Five Shopify reports give a small store almost everything it needs: Total sales over time, Conversion rate breakdown, Sessions by referrer (or Sessions by landing page), New vs returning customers, and, once you have entered product costs, Gross profit by product. Look at them once a week, in that order, and compare each number with the week before. The goal is to find the one step that changed. You can then fix that step instead of reacting to the headline sales figure.
This guide explains where each report lives, what Shopify’s main metrics actually measure (with the exact formulas), what the September 2026 change to session counting means for your conversion rate, and a worked two-week example showing how to read the numbers together. Every definition comes from the Shopify Help Center, checked on October 31, 2026.
Where to find Shopify Analytics and reports
Shopify splits analytics into two places in your admin:
- Analytics (the dashboard). This shows your key sales, sessions and fulfillment metrics. Shopify says it is “updated within about 1 minute” and you can set any date range.
- Analytics > Reports. This is the full report library. Shopify groups it into 11 default categories: Acquisition, Behavior, Customers, Finance, Fraud, Inventory, Marketing, Order, Profit, Retail sales and Sales.
Shopify says the main Analytics features are available on every plan, but which analytics and reports you can see depends on your plan. Staff members need the Analytics permission to open reports. If a report in this guide is missing from your admin, check your plan and staff permissions first.
One practical limit: a report shows at most 1,000 rows on screen. The totals still cover every row, but if you sell many products and want the full list, export the report.
The metric definitions that trip people up
Most confusion with Shopify reports comes from three different “sales” numbers and from conversion rate being based on visits, not people. Here are Shopify’s own formulas.
Gross sales Product price x quantity, before discounts and sales reversals Includes pending, unpaid and canceled orders; excludes test orders
Sales reversals All order adjustments with a negative value Replaced the old “Returns” metric; covers returns, cancellations, edits and adjustments
Net sales Gross sales minus discounts minus sales reversals The best “what we really sold” number for products
Total sales Net sales plus fees, duties, shipping charges and taxes Includes money that is not yours to keep, such as tax
Average order value (Gross sales minus discounts) / orders Excludes post-order adjustments such as returns and edits
Conversion rate Sessions that completed checkout / sessions Counted per visit; one session can contain more than one purchase
Added to cart rate Sessions with cart additions / sessions A product page and pricing signal
Reached checkout rate Sessions that reached checkout / sessions Shopify counts a session here when there was user input during checkout
Returning customer rate Returning customers / customers Only counts customers who placed an order in the period
Gross margin (Net sales minus cost) / net sales Only works for products with a cost per item recorded
Formulas from Shopify’s “Analytics data points (fields) reference”, “Sales reports” and “Profit reports” Help Center pages, checked October 31, 2026.Two details matter for your weekly review. First, Shopify’s sales reports do not track payments, and chargebacks are not included in them. A sales report can look healthy in a week when disputes are eating your payouts, so check disputes separately. Our guide to what happens when a customer files a chargeback on Shopify covers where those show up.
Second, because AOV leaves out post-order adjustments while net sales includes them, the two will not reconcile neatly in a week with heavy returns. That is expected, not an error.
The five reports to check every week
1. Total sales over time (Sales)
Start here, but only to see whether anything changed. Compare net sales and order count with the previous week, then move on. This report tells you that something moved, not why. Shopify’s sales reports also include breakdowns by product, variant, vendor, discount code and sales channel, which help when one product or code explains the whole change.
2. Conversion rate breakdown (Behavior)
This is the most useful report for a small online store. It shows the share of sessions that reached each step: all sessions, sessions with cart additions, sessions that reached checkout and sessions that completed checkout. Each step’s rate is that step’s sessions divided by total sessions.
Shopify offers an open funnel, where sessions can enter at any step, and a closed funnel, where every step must happen in order. The closed view is stricter; use one consistently so your weeks are comparable.
Read it by dividing neighbouring steps yourself. Cart to checkout and checkout to purchase tell you where shoppers drop out, which the headline conversion rate hides. The worked example below shows how.
3. Sessions by referrer or Sessions by landing page (Acquisition and Behavior)
Sessions by referrer shows whether visitors come directly, from search or from a referral. Shopify notes that acquisition reports show visits only, not orders. Use this report to check whether a traffic change came from one source. If sessions jumped but conversion fell, a new low-intent source is often the cause.
Sessions by landing page answers the next question: which pages those visitors arrived on. If you run ads, compare this with what the ad platform claims. If you see plenty of traffic but very few sales, our guide on why a Shopify store gets traffic but no sales walks through the likely causes.
