Sales Report Metrics
The Sales report dashboard in Shopify's UI contains a few key metrics about your store (Gross Sales, Net Sales, Returns, Discounts, etc). These metrics are not available through the Shopify API that we are using – they are however sometimes possible to recreate using the raw values available in Funnel. You can view Shopify's own description of the metrics here.
Why do I have to do this, why are the metrics not just added to the connector out of the box?
That's a good question. We have discovered that different Shopify setups seem to produce different calculations for these metrics.
But by reading Shopify's article about the sales report metrics and creating calculations using the raw values in Funnel, one can almost always get a matching report but not every time.
How to create a metric
This is how Shopify describes the metric Gross Sales in their article above:
"Gross sales Equates to product price x quantity (before taxes, shipping, discounts, and returns) for a collection of sales. Canceled, pending, and unpaid orders are included. Test and deleted orders are not included."
Product price is available in Funnel (in the product report), hence we make a new custom metric like this:
Here are a few calculations that previously worked for our clients:
Total Sales
Order Price - Refunded Line Item Amount - Order Refunded Shipping Amount − Order Tax Amount Refunded
Order Price - Order Amount Refunded
Net Sales
Total sales - Shipping - Taxes + Order Refunded Shipping Amount
Gross Sales
Product Original Price (as seen in the example above)
Net sales + Discounts + Refunded Line Item Amount
We have noticed that Shopify does not always include gift cards in their calculation of Gross Sales. If there are mismatches between Shopify and Funnel it may help to filter out gift card products, e.g. by using the SKU-dimension.
Discounts
Order Discount
Order Discount + Product Discount
Returns
Order Amount Refunded - Order Tax Amount Refunded
Shipping
Order Shipping Price
Order Shipping Price - Order Refunded Shipping Amount
Taxes
Order Tax - Order Tax Amount Refunded
Net Quantity
Product Quantity - Product Refund Quantity
Read more about creating custom metrics here
Final Thoughts
Matching UI metrics exactly can be difficult and hard to do without intimate knowledge of how the shop was set up, how returns are handled, how shipping and taxes are calculated, etc.
In our experience, attempting to get an exact match is not fruitful. Trend analysis and answering marketing questions effectively and accurately don’t tend to rely on an exact match with the UI.
Read more about Shopify
– What data can I get from Shopify?
– How to create API credentials for Shopify
– Shopify – Troubleshooting