If you’re running a Shopify store and staring at a dashboard full of numbers, you’re probably asking yourself: which ones actually matter?
This post breaks down the 10 most essential ecommerce metrics to track, whether Shopify’s analytics are trustworthy, and how to actually find all this data in your admin.
10 Essential Ecommerce Metrics to Track
We’re a Shopify marketing agency, and we’ve partnered with hundreds of Shopify retailers. Either consult them on these very metrics, or to help them run their entire marketing campaigns.
Over this time, we’ve found 10 metrics to be quite essential. Take out your pen and paper.
1. Conversion Rate (CVR)
Your conversion rate is the percentage of store visitors who actually complete a purchase. It’s arguably the single most important metric because it reflects the health of your entire customer journey — from landing page to checkout.
Formula: (Total Orders ÷ Total Sessions) × 100
What is a good Shopify store CVR? A healthy Shopify store typically converts between 2–4%, though this varies by industry. A sudden drop could indicate a broken checkout, slow load times, or a bad product page. Track this daily.
2. Total Sales / Net Sales
This is your top-line revenue . The total amount collected before or after refunds, depending on which view you’re in.
Net sales strips out discounts and returns to give you a cleaner picture of actual revenue. Use this to spot trends over time and compare periods (e.g., this month vs. last month, or this Black Friday vs. last year’s).
It’s also good to not get fooled within your analytics and think your bottom line is bigger than it actually is.
3. Average Order Value (AOV)
AOV tells you how much customers spend per transaction on average.
Formula: Total Revenue ÷ Number of Orders
Increasing your AOV — through bundles, upsells, or free shipping thresholds — can grow revenue without needing more traffic. A higher AOV usually signals stronger product appeal or effective cross-selling.
4. Sessions (Traffic)
Sessions measure the total number of visits to your store.
This includes new and returning visitors. Track it alongside conversion rate — lots of traffic with low conversions means something’s broken in the funnel. Low traffic with high conversions means you need more top-of-funnel marketing.
Shopify also breaks this down by device type (mobile vs. desktop) and source (organic, paid, social, direct), which is where it gets useful.
5. Traffic Sources
Knowing where your visitors come from — organic search, paid ads, email, social media, or direct — tells you which marketing channels are actually working. More importantly, you can compare not just traffic volume but conversion rates by source.
A channel sending 1,000 low-converting visitors might be worth less than one sending 200 high-intent buyers.
6. Cart Abandonment Rate
This is the percentage of shoppers who add items to their cart but never complete the purchase. Industry averages hover around 70%, so don’t panic if yours is high — but do try to reduce it.
Common culprits: unexpected shipping costs, complicated checkout, lack of trust signals, or requiring account creation. Shopify’s built-in analytics tracks this, though third-party apps offer more detailed abandonment flow analysis.
7. Returning Customer Rate
This tells you what percentage of your orders come from people who’ve bought from you before.
Formula: (Number of Returning Customers ÷ Total Customers) × 100
A high returning customer rate signals strong brand loyalty and product satisfaction. It’s also much cheaper to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. If this number is low, it’s worth examining your post-purchase experience, email follow-ups, and product quality.
8. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV or LTV)
LTV estimates how much revenue a single customer generates over the entire time they shop with you. It’s a critical metric for understanding whether your customer acquisition costs (CAC) make sense. If you’re spending $40 to acquire a customer with a $35 LTV, that’s a problem.
Shopify shows this in the Customers section of your reports, and it becomes more meaningful once you’ve been operating for several months with enough purchase history.
9. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC is what you spend, on average, to bring in one new customer. It includes ad spend, influencer fees, content costs — anything tied to marketing.
Formula: Total Marketing Spend ÷ Number of New Customers Acquired
Shopify’s native analytics doesn’t calculate CAC automatically — you’ll need to factor in your external ad spend manually or via a connected tool like Google Analytics. The goal is to keep CAC well below LTV.
10. Top Products by Sales
This one is straightforward but essential. Knowing which products drive the most revenue helps you make smarter inventory decisions, identify what to promote, and understand what your audience actually wants. Shopify surfaces this in the Products reports section, where you can filter by units sold, revenue, and timeframe.
