The eCommerce Analytics Guide for Store Owners Who Hate Spreadsheets
- eCommerce store owners spend an average of 4 hours per week on reporting that drives zero decisions
- Question 1: Which products are most profitable, not just most popular?
- Question 2: What percentage of revenue comes from repeat customers?
- Question 3: Where are customers dropping off in the purchase journey?
- Question 4: What is my average order value trend over the last 90 days?
- Question 5 and 6: customer acquisition cost by channel and return rate by product
Analytics does not have to mean pivot tables. For eCommerce store owners, six questions cover 90% of the decisions you need to make well. This post explains what each question tells you, where the data lives, and the fastest path to getting answers without becoming a spreadsheet expert.
- eCommerce store owners spend an average of 4 hours per week on reporting that drives zero decisions
- Question 1: Which products are most profitable, not just most popular?
- Question 2: What percentage of revenue comes from repeat customers?
- Question 3: Where are customers dropping off in the purchase journey?
- Question 4: What is my average order value trend over the last 90 days?
eCommerce store owners spend an average of 4 hours per week on reporting that drives zero decisions#
That figure comes from a 2024 Shopify partner survey. The hours go into exporting CSVs, building pivot tables, and generating reports that confirm what the operator already suspects rather than surfacing anything new. The problem is not that eCommerce operators are bad at analytics. The problem is that the tools they use — native Shopify reports, manual spreadsheets, disconnected Google Analytics — require significant effort to produce insights that should be immediate. Meanwhile, the questions that actually drive decisions go unasked because answering them seems too time-consuming. There is a better approach: identify the six questions your store data can already answer, and find the fastest path to those answers.
Question 1: Which products are most profitable, not just most popular?#
Units sold and profit are not the same metric. Your top-selling product by volume may have thin margins because of high returns, heavy discount usage, or expensive fulfilment requirements. To find your most profitable products, you need revenue minus cost of goods sold minus returns minus fulfilment cost per unit. Many Shopify operators do not track cost of goods in their Shopify product settings, which means their margin data is missing from the outset. Add cost of goods to every product in your catalogue — even a rough estimate — and you can run a profitability ranking that will almost certainly surprise you. Most operators discover at least one high-volume product that is marginally profitable and at least one low-volume product that should be promoted aggressively.
Question 2: What percentage of revenue comes from repeat customers?#
Shopify shows this metric in its customer reports but it is rarely the first number operators check. It should be. A store where 40% of revenue comes from repeat customers has fundamentally different economics than one where 10% does. In the first case, acquisition costs are diluted across multiple purchases. In the second, every pound of revenue requires a proportionally higher acquisition investment. The repeat customer revenue percentage also moves before your total revenue does. A declining repeat rate is a leading indicator of revenue trouble that typically appears two to three months before the revenue line turns down. Check this number monthly, not quarterly. Set a target, and investigate every time it drops by more than three percentage points.
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Question 3: Where are customers dropping off in the purchase journey?#
Your conversion funnel — from product page view to add to cart to checkout initiation to completed purchase — has drop-off at every stage. Knowing where the biggest drop occurs tells you where to focus your optimisation effort. A low add-to-cart rate relative to product views suggests a product presentation problem: price, images, or copy. A high add-to-cart rate with low checkout initiation suggests something is wrong at the cart stage: unexpected costs, complexity, or a missing payment method. A high checkout initiation rate with low completion suggests friction at the payment step: too many form fields, a missing payment option, or a trust issue. Fix the biggest leak first. Plugging a 20% drop-off at the cart stage is worth more than optimising every other stage by 2%.
Question 4: What is my average order value trend over the last 90 days?#
Average order value (AOV) is a metric most operators check in isolation. The trend is far more revealing. If your AOV has declined from £65 to £52 over 90 days, customers are buying fewer items per order or choosing cheaper products. That shift may reflect a broader market pressure, a competitor offering lower prices, or a change in your customer mix — more new customers who start with smaller orders. If your AOV is rising, customers are increasingly bundling or choosing premium options, which may present an opportunity to double down on upsell mechanics. Map your AOV trend against any changes you made — pricing adjustments, promotion campaigns, product launches — to understand what is driving the movement.
Question 5 and 6: customer acquisition cost by channel and return rate by product#
Customer acquisition cost by channel tells you which marketing spend is actually converting new customers and at what price. If your Instagram ads cost £18 per new customer and your Google Shopping ads cost £9, you have an immediate reallocation decision to make. Track this monthly and compare it against the average first-order value from each channel — a channel that acquires customers cheaply but attracts lower-value orders may not be superior. Return rate by product is the other metric most store owners undertrack. A product with a 25% return rate may be profitable on paper but unprofitable in reality once returns, restocking, and customer service costs are factored in. Both metrics require connecting your marketing spend data to your order data. AskBiz connects to Shopify directly and surfaces all six of these questions in plain English — ask "Which channel has the lowest cost per new customer?" or "Which products have the highest return rate?" and get specific answers from your live store data without building a single custom report.
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