SHOPIFY · REPORTING · DASHBOARDS
Shopify is good at telling you what happened. It is much worse at telling you why, and no use at all for anything that happened somewhere else.
There is a fairly predictable point where a shop outgrows its own analytics, and it is not about size. It is about the first question nobody anticipated.
Shopify's reports answer the questions Shopify decided you would ask: orders, sessions, conversion rate, top products, returning customers. Useful, and enough for a long time.
You have outgrown it the first time you find yourself exporting to a spreadsheet to answer a question, and then doing it again the following month.
That is the signal, because the export is the workaround. The questions that trigger it are nearly always the same shape: they involve something Shopify does not know about.
Every one of those needs data from more than one place, or more history than the platform keeps to hand. That is the actual boundary, and it is why "get a better dashboard app" often does not fix it.
Most people should stop at one or two. Genuinely.
On the higher plans you can build custom reports and filter fairly deeply. A lot of people asking for a dashboard have simply never opened this.
Try this first. It costs nothing and it answers more than people expect.
Better slicing, saved reports, scheduled emails, profit tracking if you feed it your costs. Tens of pounds a month, installed in an afternoon.
The right answer for most single-channel shops. If your questions are all about Shopify data, buy one of these.
Shopify exported on a schedule into something like BigQuery, joined to whatever else matters, and read by Looker Studio or Power BI. History kept as long as you like, and anybody can ask their own question.
Worth it when you have a second source of data, or several people who need answers without queueing for a spreadsheet.
Where the numbers appear in the thing people already use all day rather than in a separate tool nobody opens.
Only once you know exactly which numbers matter, which you will not until you have done step three.
It is the fashionable answer and it is usually premature. A warehouse pays for itself when there is more than one source to join, when you need history the platform will not keep, or when several people need to ask their own questions.
If you have one sales channel, one question a month, and one person who asks it, a reporting app does the job for the price of a coffee a week, and the honest advice is to buy that and come back when it stops fitting.
The reason to know about step three before you need it is that the switch is much easier if the data has been landing somewhere since last year. History is the one thing you cannot buy retrospectively.
Because it is fair to ask whether we have actually done this.
Progress JJ
A Python integration pulling sales out of Shopify through its API. Customers and invoices go into Xero, and the same data lands in a BigQuery database that the client attaches their own dashboarding to.
Two destinations from one pull, which is the argument for doing this once rather than buying two connectors that each know half the story. The reporting half is why it was built rather than bought: the accounts could have been handled off the shelf, the questions could not.
We price the job, not the day, and you see the price before anything starts. At our current rate of £15 a token:
On top of the build, a warehouse like BigQuery costs very little at shop scale: for most retailers it lands under a pound a day, and often close to nothing, because you are charged for what you query rather than what you store.
Those figures are illustrative rather than a quote. They are here because you should be able to work out roughly what bracket you are in before speaking to anybody.
Nothing, for what they are. They are poor at joining to anything outside Shopify, at holding enough history to see a multi-year trend, and at answering a question nobody anticipated. If your question involves cost, margin, stock or a second channel, you will end up in a spreadsheet.
Probably not. Most shops asking do not. It earns its keep with more than one data source, history beyond what the platform keeps, or several people asking their own questions. Below that a reporting app is cheaper and quicker.
Not usefully. Both want a tidy data source and Shopify's API is built for running a shop, not for analysis. The normal shape is Shopify into a warehouse on a schedule, then the dashboard reads the warehouse. That also keeps working when you add a second channel.
No, they are different jobs and worth doing together if you are doing both. The accounts side is about making the numbers reconcile; this is about being able to ask questions. We wrote about that separately: connecting Shopify to Xero.
Usually, and the cause is nearly always the data underneath rather than the dashboard itself. There is a free healthcheck if you would rather work out where you stand without speaking to anybody.
Describe the job on our simple wizard. You get a real answer with a real price, usually the same working day, and nothing happens until you say so.
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