify sales dashboard is a reporting tool that provides graphical representation of different aspects of your online business. Depending on the metric that you’re looking at, you can view crucial data such as total sales, average order value, customer acquisition cost, online store conversion rate, and a lot more.
Additionally, you can measure the efficacy of your marketing efforts by measuring the generated website traffic. Aside from these things, the Shopify sales dashboard is capable of measuring other aspects of your business. Because of that, it can provide a bird’s eye view of every corner and aspect of your business.
Furthermore, the Shopify sales dashboard does not only provide a static illustration of your ecommerce store in terms of numbers. Instead, it can be configured so it can be useful to various departments of your business.
For example, if you have a marketing team that only focuses on generating traffic for your website, you can configure your Shopify dashboard to show details of their omni-channel approach. On the other hand, if you have a sales team that handles the conversion rate optimization of your website, you can set up an additional configuration of your dashboard to measure online store sessions, conversion rates, gross sales, and average order values.
To sum it up, you can customize the data that you want to see on your Shopify sales dashboard to suit your specific needs. We will teach you how to do that over the succeeding sessions.
Let us now discuss the benefits of knowing how to use the Shopify dashboard effectively.
Benefits Of Knowing How to Use The Sales Dashboard
Source: Geckoboard
Here are the benefits of learning how to maximize the Shopify sales dashboard:
Single source of truth about your online business data: The Shopify sales dashboard centralizes all key metrics of your business in one place. This ensures real-time and accurate insights about sales, customer behavior, inventory levels, and more.
Faster decision-making: With accurate and real-time data provided in a comprehensive format, business owners can quickly identify emerging trends and make snappy decisions on pricing, marketing, logistics, and more.
Actionable insights for various business departments: For medium and large businesses, various departments can extract relevant insights tailored to their needs. This could help in optimizing campaigns, improving product offerings, streamlining processes, and employee management.
More effective data-focused collaboration: With departmentalized sales dashboards and performance metrics, teams can collaborate in formulating cohesive strategies that are aligned towards attaining business goals.
Long-term business sustainability: Utilizing the Shopify sales dashboard does not only impact short-term business decisions. Instead, it enables Shopify store owners to adapt to market changes and discover growth opportunities to build a solid foundation for sustainable long-term growth.
Components of Shopify Sales Dashboard
Depending on your Shopify subscription, the reporting tools that you will access on the platform, particularly because Shopify store owners who are subscribed to higher plans have more complex business operations, and thus, need complex reporting tools.
Source: Shopify Help Center
As such, a Starter Shopify plan has fewer reporting tools when compared to the Advanced or Plus Shopify plans. Be that as it may, the platform does not fall short on providing the essential reporting tools or all Shopify users.
Under the Sales category in Shopify Analytics, you get access to 11 types of sales reports.
Read more: Shopify Reports and Analytics: Master The Data In Less Than 10 Minutes
Let us define each one of them in the table below.
Report Type | Description |
Sales over time | This report shows the total sales or gross revenues generated by your store (from all your current and past products) over a specified date range. |
Sales by product | This report shows the gross sales your store has generated from each of the listed products on your store. |
Sales by product variant SKU | This report goes a layer deeper into the sales product. Here, you can view the gross sales of each product variant. Thus, if you say you’re selling a t-shirt with several color variants, you can view the sales performance of each of those colors. |
Sales by product vendor | This report allows you to identify the suppliers with the best (and poor) selling products in your store as it provides analytics on the number of items sold and gross sales per vendor. |
Sales by discount | This report shows you the performance of your discount codes or automatic discounts as it gives you an insight into the total sales that were generated using those discount policies. |
Sales by traffic referrer | This report shows you the origin of the traffic that brought sales to your store. As such, using this dashboard will help you identify if your email marketing, Google ads, or social media ads bring buyers to your store. |
Sales by billing location | This report complements the previous report as this one provides an insight into the physical location of your customers. This will allow you to see the geographical markets where your brand has a strong presence. |
Sales by checkout currency | This report allows you to see the gross sales and most-used currency on your online store. This also gives you an idea as regards the origin of your customers. |
Sales by channel | If you are using an omnichannel approach in online selling, this report will allow you to identify the total sales generated from all your sales channels. |
Sales by customer name | This report allows you to look into individual records to see your top buyers and the corresponding customer lifetime value based on total sales per customer. This is very useful if you are running a B2B business as you can create personalized marketing campaigns to keep your customers engaged. But even if you’re an online retailer, this report also comes in handy because you can identify your top customers which can be included in your VIP access (if you have any) or exclusive promos. |
Average order value over time | This report shows the average order value (AOV) of your customers over a specified date range. Using this report, you can create comparative assessments to identify if your store sales conversion rates are increasing. Otherwise, it will also allow you to understand if your store needs a proper conversion rate optimization. |
These detailed reports are enough to give an insight regarding the sales performance of your store. However, only looking at these reports won’t allow you to gain a whole perspective on your business, as such, you also need to know how to read other reports in the Shopify analytics dashboard.
