Shopify Analytics and Reports: A Complete Guide for 2026

Shopify Analytics is the reporting suite built into every Shopify admin. It gives you an overview dashboard of key metrics, more than 200 prebuilt reports, a Live View of what's happening on your store right now, and a query editor for building your own reports. You don't need an app or a higher plan to use it: as of October 2026, every plan from Basic to Plus includes "200+ real-time reports, plus custom analytics," according to Shopify's pricing page.

That's a big change from a few years ago, when Shopify split reports into tiers by plan. Many older guides still say custom reports need Advanced or Plus. They don't. What does still differ by plan is a handful of extras, such as predicted values on Advanced and multi-store reporting for organizations.

This guide explains what's in Shopify Analytics, how reports and ShopifyQL work, what Live View shows, how Shopify attributes sales to marketing, how it fits with Google Analytics 4, and how to read the numbers without being misled. It also covers the session measurement update Shopify rolled out on 21 to 23 September 2026, which changed session counts and conversion rates for many stores.

What Shopify Analytics includes on each plan

Shopify Analytics lives under Analytics in your admin and has three parts: the overview dashboard, Reports, and Live View. The Help Center says the "main features are available to merchants on any Shopify subscription plan," and staff need the Analytics permission to see them.

Here's how the reporting features compare across the current US plans as of October 2026.

The Basic plan help page says Basic "comes with access to all reports, including the ability to create custom reports with data explorations." If you're choosing a plan, reporting is no longer a reason to upgrade on its own. Our Basic vs Grow vs Advanced comparison covers the differences that do matter, such as card rates and staff accounts.

The overview dashboard

The overview dashboard is the first screen under Analytics. It's made of cards, which Shopify calls metrics, each showing a single number or trend such as total sales, sessions, conversion rate, average order value or returning customer rate. You can add, remove and rearrange cards, and clicking a card opens the full report behind it.

Use the dashboard for a daily or weekly check, not for analysis. A card tells you that sales dropped; the report behind it tells you which channel, product or day caused it. Set the date range and comparison period before you read anything, because the default comparison may not be the one you want (for example, comparing a sale week to a normal week).

Reports, data explorations and ShopifyQL

Reports sit under Analytics > Reports and are grouped into categories based on the type of information they include, such as Acquisition, Behavior, Inventory, Marketing and Sales. A few limits and behaviors are worth knowing:

• Row limit: reports display a maximum of 1,000 rows on screen, though the totals cover all the data. Export the report if you need every row.
• Data explorations: you can build a custom report from an empty exploration or by editing any default report and saving it as your own. Shopify says creating a new data exploration is available on all plans.
• ShopifyQL: since 11 June 2025, every report has a query editor that shows the ShopifyQL (Shopify Query Language) behind it. You can edit the query and select Run, or write one from scratch.
• Sidekick: you can ask Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant, to create or edit a report in plain language, and it generates the ShopifyQL for you.

ShopifyQL reads a lot like SQL: you pick a data source, the metrics to show, how to group them and a date range. You don't need to write queries to get value from reports, but reading the query behind a default report is the fastest way to understand exactly what it counts. The ShopifyQL syntax reference lists the available tables and keywords.

Reports most stores should check regularly

• Total sales over time and Total sales by product: what's selling and how it's trending.
• Conversion rate over time: the share of sessions that add to cart, reach checkout and complete checkout.
• Total sales by referrer and Total sales by sales channel: which sources and channels produce revenue.
• Sales by discount codes: whether promotions are paying for themselves.
• Average order value over time: the effect of bundles, free-shipping thresholds and upsells.
• Inventory reports: stock levels and how fast products sell through.

Live View

Live View (Analytics > Live View) shows activity on your store in real time on a 2D map or a 3D globe. Shopify suggests using it during high-traffic periods such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. It shows:

• Visitors right now: people active on your online store in the past 5 minutes. A visitor has to view a page or click something to stay counted as active.
• Total sales: sales from your online store and other channels, calculated as gross sales minus discounts and sales reversals, plus shipping and taxes.
• Sessions and orders: totals for your online store and other sales channels.

Live View is a monitoring tool. It's good for spotting a problem fast (a launch email went out and nobody is reaching checkout) but it's not where you should make decisions. Shopify notes that Live View visitor counts won't match Google Analytics or other tools, and that this is expected.

How Shopify counts sessions and conversion rate

Shopify defines conversion rate as the percentage of sessions that resulted in an order. The Conversion rate over time report breaks this into funnel steps: sessions with cart additions, sessions that reached checkout, and sessions that completed checkout. Each step's rate is that step's sessions divided by total sessions.

