Shopify users who are on the Advanced Shopify or Shopify Plus plans enjoy more options for reports and analytics. In a previous post, we discussed basic reporting functions; in this post, we want to address advanced features for users on one of the two advanced plans.

Advanced reporting capabilities are necessary for truly understanding how your business is doing. Shopify’s advanced features allow you to generate very detailed reports that can be shared with your entire team, printed, archived, and analyzed. As you get into using advanced reporting, there are three things you need to know:

1. Report Dimensions

Every report you want to generate must have at least one dimension established. According to the Shopify documentation, a dimension is that set of data you want to appear in your report. When you first navigate to the reports page within the Shopify admin, you will see three buttons at the top; one of them is the Dimensions button.

Clicking on this button triggers a drop down menu that allows you to choose your dimensions. The list of possibilities is rather long, and it includes things such as:

• customer name
• customer e-mail
• payment status
• billing region
• sales by product
• product type

Setting your dimensions is as easy as clicking on the appropriate items in the drop-down menu.

2. Report Metrics

Every report you generate must also have established metrics. Once again, the Shopify documentation defines metrics as “calculated amounts…such as totals and counts.” Simply put, if one of your dimensions is product type, you might select the metric that displays the number of those products sold over a given period of time.

You will find the Metrics button to the far right of the top of your screen. Clicking on it activates a drop-down menu with all of the metric choices available for that dimension. Options include Customers, Order Count, Discounts, etc.

3. Report Filters

Lastly, it is possible to filter the results of any dimension in order to create a more specific report. The most important thing to note here is that the filters are very similar to common search functions you would use in a database or with an online search engine. For example, you can add multiple filters to a single dimension by using the ‘AND’ or ‘OR’ operator, just as you would with any Boolean search.

You will find the Filters button to the left of the Dimension button at the top of your page. Clicking on the button opens a small window with two options. The first option involves general filters chosen from a drop-down menu; the second is a dialogue box that allows you to add more specificity to the general filter.

With these three tools, you can generate very detailed reports. But remember, these advanced features are only available to members with advanced accounts. If you are still using a basic Shopify account, you only have access to basic reporting features.