In the next section, we will teach you how to customize your own Shopify sales dashboard that includes this sales report and other key performance indicators or KPIs so you can build a set of comprehensive reports to effectively track your business.
How To Customize Your Shopify Sales Data Dashboard?
Creating a custom Shopify dashboard is easy.
- Log in to your Shopify account to access the admin dashboard
- Click the Analytics menu
- Click Customize
After logging in to your Shopify account and clicking the Customize button, you will be redirected to the metrics library where all the KPIs available for your Shopify plan can be accessed.
Shopify has a pre-loaded dashboard template. However, you can add or remove other metrics to create your custom Shopify dashboard.
Now, let’s say you want to create a sales dashboard that not only measures total sales but also provides insights as regards the source of traffic, marketing efficacy, the average order value, and sales conversion rate of your store. To do that, simply select the corresponding metrics on the right panel to add them to your analytics dashboard.
After making sure that all metrics needed for your custom sales dashboard are included, click Save. There you have it, you now have a Shopify sales dashboard that’s tailored to your needs.
Moving on. As you can see, each of the KPIs in the Shopify dashboard has this small button at the top-right corner.
You can click this button to view the detailed report for each of these KPIs. For example, if you click the “View Report” button in the Total Sales KPI, you will be redirected to a detailed report concerning all your sales depending on the filters that you applied.
For this report, you have the following filters: Date, Comparison, and Time grouping. As such, you can adjust the reported data to see reports corresponding to the filters you applied.
You can choose to apply filters on all the reporting tools in your Shopify sales dashboard to see historical figures in your business. You can also use these filters to monitor your business in real time. Additionally, you can apply the Compare filter to see how your business performs today compared to previous days.
Quick read: Shopify Analytics: Get Data-Driven Approaches To Grow Faster
Other Sales Dashboards on Shopify
Aside from the Analytics menu, you can also find some sales reporting tools in the Marketing menu of your Shopify admin.
This Marketing dashboard provides insight about all your marketing activities based on your marketing apps that are integrated on your Shopify store. You can apply filters to view historical data and you can also create comparative reports to see if your efforts are effective or lacking.
In the campaigns sub-menu, you’ll see campaign activities on all marketing channels that you have. You can also see specific data such as sales generated by each traffic type online store sessions, conversion rates, and more.
In the automation sub-menu, on the other hand, you’ll find data regarding the impact of your marketing automation tools. Here, you can glance at quick reports on cart abandonment and new subscribers.
You can also create your automation policies by clicking the “View Template" button at the top-right. This will redirect you to the automation templates that you can implement on your marketing dashboard.
But if you want to create your automation policies, you can do so by clicking the “Create custom automation” button at the top. You can then set up triggers and actions based on various events of your choosing. The Shopify Flow app is needed for this one.
Staring at different types of graphs and reports can be quite overwhelming and confusing. As such, you need to learn how to choose the vital KPIs that you need to see on your Shopify sales dashboards. But to do that, you should learn what these KPIs represent.
Shopify wrote a blog explaining all these KPIs. you can read it here: 70+ Ecommerce KPIs for Tracking Business Success (2024) - Shopify Philippines
Shopify Store Sales Dashboard Apps
The Shopify sales dashboard can provide the reporting needs of most online store owners in the platform. But for those who want more customizability and features from their reporting tools, they can use other paid apps in the Shopify store.
