Shopify Analytics: Which Products Actually Make Money?
- Your best-selling product might be your worst investment
- What this means for a Shopify store doing £200k–£800k a year
- Three moves smart Shopify operators are making right now
- How AskBiz shows you exactly which Shopify products make money
- Warning signs your product mix is quietly losing you money
- Your action plan for this week
Most Shopify founders optimise for top-selling products — but high volume and high profit are not the same thing. Shopify Analytics and tools like Glew.io reveal which products actually pad your margin versus which ones quietly drain it. The move is to sort by contribution margin, not units sold, and cut or reprice the deadweight before Q3.
- Your best-selling product might be your worst investment
- What this means for a Shopify store doing £200k–£800k a year
- Three moves smart Shopify operators are making right now
- How AskBiz shows you exactly which Shopify products make money
- Warning signs your product mix is quietly losing you money
Your best-selling product might be your worst investment#
Here is a number that should give every Shopify founder pause: mineral sunscreen — one of the most searched and stocked beauty SKUs in 2025 — saw a quarter of negative sales growth simply because it went on backorder. According to Shopify's own diagnostic analytics case study, the drop wasn't a demand problem. It was a supply visibility problem. The founder had the data. She just wasn't reading it in time. That gap — between data existing and data being acted on — is where most ecommerce businesses quietly bleed margin. Shopify Analytics offers sales reports broken down by product, location, and time period. It tracks returning customer rate, average order value, and lifetime value. All of it is there. But the default dashboard shows you what sold. It doesn't automatically show you what made money. Fashion, beauty, fitness gear, home décor, and tech accessories consistently appear on most-profitable product lists — ZIK Analytics names all five as strong Shopify categories. But profitability within those categories swings wildly depending on your cost of goods, return rate, ad spend per unit, and fulfilment cost. A £40 skincare set with a 60% return rate can have a worse net margin than a £12 phone case with near-zero returns. The real question isn't 'what's selling?' It's 'what's selling and leaving money behind after every cost is accounted for?' Those are often very different products.
What this means for a Shopify store doing £200k–£800k a year#
Take a Shopify store doing £600k annually across 120 SKUs — a realistic size for a UK founder in fashion accessories or home goods. On the surface, the business looks healthy. Revenue is growing. Orders are up. But dig into the product-level data and a familiar pattern emerges: the top 20% of SKUs by revenue are generating maybe 60–70% of the actual margin. The bottom third are margin-neutral at best, margin-negative at worst when returns and ad costs are factored in. Shopify Analytics gives you the top-line view: units sold, revenue by product, conversion rates. That's useful. But it doesn't natively calculate your true contribution margin per SKU — revenue minus cost of goods, minus returns, minus the paid traffic that drove that sale. Glew.io, which connects directly to Shopify, goes deeper. It surfaces which products drive repeat purchases, how bundling affects average order value, and what product combinations lead to higher lifetime value customers. For a £600k store, knowing that one product bundle generates 2.3x the LTV of your individual bestseller is the kind of insight that reshapes your entire merchandising strategy. The operational risk is real too. If your top-margin product goes out of stock — even for three weeks — and you're not running predictive demand analytics, you're flying blind into your worst quarter. Shopify's diagnostic analytics flagged exactly this scenario. The founders who caught it early had forecasting tools in place. The ones who didn't lost an entire quarter's growth.
Three moves smart Shopify operators are making right now#
**Sort your products by contribution margin, not revenue.** Pull your Shopify Analytics sales report and export it. Add a column for cost of goods sold and a column for your average return rate per SKU. Calculate net revenue minus COGS minus returns. You will almost certainly find three to five products that look healthy by revenue but are eating your margin alive. Flag those for repricing or delisting before Q3 peak season begins. **Set up predictive reorder alerts for your top-margin SKUs.** Shopify's native analytics supports trend analysis, and tools like Glew.io layer in forecasting. If your mineral sunscreen — or its equivalent in your category — has been growing at 5% per quarter, build a reorder trigger at 45 days of stock, not 14. Stockouts on your best-margin products cost more than overstock on your worst ones. Set the alert once and let it run. **Track which products generate repeat buyers, not just first orders.** Shopify Analytics shows returning customer rate at the store level. Glew.io and similar tools break it down by product. A £15 candle that gets repurchased four times a year is worth more than a £60 item bought once. Identify your repeat-purchase drivers, increase their visibility in email sequences and on-site recommendations, and watch lifetime value move. Attribution App notes this directly: the products that drive repeat purchases are rarely your top-revenue SKUs.
