How to read your store dashboard

Store › Analytics is the trading dashboard. Every card on it is measured over one period that you choose, and compared against the equal-length period immediately before.

This page covers reading it. For what Store is, start at What is the store dashboard?.

Before you start

Store has to be switched on for your workspace, and you need view access to the store dashboards, which usually starts at team lead.

If the whole section is missing rather than locked, the module is off. That is an admin setting in How to switch parts of Tideswell on and off.

What are the three headline numbers?

Revenue, order count and average order value, each for the period you picked.

Under each one is an arrow and a percentage: the change against the prior period, which is the equal-length stretch immediately before your window. Pick Last 30 days and the comparison is the 30 days before that.

That comparison is why the date picker matters more than it looks. Choosing a period is choosing what you are measuring against. See How to change the date range.

Which number ignores the date picker?

Waiting to ship. It counts paid orders that are unfulfilled or only partly fulfilled, and it is always the position right now.

That is deliberate. A backlog is a thing you have today, not a thing you had last month, so scoping it to a date range would make it meaningless.

For working through the backlog itself, see How to look up orders and check your fulfilment backlog.

What do the two rings show?

Revenue by sales channel splits your revenue by where the order came from: the online store, point of sale, marketplaces, and an Other bucket. Every order belongs to exactly one channel, so the ring adds up to your revenue.

Revenue by category splits it by Shopify's product type. The top eight are shown and everything else folds into Other.

Both carry an order count as well as a value, which is how you tell a channel with a few big orders from one with many small ones.

What are the two trend charts?

A revenue trend across the chosen period, and an average order value trend with the swing against the previous period shown as a chip beside it.

The average order value trend is the more interesting of the two, and the one people skip. Revenue rising while average order value falls means you are working harder for the same money, which is a different problem from a quiet week.

What does "Updated 4 minutes ago" mean?

That the page was served from a recent snapshot rather than computed from scratch, which is why it opened instantly.

Refresh forces fresh numbers. Use it when you have just made a change in Shopify and want to see it, and otherwise leave it alone: the snapshot rebuilds itself every few minutes.

A page computed live has no stamp, because there is nothing for it to be updated against.

Why does a card say it is based on recent orders only?

Because reading your whole order history has a ceiling, and on a busy store the scan reaches it.

Rather than quietly under-reporting, the card tells you: the figures came from the most recent orders and older history was not scanned. Read that line as a scope note on the number above it.

It matters most on long windows. A Last 365 days figure carrying that note is not a year of data, and narrowing the range often removes the note entirely.

Why is a margin percentage blank?

Because no cost was recorded in Shopify for the products that sold. Gross margin is revenue minus unit cost, so without a cost there is nothing to compute.

A blank is Tideswell declining to guess rather than a fault. Adding costs in Shopify fills them in.

What if I want an answer rather than a chart?

Ask for one. The analyst reads these same figures plus your stock, suppliers and marketing, and answers in sentences.

"How did we do yesterday and what moved" is one click on the home page. See What is the analyst?.