Shopify Analytics: The Dashboard, Reports and Live View
Shopify analytics is the Analytics area of your Shopify admin: an overview dashboard of metric cards, a list of reports you can edit and save, and Live View for what is happening on your store right now. If your sessions or conversion rate changed suddenly in late September 2026, that may be Shopify’s new session measurement rather than your traffic.
Everything below comes from the Shopify Help Center pages on the Analytics dashboard, reports and Live View, read on October 23, 2026.
The Shopify analytics dashboard, card by card
Open Analytics in the admin. The page shows your key sales, sessions and fulfillment metrics across all sales channels, updated within about a minute, for whatever date range you pick, and lets you compare it with an earlier period.
Each metric is a card, and there is a card for every available report. What you can do with them:
- Add, remove and rearrange cards. Put the five numbers you check every morning at the top and remove the rest.
- Group cards into labeled sections, for example “Sales”, “Marketing”, “Fulfillment”.
- Resize cards so the important ones are bigger.
- Set metric targets to track progress toward a goal, such as a monthly net sales figure.
- Read the insights. Shopify generates them automatically when it finds a meaningful trend in your data. People who search for “Shopify insights” usually mean these.
Clicking a card opens the full report behind it, where you can see which product, channel or day moved the number.
Metrics that confuse merchants
| Metric | What Shopify counts | Common misreading |
|---|---|---|
| Total sales | Gross sales − discounts − sales reversals + shipping + taxes | Treated as revenue you keep. It includes tax you owe and shipping you pay out |
| Net sales | Gross sales minus discounts and returns, without the shipping and taxes that total sales adds | Confused with total sales, so two reports “disagree” |
| Sessions | Visits to your online store, counted by Shopify’s own method | Expected to match Google Analytics. They are counted differently, so they never match exactly |
| Conversion rate | “The percentage of sessions that resulted in a purchase” | Compared across September 2026, when session measurement changed (below) |
| Visitors right now (Live View) | Visitors active in the past 5 minutes; a visitor stays active by viewing a page or clicking a button | Read as people “on the site” for the whole day |
The two lines with the most confusion are total sales and net sales. When a number looks too high for what landed in your bank, check whether you are reading total sales, which includes tax and shipping.
Reports: change a default report and save it
Shopify’s default reports (the ones authored by Shopify) are a starting point. You can filter the Reports list by Created by > Shopify to see only them. Every one of them can be changed:
- Open a report from Analytics > Reports.
- Use the quick filters across the top: the date range (presets include Last 7 days, Month to date and Black Friday Cyber Monday), a comparison with another period or a target, and the currency. Converted currency uses the historical rate on the day of each transaction.
- In the configuration panel on the right, choose metrics, dimensions, filters and the visualization. The Freeform tab is the default; the Cohorts tab looks at customers grouped by their first order.
- To keep your changes, save the report as a custom data exploration. Edits to a default report are temporary until you save them, and saving works on every Shopify plan.
Above each report is the ShopifyQL query editor. It shows the report as a query in Shopify Query Language, and every change you make in the panel appears in the query as you make it. You can also write or edit the query and click Run, or ask Sidekick to write one from a prompt. Even if you never write a query, reading the one behind a report tells you exactly which data it uses.
Two more tools in reports are worth knowing. Annotations mark events on a time chart: some come from the store itself (a product published, a theme deployed, an app installed), and you can add your own, such as “newsletter sent”. When a chart jumps, check the annotations first. And every report can be exported for a spreadsheet.
For a dashboard outside Shopify that combines several sources, see our guide to Shopify KPI reports in Looker Studio. For repeat-customer analysis, the Cohorts tab and the default Customer cohort analysis report are covered in cohort analysis.
Live View for launches and sales days
Analytics > Live View shows activity on your online store in real time on a 3D globe or a 2D map. Blue dots are recent visitor sessions, purple dots are orders. Next to the map are cards for visitors right now, total sales, total sessions and total orders since midnight in your store’s time zone, top locations, top products, and customer behavior (sessions in the last 10 minutes that added to cart, reached checkout or bought).
It is most useful during a launch, a sale or Black Friday: you see within minutes whether an email or a discount brought people in and whether they reached checkout. Streamer mode hides the numbers and keeps the map, so you can share your screen. It is not available on mobile.
Why your numbers changed in September 2026
Shopify rolled out a new session measurement between 21 and September 23, 2026. After the update reached a store, its sessions, conversion rate and other session-based metrics could show different values. Shopify’s note says this does not necessarily mean your traffic, orders or customer behavior changed.
In practice: do not compare a conversion rate from October 2026 with one from August 2026 and draw conclusions. Orders and net sales are not session-based metrics, so for a before-and-after comparison across that date, compare orders and sales. Add an annotation on September 21 so the jump is explained the next time someone opens the report.
When Shopify analytics is not enough
Shopify’s reports cover sales, customers, products, inventory and marketing for your own store well. You need more tools when: The running a store hub links our guides on each of these.
- You want to follow visitors across sites and ads, such as which Google Ads search led to a purchase days later. Connect Google Analytics 4; our guide to GA4 on Shopify covers the setup and why its numbers differ.
- You want one dashboard for several sources (Shopify, ads, email): Looker Studio or a similar tool.
- You want profit after ad spend and app costs per order: Shopify’s profit reports cover product cost and gross margin; ad spend has to come from another tool.
Frequently asked questions
Is Shopify analytics free? The Analytics dashboard, default reports and Live View are part of the Shopify admin, and Shopify says edited reports can be saved as custom explorations regardless of your subscription. Some reports, such as multi-store reporting, depend on the plan.
Why do Shopify and Google Analytics show different sessions? Each counts visitors its own way, with different time windows and rules for who counts as active, so the numbers are expected to differ. Shopify’s Help Center says these discrepancies are normal and do not indicate an error.
How do I see analytics for one product? Open a sales report by product, such as Total sales by product, and add a filter for the product title in the configuration panel. Save it as an exploration if you want to return to it.
Can I export Shopify reports? Yes. Shopify reports can be exported for analysis in spreadsheet programs.