How AskBiz shows you exactly which Shopify products make money#
A founder running a Shopify health and wellness store connects their Shopify and Xero accounts to AskBiz and types: *'Which of my products has the best margin after returns and shipping costs this quarter?'* AskBiz pulls live data from both integrations and returns a ranked product table — not by units sold or gross revenue, but by net contribution margin per unit after COGS, return costs, and fulfilment fees are subtracted. The top result isn't the store's bestselling protein powder. It's a medium-velocity electrolyte sachet with a 0.4% return rate and no paid traffic driving it. The protein powder, which everyone assumed was the engine of the business, sits fifth on the margin list once its 18% return rate and £3.20-per-unit fulfilment cost are factored in. The founder then asks: *'If protein powder returns drop to 8%, where does it rank?'* AskBiz runs the scenario instantly. That's the CFO-level margin analysis that would normally take a spreadsheet, three exports, and an afternoon. It takes 30 seconds with AskBiz — and it changes which product gets the next paid campaign budget.
Warning signs your product mix is quietly losing you money#
Watch for these signals in the next 30 days: **Your revenue is growing but your cash balance isn't moving.** This usually means high-revenue, low-margin products are scaling faster than your profitable ones. Pull your product-level margin data immediately. **Your return rate is above 15% on any SKU.** At that level, returns are almost certainly wiping the margin on that product. Check Shopify Analytics for return trends by product — not just store-wide. **Your top-selling product has been on backorder more than once this year.** You're losing margin twice: once from the stockout, once from the ad spend that ran while you had nothing to sell. That needs a forecasting fix, not a marketing fix. **Your average order value is flat despite adding new SKUs.** New products aren't pulling customers up the basket. Your bundling and upsell logic needs reworking — and that starts with knowing which products customers actually buy together.
Your action plan for this week#
**Before Friday:** Export your Shopify product sales report for the last 90 days. Add your COGS and average return rate per SKU. Calculate net contribution margin. Identify the bottom five products by that metric — decide now whether to reprice, bundle, or delist them before Q3. **Set up once:** Configure a low-stock alert in Shopify or your analytics tool for every SKU that sits in your top 20% by contribution margin. Set the trigger at 45 days of remaining stock based on your trailing 90-day sales velocity. **Track monthly:** Net contribution margin per SKU — not gross revenue, not units sold. If your top-margin product's rank drops two positions month-over-month, you have a cost or returns problem developing. Catch it at month two, not month five.
People also ask
How do I find out which Shopify products are most profitable?
Go beyond Shopify's default sales reports. Export product data and add your cost of goods sold, return rate, and fulfilment cost per unit. Net contribution margin — revenue minus all those costs — is your real profitability metric. Tools like Glew.io automate this calculation and rank your products by true margin, not just volume.
What is the best analytics tool for Shopify product performance?
Shopify Analytics handles top-line reporting: sales by product, location, and time period. For deeper margin and customer behaviour analysis, Glew.io is built specifically for Shopify merchants and surfaces repeat purchase rates, bundle impact on AOV, and LTV by product — data Shopify's native reports don't provide natively.
Why is my Shopify revenue growing but profit not improving?
High-volume products often have high return rates, heavy ad spend, or thin margins on sourcing. If your top-selling SKUs are scaling faster than your high-margin ones, revenue grows but cash doesn't follow. Sort your products by contribution margin — revenue minus COGS, returns, and fulfilment — and you'll usually find the culprits within 30 minutes.
What does contribution margin mean in ecommerce?
Contribution margin is what's left from a sale after you subtract the direct costs of that product — cost of goods, returns, packaging, and fulfilment. It tells you how much each SKU actually contributes to covering your fixed costs and profit. In ecommerce, it's a more honest profitability measure than gross revenue or even gross margin.
How does AskBiz help identify which Shopify products make money?
AskBiz connects to your Shopify and accounting tools and answers plain-English questions like 'Which product has the best margin after returns?' It returns a ranked margin table per SKU, factoring in COGS, returns, and fulfilment — in seconds. Founders use it to reallocate ad spend and inventory budget toward products that actually generate cash.
Alice Watson is AskBiz's Head of Market Intelligence. She tracks regulatory shifts, pricing trends, and growth signals across global SME markets — and turns them into briefings founders can act on before their competitors notice.
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