One big strength of Shopify as a platform is its Analytics pages, where you can see how important marketing and eCommerce metrics change over time. Nowadays, awareness of these metrics is a huge advantage in bringing success to a business. This series, therefore, aims to show you how to access these metrics in Shopify.
For this tutorial, we will learn how to access the main profitability metrics in Shopify: gross profit, cost of goods sold (COGS), and sales. To refresh your knowledge, gross profit is your revenue minus COGS, while COGS is the cost of goods to be sold during a particular period. If you need a full review, we have the following articles you can read first:
If you are ready, you can now start reading!
Clicking on the Analytics option on the left side of the admin panel will lead you to the Overview dashboard. At the same time, a list of options will appear below the Analytics label. Click on the Reports option. Afterward, scroll down to look for the Finances box.
Click on Finances summary.
The Finances summary will contain a Gross profit box, listing a summary of the relevant data for calculating the Gross profit. Clicking on the Gross profit will bring you to a table listing all the orders.
Here’s the thing: for Shopify to accurately calculate the gross profit, you should include the cost for each item you are selling. It will ignore the sales of items that do not have their cost included.
To see how much was not included in the calculation, you can go back to Finances summary to check it. The amount of net sales that is not included in the calculation is listed as Net sales without cost recorded. If the value was quite larger than the Net sales with cost recorded, which was used to calculate the Cost of goods sold and the resulting Gross profit, you should update the product information to add the cost of the product. Follow the steps here.
Another relevant metric is the Gross Profit Margin metric. This was discussed in the same article as the Gross Profit metric. You can access it by clicking on the Analytics option in the left panel, and then on the Reports option underneath it.
You can also check the individual contributions of each product by clicking on the Profit by product link. A table will be loaded containing the net sales, the cost, the gross margin, and the gross profit. Shopify will only compute this for the products whose costs were declared, however.
When you load the table, the items are listed in descending order, starting from the product with the biggest gross profit margin. This will help you identify which products should be advertised more.
The Gross profit box also contains the Cost of goods sold (COGS) metric. This is calculated for the sold items with their costs included. Clicking on the Cost of goods sold will load a table containing the list of cost of each item sold.
After, when you click the View report link on the upper-right corner of the box, a new page will display the list of sales data, divided by the specified period. It will display a bar chart of sales over a certain period, and a table of sales data below it.
The table contains Gross sales and Net sales, which correspond to gross profit and net profit, respectively.
While the profit and cost metrics are accessible on Shopify, checking every day, week, or month for each of these can be a pain. For those who don't look forward to manually finding numbers over and over again, you can check out our Shopify integration that will pull your conversion funnel data alongside other Shopify and eCommerce platform data! Spend more time on data analysis and less time metric-hunting with Lido.