Because conversion rate is calculated from sessions, any change to how sessions are counted moves your conversion rate even if orders don't change. That happened in September 2026. According to Shopify's session measurement update page, the rollout ran from 21 to 23 September 2026 and changed three things:

• A session now ends after 30 minutes of inactivity instead of at midnight UTC, so activity that runs past midnight counts as one session, not two.
• Some sessions without a pageview are now counted, such as a customer going straight to checkout from a cart link.
• Identified bot sessions are filtered out of session reports by default. Reports that support the "Human or bot session" filter let you add them back. Bot classification only applies to sessions from 7 October 2025 onward.

The practical effect: if your session count fell in late September 2026 and your conversion rate rose, that's likely the measurement change, not a real improvement. Annotate the date in whatever you use for reporting, and be careful comparing September 2026 onward with earlier periods.

Marketing attribution basics

Shopify's marketing reports (under Analytics and in the Marketing section of the admin) let you choose an attribution model. Five are available:

Reports that support the model switch include Performance by referring channel, Performance by marketing activity and Performance by UTM campaign. Traffic arriving with a utm_campaign parameter is attributed to marketing, so tag every link you control (email, social posts, influencer links, paid ads) with consistent UTM values. Inconsistent tags such as "Facebook," "facebook" and "fb" split one channel into three rows.

No model is "correct." Last non-direct click tends to favor email and retargeting; first click favors discovery channels such as social and search. Look at the same period under two models before cutting a channel's budget.

Connecting Google Analytics 4

Shopify Analytics covers most store-level questions, but many teams also run GA4 for cross-site journeys, audiences for Google Ads, and comparison with other properties. Shopify's Help Center says to connect GA4 by installing the Google & YouTube sales channel. Additional scripts on the Thank you page have been view-only since 28 August 2025, so old snippet-based purchase tracking is no longer an option; custom tracking now goes through customer events (web pixels).

We walk through the setup step by step in our Google Analytics for Shopify guide, and our GA4 conversion tracking guide covers key events and testing.

Why Shopify and GA4 never match

• Consent: GA4 only records visitors who accept analytics cookies where consent is required, so it undercounts in regions with consent banners.
• Ad blockers and browsers: they block GA4 more often than Shopify's first-party tracking.
• Session definitions: GA4 and Shopify use different session rules and different bot filtering.
• Attribution: GA4's default model and lookback windows differ from Shopify's.
• Orders: Shopify counts every order, including POS, draft and manual orders; GA4 only sees what fires on the storefront.

Use Shopify for sales, orders, products and inventory. Use GA4 for on-site behavior paths and ad audiences. Expect a gap and watch whether the gap changes, not whether it exists.

What the numbers mean (and common misreadings)

• Gross sales vs net sales vs total sales: gross sales is product price times quantity before taxes, shipping, discounts and sales reversals. Net sales is gross sales minus discounts and sales reversals. Total sales then adds taxes, duties, shipping charges and fees. Use net sales to judge product performance.
• Reversals land on the date they're processed: refunds, returns, cancellations and edits show as negative values on the day they happen, so a big refund in March for a February order lowers March's net sales.
• Average order value: can rise because of one wholesale order. Filter by sales channel or customer type if you sell B2B.
• Conversion rate: moves with traffic mix. A viral social post brings low-intent sessions and lowers your rate even if sales rise.
• Returning customer rate: depends on the date range. A short window hides repeat buyers who purchase every few months.
• Payouts aren't sales: payouts are net of card fees, refunds, chargebacks and reserves. Reconcile with the payouts report, not the sales report.

Build a short weekly routine: check the dashboard, read sales by product and sales by traffic source, look at the conversion funnel, and note anything unusual (promotions, outages, measurement changes) so you can explain it later. If you want alerts when something crosses a threshold, Shopify Flow can send an email or Slack message when orders or inventory hit conditions you set.

Conclusion

Shopify Analytics is now the same on every plan for nearly everything a store owner needs: dashboards, 200+ reports, custom reports in ShopifyQL and Live View. The skill isn't unlocking features, it's reading them correctly: know which attribution model you're looking at, account for the September 2026 session change, and treat GA4 as a complementary view rather than a second answer to the same question. For more guides like this, see our Shopify hub. If you'd like help setting up reporting and tracking you can trust, eSEOspace's Shopify SEO team works on analytics as part of every engagement.

Frequently asked questions