Is Shopify Accurate in Tracking Metrics?
This is a fair question, and the honest answer is: mostly yes, but with caveats.
For commerce-specific data (orders, revenue, AOV), Shopify is highly reliable. It pulls directly from your store’s transaction data, so sales numbers are as accurate as they get. The October 2024 analytics overhaul also improved data reliability significantly — Shopify unified its data platform and standardized how events are tracked across all reports, fixing inconsistencies that existed between different dashboards.
Where it gets messy is traffic and session data. Shopify counts sessions differently than Google Analytics. For example:
- Google counts every page reload; Shopify doesn’t count reloads of cached pages.
- Some analytics software counts search bots as visitors; others don’t.
- Customers using ad blockers or browser extensions can prevent certain tracking altogether.
- Privacy regulations (GDPR, iOS tracking changes) mean some user journeys are invisible to any analytics tool.
As a result, discrepancies between Shopify and Google Analytics are completely normal — it doesn’t mean either is broken. Shopify’s own Help Center acknowledges this and recommends understanding the differences rather than trying to reconcile them perfectly.
A practical note from the merchant community: Shopify Analytics is best used for store-specific decisions (what’s selling, how customers are converting, which products to restock). For cross-channel marketing attribution and detailed behavioral analysis, pairing it with Google Analytics 4 gives you a much fuller picture.
Reddit take: Shopify’s built-in analytics get mixed reviews in the community. Merchants generally praise it for being easy to use and giving a clean overview of sales performance, but many note that for serious attribution work, especially if you’re running paid ads across multiple platforms. You’ll want GA4 or a dedicated tool like Triple Whale or Northbeam on top of it.
How to Check Your Shopify Metrics in Analytics
Getting to your data is simple:
- Log in to your Shopify admin.
- Click Analytics in the left-hand sidebar.
- You’ll land on the Overview Dashboard — a customizable collection of metric cards showing your most important KPIs at a glance.
From there:
- Customize your dashboard by clicking the “Customize” button to drag, drop, resize, add, or remove metric cards. Changes sync across desktop and mobile.
- Drill into reports by clicking any metric card, which takes you to a full report with deeper breakdowns. You can also navigate to Analytics → Reports to browse 100+ pre-built reports covering sales, sessions, customers, marketing, inventory, and more.
- Set date ranges using the calendar icon — you can compare fixed periods, rolling windows (last 7 or 30 days), or custom ranges down to the minute.
- Create custom reports using ShopifyQL (available on Shopify Advanced and Plus plans) to query your data and build reports around your exact business questions.
The dashboard refreshes automatically every 60 seconds when you’re viewing current date ranges, so live data is always available during campaigns or sales events.
Shopify Analytics vs. Google Analytics: Which Should You Use?
You don’t have to choose — use both, for different purposes.
| Use Case | Best Tool |
|---|---|
| Daily sales monitoring | Shopify Analytics |
| Conversion rate by product | Shopify Analytics |
| Customer LTV and retention | Shopify Analytics |
| Cross-channel attribution | Google Analytics 4 |
| Behavioral flow analysis | Google Analytics 4 |
| Paid ad performance | GA4 + Ad platform |
| SEO traffic insights | GA4 + Search Console |
To connect GA4, go to Online Store → Preferences in your Shopify admin and add your GA4 Measurement ID. For more advanced server-side tracking, tools like Analyzify or Elevar are popular in the Shopify Plus community.
Final Word
The metrics listed above cover the fundamentals every Shopify merchant should have eyes on. Start with conversion rate, total sales, and traffic sources — these three alone will surface most of what you need to act on. Add AOV and returning customer rate as your next layer, and work toward understanding LTV and CAC as your store matures.
Shopify’s analytics have improved substantially since the 2024 platform overhaul, and for most merchants, the built-in dashboard is a solid starting point. Just don’t rely on it exclusively for paid advertising decisions — that’s where GA4 and dedicated attribution tools earn their keep.
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