4. New vs returning customers (Customers)
This report shows how many first-time and returning customers ordered in a period. Shopify defines a returning customer as one “whose order history already includes at least one order.” In its field reference, Shopify notes that most stores show a returning customer rate of 20 to 40%.
Watch the trend rather than the level. A falling returning rate while new customers rise is normal during a promotion. A falling rate in a quiet week can point to a product or delivery problem. For a longer view, the Customer cohort analysis report groups customers by the date of their first order and shows how many come back. Our guide to calculating customer lifetime value from profit shows how to use that data.
5. Gross profit by product (Profit)
Shopify reports profit only “for products and variants that had a cost recorded at the time they were sold.” If you have never filled in Cost per item on your products, this report will be empty or incomplete. Add costs first; past orders without a cost will not be backfilled.
The report calculates margin on net sales, after discounts. Shopify’s own example: a $20 T-shirt that costs $10 shows a 50% margin on the product page, but after a 25% discount the report shows 33%. We checked that: $15 net sales minus $10 cost is $5, and $5 / $15 is 33.3%. If you want the full picture beyond product cost, see our explanation of gross margin vs contribution margin vs net profit.
Worked example: reading two weeks together
Here is a hypothetical store’s numbers for two weeks, with every metric calculated using Shopify’s formulas. The data is invented for illustration; we calculated each figure twice in Python, once with floating-point division and once with exact fractions.
Sessions 4,000 4,400 +10%
Sessions with cart additions 280 290
Sessions that reached checkout 150 160
Sessions that completed checkout 96 92
Orders 100 95 -5%
Gross sales $6,500 $5,900
Discounts $520 $650
Sales reversals $390 $310
Net sales $5,590 $4,940 -11.6%
Average order value $59.80 $55.26
Conversion rate 2.40% 2.09%
Added to cart rate 7.00% 6.59%
Reached checkout rate 3.75% 3.64%
Cart to checkout (150/280, 160/290) 53.6% 55.2% Better
Checkout to purchase (96/150, 92/160) 64.0% 57.5% Worse
Returning customer rate (23/92, 20/88) 25.0% 22.7%
Gross margin (cost $2,236 and $2,120) 60.0% 57.1%
Hypothetical data, calculated with Shopify’s published formulas. Net sales = gross sales – discounts – sales reversals; AOV = (gross sales – discounts) / orders; conversion rate = sessions that completed checkout / sessions.Here is how to read it:
- Traffic rose, sales fell. Sessions grew 10% but net sales dropped 11.6%. The headline says “bad week” without saying why.
- The product pages were fine. The added to cart rate dipped a little, and the share of carts that reached checkout actually improved, from 53.6% to 55.2%.
- The checkout lost buyers. Only 57.5% of sessions that reached checkout completed it, down from 64.0%. That is the step to investigate: a new shipping rate, a payment method that stopped working, or a surprise cost at the last step.
- Discounts did not buy volume. Discounts rose from $520 to $650 while orders fell, which pulled AOV down from $59.80 to $55.26 and gross margin from 60.0% to 57.1%.
The conclusion for this store would be: look at checkout first, and review the discount code in the sales by discount code report before running it again. If shipping cost is the suspect, our guide to setting a free shipping threshold without losing margin shows how to test a change.
Why your conversion rate may have changed in September 2026
If your sessions or conversion rate shifted around late September, check the calendar before you change anything. Shopify rolled out a new session measurement from September 21 to 23, 2026. According to Shopify’s Help Center:
- A session now ends after 30 minutes of inactivity, instead of also ending at midnight UTC.
- Some sessions without a pageview are now counted, such as a customer going straight to checkout from a cart link.
- Identified bot sessions are filtered out of session reports by default. Bot classification applies only to sessions from October 7, 2025 onward.
- Orders, sales and customer counts are not affected, and historical data is not reprocessed.
Bot filtering lowers session counts, which raises conversion rate. Counting sessions without a pageview raises session counts, which lowers it. Which effect wins depends on your store.
A simple model shows how large the shift can be. Suppose a hypothetical store had 4,600 sessions in a week, of which 600 were bots, and 96 sessions completed checkout. Before filtering, conversion rate is 96 / 4,600 = 2.09%. With bots removed, it is 96 / 4,000 = 2.40%. Nothing about the store changed, but the reported rate rose by about 0.3 percentage points. So when you compare weeks across September 21, 2026, compare orders and net sales, which did not change, and treat session-based metrics on either side as separate series.
Two more points affect session numbers. Shopify counts sessions only when visitors consent to cookies through your cookie banner, and it warns that other analytics platforms calculate sessions differently. Expect Shopify, Google Analytics and ad platforms to disagree on traffic. Shopify’s historical session data also goes back only to October 1, 2022.