Here is a list of popular and high-ranking online store reporting tools for Shopify:
01. Data Export IO: Reports
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 (2000+ reviews)
Pricing: Free plan available. Starts at $7 per month
Data export is one of the most popular Shopify sales reports apps. It boasts efficient data management and robust filtering options on top of its advanced automation features.
Shopify store owners can use it to generate reports and monitor all aspects of their online businesses, including sales, taxes, inventory, POS, payouts, orders, and more.
With this app, users can set up fixed schedules so they receive email updates of their chosen reports.
Key features:
- Pre-made and customizable templates
- Report filtering
- Column management
- Multi-format file exports
- Password protection on reports to limit access
02. Report Pundit
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 (1400+ reviews)
Pricing: Free plan available. Starts at $9 per month
Report Pundit is another Shopify dashboard tool that’s highly regarded by its users primarily because of excellent customer service and the variety of pre-built and customizable reports within the app.
This app contains hundreds of reporting tools for Shopify stores, which large enterprises will surely appreciate. Data visualization is also one of its strongest suits.
Key features:
- Easy to use interface
- Pre-made reporting templates
- Advanced data filtering to get accurate and crucial insights
- Integration with third-party marketing apps for measurement of marketing efforts
- Can be used by multi-store owners to centralize data management
03. Better Reports
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 (1000+ reviews)
Pricing: Free plan available. Starts at $19.90 per month
Better Reports is a Shopify sales dashboard tool that’s well-liked by merchants because of its customizable reporting features that offer detailed and accurate insights into sales, inventory, and customer data. One of its highly regarded features is its revenue report and order source analysis.
Aside from Better Reports’ pre-built templates and customizability, Shopify store owners who also own physical stores can take advantage of its POS integration to centralize sales data and other information.
Key features:
- Monitors all store-related data, even smaller ones such as tags, metafields, and more.
- Customizable reports
- Various data visualization tools.
- Their customer success team can be tapped to assist in building custom reports
- Multi-format data export
- Automated reports via emails
04. Polar Analytics
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 (100+ reviews)
Pricing: Free plan available. Starts at $300 per month
Polar Analytics is yet another Shopify dashboard app that gets a 5 out of 5 rating from its users. Merchants, particularly large enterprises, highly value this app’s ability to consolidate and analyze data from various sources, not just from Shopify.
Priced at $300 per month, this app is directed towards complex enterprises that require more data and higher accuracy, especially those that aren’t solely using the Shopify platform.
It comes with a Conversion API enhancer so its users can integrate this app to all their channels and other systems.
Key features
- Integration with Shopify, Amazon, Google Analytics, Meta, Tiktok, Klaviyo and more
- Pre-built and customizable templates
- Private and secure database
- Real-time dashboard alerts
- Supports omnichannel sales and marketing
- Supports multi-store accounts
05. Report Toaster: Custom Reports
Rating: 4.9 out of 5 (90+ reviews)
Pricing: Free plan available. Starts at $9 per month
Report Toaster is a Shopify dashboard app that boasts robust reporting capabilities and customizability for growing Shopify stores.
It includes 120+ reporting templates that report real-time data so you’re on top of all events as they happen. Despite being on the affordable side, Report Toaster allows merchants who own multiple stores to centralize all their sales data management needs in one place.
Key features:
- 120+ templates plus customizable ones
- Multi-format data export
- Automated report delivery
- Easy report sharing using custom links
- Multi-store reporting
Conclusion
Successful Shopify merchants are expert marketers. But aside from mastering the art of sales and marketing, they also know how to make use of numerical data so they can make informed decisions about their businesses.
As such, data comprehension and management is one of the key skills that you need to master to effectively run and sustain an online business. Luckily, Shopify has a built-in analytics tool that makes data analysis easier through visualization and accurate tracking.
Always remember that at the end of the day, numbers speak. If you know how to spot trends by simply looking at your Shopify sales dashboard, you can save your business from potential catastrophe. Otherwise, you can capitalize on emerging trends to take your business to new heights.
To Explore more, check out: Shopify Guide: A Complete Step-By-Step Shopify Tutorial in 2024
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