Analytics & reports

Analytics is where you measure the store. It opens on an Overview, fans out into a gallery of ready-made reports grouped by subject, and every row in that gallery opens the same report runner. There is one place a number is computed; every other screen is a bookmark into it.

Find it under Analytics in the store sidebar.

What changed: merchandise money is net of tax

If your store enters prices with tax included, Gross sales, Net sales, Average order value, and gross profit now read lower than they used to. The tax embedded in an inclusive price is carved out before those figures are written, so they mean the same thing on an inclusive store as on a tax-exclusive one. Nothing was lost: the tax you collected is reported in full by Taxes (embedded and additive together), and Total sales — net sales plus shipping, taxes, tips, fees and adjustments — is unchanged, because it is still exactly what the buyer paid. This is a correction to how the money was split across the columns, not a change in revenue.

Shipping is reported net of shipping tax on the same basis, and the tax removed from it is reported by the tax metrics. For the term-by-term contract, see Analytics definitions and Financial semantics.

How Analytics is organised

Screen	The question it answers
Overview	How is the store doing, right now and over the selected range?
Reports	What can I measure, and what have I saved?
New exploration	Answer a question I compose myself.
Live View	What is happening on the storefront in the last few minutes?
Customize overview	Which cards and targets belong on my Overview?
Scheduled / Exports	Where are my reports going, and what has been produced?
Health	Can I trust today’s numbers?

Overview, Reports and Live View are the three tabs across the top of Analytics. Everything else is in the Manage menu beside them: Customize overview, Scheduled, Exports and Pixels, then — below a divider — the diagnostic pages Health and Debug.

Overview

The Overview is driven by a date-range picker — presets from Today through Last 365 days and All time, the current and previous week, month, quarter and year, or a Custom range — plus an optional comparison against the previous period, the previous year, or a custom window. With a comparison on, the headline KPIs carry their percentage change.

It shows:

Total sales, Orders, Sessions and Conversion rate as the headline KPIs, then Average order value, Add-to-cart rate and Checkout completion.
Sales, Visits and Conversion over time.
Ranked top products, top referrers, top searches, top landing pages and top countries, plus generated Insights.
A recommendations block: impressions, clicks, add-to-carts and recommendation revenue, with the products, sources, placements and positions behind them.
Any dashboard cards and dashboard targets you have added, and a freshness banner.

Every card carries its server-owned definition behind the ? control, and View report opens the gallery filtered to that subject. Cost of goods, gross profit and margin are not on the Overview — open the Profit report; gift-card and store-credit balances are in Liabilities. The operational contribution estimate is a commerce contribution diagnostic that is explicitly not accounting net profit; it is not currently displayed on the Overview or in any report, and is defined in Financial semantics.

To change what the Overview shows, open Manage → Customize overview.

Reports

Analytics → Reports is one gallery. It lists the captured Shopify report catalog alongside Sellerlane-native reports, grouped into subject sections — Overview, Sales, Orders, Acquisition & traffic, Behavior, Products, Collections, Search, Customers, Marketing, Finance, Inventory, Retail & POS, Fulfillment, Performance and Operational. Saved reports appear in the same list, filterable by Category and Created by, sortable, and pinnable.

Every row opens the report runner seeded with that report’s metrics, dimensions and visualization. Rows that depend on a primitive Sellerlane does not have stay visible, are labelled Unavailable, and cannot be opened — so an unsupported report is never mistaken for a supported one.

What each area answers

Sales — orders, units, gross/net/total sales, discounts, returns, taxes, shipping and average order value; also total sales by billing location and post-purchase upsell performance.
Orders — orders and conversion, and Cancellations.
Finance — the money that is not merchandise margin: taxes and tax by rate, tips, adjustments, Payments (attempts, captures, failures, gross and net payments), Payouts and Payment fees, COD & partial payments, Returns & refunds, Liabilities, and sales reversals.
Profit — cost of goods sold, gross profit, gross margin and cost coverage, by product and variant. These live in Profit, not in the Finance summary. Gross margin’s denominator is costed net sales, not all net sales.
Chargebacks & disputes — provider payment disputes and the captures they are rated against, filed under Finance. Order risk scoring is not reported.
Products and Collections — performance per product, variant, vendor and collection, plus Recommendations.
Inventory — levels, movements, transfers, shipments, month-end inventory and ABC analysis.
Customers — RFM segments, lifetime value and cohorts. See Customers & segments.
Acquisition & traffic — sessions, visitors, landing pages, devices, sessions and conversion by location.
Behavior — the checkout funnel, cart activity, page performance and visitor behavior.
Marketing — consent-qualified, model-aware channel attribution, plus loyalty and referral performance. It is not a relabelling of Traffic. See Marketing attribution.
Search — what shoppers searched for and, importantly, zero-result terms. See Search & discovery.
Retail & POS and Fulfillment — in-person sales, and fulfillment throughput and timing.
Performance — Web Vitals and theme components.
Operational — post-purchase requests, upsell health, and privacy/ingest health.

Pick the row closest to your question and edit it in the runner rather than starting from a blank exploration.

Build your own report

Reports draw metrics and dimensions from a server-side catalog — an allowlist, so you never write SQL. Open Analytics → Reports → New exploration, or edit any gallery row.