Inventory reports worth a monthly look
Inventory reports change less week to week, so a monthly check is enough for most small stores. Two of them use simple formulas you can sanity-check:
- Products by sell-through rate: units sold / (units sold + units still in stock). Shopify uses the most recent 30-day period available, usually with a 2-day processing delay.
- Inventory remaining per product: ending quantity / average units sold per day, using the last 28 days of sales.
Example with hypothetical numbers: a variant with 120 units on hand that sold 84 units in the last 28 days sells 3 per day, so it has 40 days of stock left. Its sell-through rate is 84 / (84 + 120) = 41.2%. If your supplier needs 45 days, you are already late to reorder.
The ABC product analysis report grades variants by revenue over the last 28 days: A products make up 80% of revenue, B the next 15% and C the last 5%. It ignores cost, so pair it with Gross profit by product before you cut anything. Note that from October 1, 2026, Shopify measures inventory reports by On hand quantity instead of Available, so numbers before and after that date may not line up.
Common mistakes when reading Shopify reports
- Treating total sales as revenue. Total sales includes taxes, shipping and duties. Use net sales for product performance.
- Reading conversion rate alone. A flat rate can hide a better cart step and a worse checkout step. Always look at the breakdown.
- Comparing across September 21, 2026 without adjusting. The session measurement change can move conversion rate with no change in sales.
- Trusting profit reports without costs. Missing cost per item means missing orders in profit reports.
- Expecting chargebacks in sales reports. They are not included. Track disputes separately.
- Judging a single day. Small stores have noisy daily numbers. Compare full weeks, ideally the same weekday range.
What you should check next
- Open Analytics > Reports and save the five reports above, each set to “last 7 days” compared with the previous period.
- Add Cost per item to your best-selling products so profit reports start working from now on.
- Write down your conversion rate for the weeks before and after September 21, 2026, and note the change as a measurement shift.
- Each week, divide the funnel steps yourself (cart to checkout, checkout to purchase) and record them in one sheet.
- If you prefer to dig into exports, our guide to analyzing a Shopify sales export with ChatGPT or Claude shows how to do it safely.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my Shopify conversion rate differ from Google Analytics?
The two tools define and count sessions differently. Shopify counts sessions only with cookie consent, filters identified bots by default and ends a session after 30 minutes of inactivity. Shopify itself warns that other platforms calculate sessions differently, so compare trends within each tool rather than the absolute numbers.
Why don’t my order count and “sessions that completed checkout” match?
Shopify notes that a customer can make more than one purchase in a single session. Orders also come from channels other than the online store, while session metrics cover online store visits.
Why is my profit report missing orders?
Profit is only reported for products and variants that had a cost recorded when they sold. Add cost per item to your products; earlier orders without a cost stay out of the report.
Do refunds show up in Shopify sales reports?
Yes, as sales reversals, which are subtracted from gross sales to give net sales. Shopify replaced the older “Returns” metric with sales reversals. For how refunds affect your fees, see our guide on whether you get fees back when you refund a Shopify order.
How often do Shopify Analytics numbers update?
Shopify says the Analytics dashboard updates within about 1 minute. Some inventory metrics, such as sell-through rate, usually run with a 2-day processing delay.
The takeaway
You do not need dozens of reports. Check sales, the conversion funnel, traffic sources, new vs returning customers and gross profit once a week, divide the funnel steps yourself, and look for the single step that moved. Keep the September 2026 session change in mind when comparing conversion rates, and enter product costs so your profit numbers mean something.
Sources
- Shopify Help Center, “Analytics”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Shopify analytics”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Reports”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Default Shopify reports”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Analytics data points (fields) reference”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Sales reports”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Behavior reports”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Acquisition reports”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Customers reports”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Profit reports”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Inventory reports”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Changes to sessions and conversion rate in Shopify Analytics”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Bot filtering in Shopify analytics and reports”. help.shopify.com
- Shopify Help Center, “Features on all plans”. help.shopify.com
Last reviewed: October 31, 2026. All Shopify Help Center pages above were checked on that date, including metric formulas, report names and the September 21 to 23, 2026 session measurement change.
How this article was made: researched and drafted with AI assistance, with every factual claim checked against the sources above. The two-week store data, the bot-filtering model and the inventory example are hypothetical numbers built with Shopify’s published formulas.
Related guides
- Why is my Shopify store getting traffic but no sales?
- Customer lifetime value for small stores: an honest formula
- Do you get fees back when you refund a Shopify order?
- Gross margin vs contribution margin vs net profit