Pick a metric first. The metric’s physical source decides the report family; dimensions, filters and visualization stay disabled until it resolves, so incompatible fields are never silently joined.
Add metrics and dimensions from the compatible catalog. Each metric carries its own allowed aggregations.
Add filters, granularity and a comparison. Granularity runs day through year; selected store-metrics families also support hour for ranges of at most seven days. Minute is a Live View clock only.
Pick a visualization — table, line, bar, stacked bar, area, pie, donut, funnel, KPI or heatmap. Maps are a Live View surface, not a report visualization.
Save the report with a name. It then appears in the gallery, can be pinned, scheduled, or exported.

Switch the Exploration method tab to Cohorts for repeat-customer analysis. Cohort results stay at exact cohort-date × period × interval grain: headline totals, comparisons and time series are omitted on purpose, because summing retention cells would count one customer in several periods. See Customer cohorts.

Schedule, export, and set targets

Manage → Scheduled delivers any report to an inbox daily, weekly or monthly, at an hour and timezone you choose, in CSV, XLSX, JSON, JSONL, XML or Parquet. Each schedule shows its next run, last run and last status.
Manage → Exports runs the same formats on demand. Exports are asynchronous: track, download or cancel them here, where each shows pending, running, completed, failed or canceled.
Manage → Customize overview arranges Overview cards and adds dashboard targets — a durable At least floor or At most ceiling on one canonical report metric, shown with its attainment ratio over a fixed period. Target periods are snapshots, not rolling labels, and only the threshold can be edited afterwards. See Dashboard target semantics.

If a scheduled report does not arrive, open the schedule and read its last status / last error — a failed run records its reason there.

Live view

Analytics → Live is a real-time map: a lightweight Globe for an at-a-glance world view, or the detailed 2D map with pan, zoom and location search. Active sessions appear as city-level points, clustered when zoomed out; dot colour is latest activity, not visitor identity. Alongside the map, Live shows carts in progress, orders as they happen, and a live behavior funnel.

Windows are rolling and adjustable: visitors “right now” default to a 5-minute window, the behavior funnel to 10 minutes.

Session location is audience geography, not a shipping address, POS selling location, or fulfillment location — see Location has three meanings.

Freshness, and what can change a number

Standard reports read pre-aggregated rollups rather than scanning raw events, so figures lag the newest accepted event. Reports whose math is not safely composable — exact Web Vitals percentiles, five-minute live windows, signed customer and event ledgers — read bounded, indexed fact sources at their documented grain instead.

Cadence differs by source, and the banner on a report reflects the daily rollup only. Manage → Health shows per-source freshness — fresh, delayed, stale, failed or unknown — with last-success time and lag for each fact source and rollup, the state of the background jobs, and a control to re-enqueue one.

Numbers can also change legitimately after you have seen them: refunds, cancellations, order edits and lost chargebacks land on their own processed day as signed reversals, and snapshot families such as RFM and lifetime value are recomputed forward. See Freshness and durable ingestion.

What Analytics does not report

Some reports are deliberately unavailable because the underlying primitive does not exist, and Sellerlane will not substitute a lookalike:

Order risk scoring — no risk provider writes per-order risk assessments or fraud-attributed cancellations, so every field would be a permanent zero. Chargebacks are a different primitive and remain available under Finance.
Subscriptions — repeat orders are not subscription contracts.
Duties — no duties amount is persisted on orders, so the slot stays empty rather than showing a fabricated zero.
Shop channel, Shop Pay, Managed Markets, Markets, Autopilot marketing and agentic commerce reports — these are Shopify-owned classifications, not renamable equivalents of online-store traffic, gateways, tax ledgers or referrers.

Unavailable rows in the gallery state which primitive is missing. For the full list and the three levels of support — defined, executable, and captured-reconciled — see Reconciliation status.

Visitors who decline analytics tracking are not persisted or counted, and their analytics identity cookies are cleared; no anonymous stand-in session is manufactured. IP addresses and user agents are stored hashed, and location is never more precise than city level — postal and metro codes are not collected.

Two cases are worth stating precisely, because “declined” can mean different things:

Withdrawing consent mid-session. A visit that was already recorded is not deleted retroactively — the visitor’s consent is updated and collection stops from that point. Sessions already counted for that day stay counted.
Declining analytics while accepting marketing. No analytics visit is created, so nothing is persisted or counted. Advertising destinations that require only marketing consent still receive the events the browser can send directly; server-side conversions for these visitors are not sent today.

Configure the storefront consent banner and server-side conversion destinations in Pixels & tracking.

Troubleshooting

My numbers differ from my payment provider. Analytics counts sales as recorded in Sellerlane; your gateway reports settled money after fees, refunds and chargebacks. Compare like for like and allow for rollup lag.
Gross sales dropped and I did not lose orders. On a tax-inclusive store the merchandise ladder is now net of tax. Check that Total sales is unchanged, and read the note at the top of this page.
Net sales does not equal gross minus discounts minus returns. Returns counts only refunds linked to a return. Refunds without a return, plus cancellations, edits and lost chargebacks, also reduce net sales on their own processed day.
A report says it is unavailable. It depends on a primitive Sellerlane does not capture; the row states which one.
A number looks stale. Check per-source freshness on Analytics → Health; figures catch up once the rollup workers recover.
Two reports disagree. Work through Troubleshooting a mismatch.

Next steps

Analytics definitions

Every formula, clock and population in Analytics definitions.

Marketing attribution

See which channels and campaigns drive revenue in Marketing attribution.

Pixels & tracking

Connect Meta, Google, TikTok and more in Pixels & tracking.

Customers & segments

Dig into RFM, LTV and cohorts in Customers & segments.