Key takeaways
- Every Shopify plan now gets the core analytics, including custom reports, ShopifyQL and Sidekick questions. Multi-store analytics is the main feature reserved for Plus.
- Shopify's profit reports are gross profit only. Ad spend, shipping, gateway fees, packaging and RTO are not in them.
- RTO is the Indian blind spot. Unicommerce's April 2026 report put COD return rates at 58% in the FY26 festive season against under 15% for prepaid. Shopify has no RTO report.
- A sales drop has a structure. Revenue = sessions × conversion rate × average order value. Find which factor moved, segment it, then check stock, RTO and recent changes.
- The real win is joining data. Shopify plus ad platforms plus logistics plus Tally on one screen, with a tool that ranks the causes.
What Shopify analytics includes in 2026
Shopify's help centre states that the main analytics features are available on every subscription plan. The three layers are:
- Analytics dashboard. A customisable overview of sales, sessions, conversion rate, average order value, returning customer rate and top products, with date comparison.
- Reports. Grouped into acquisition, behaviour, customers, inventory, marketing, orders, profit, retail sales, sales and finance. Each report has quick filters, a configuration panel, a visualisation and a data table.
- Live View. A real-time map of visitors, carts and orders, mostly useful on sale days.
Three things changed in the last year that matter for analysis:
- ShopifyQL and custom explorations on every plan. You can edit any report's query, add metrics and dimensions (up to four metrics per visualisation) and save the result as a custom exploration regardless of plan.
- Sidekick in analytics. Since October 2025 you can type a question such as "which products had the most refunds last month" and Sidekick writes the ShopifyQL report, with follow-up questions.
- Winter '26 Edition. Sidekick Pulse insights, hour-by-day heatmaps, top-N lists no longer capped at five items, bot filtering, filters to the minute, and the 180-day cap on inventory history removed. Multi-store analytics arrived, but for Plus organisations only.
Automated daily Insights require an average of 10 or more orders a week over the previous six months, so very new stores will not see them.
Shopify India plans and what they cost
| Plan | Monthly (billed monthly) | Monthly (billed yearly) | Third-party gateway fee | Analytics notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | ₹1,994 | ₹1,499 | 2% | Full analytics, reports, custom explorations |
| Grow | ₹7,447 | ₹5,599 | 1% | Same, plus more staff accounts |
| Advanced | ₹30,164 | ₹22,680 | 0.6% | Same, plus lower fees and more locations |
| Plus | From ₹1,75,000 | 0.2% | Adds multi-store analytics |
Prices from shopify.com/in/pricing, November 2026, exclude GST. Shopify Payments is not available in India, so every store pays a third-party gateway and the Shopify transaction fee above. Shopify charges GST on its own fees unless your GSTIN is added under Settings > Billing.
What Shopify analytics does not show you
Shopify is the source of truth for what happened at checkout. These are the questions it cannot answer on its own, and for Indian brands they are the expensive ones.
True profit. Profit reports show gross profit only for products where you have entered a cost per item. Ad spend (Meta, Google), shipping cost, gateway fees, packaging, COD handling and RTO losses are not included. A store can show healthy gross profit in Shopify and lose money every month.
RTO and COD returns. Shopify has no return-to-origin report because the courier knows that, not the store. Razorpay cites ET Prime data putting cash on delivery at 60 to 65% of Indian e-commerce orders, and Unicommerce's April 2026 D2C report found COD return rates of 58% in the FY26 festive season against under 15% for prepaid, with RTO peaking at 39.2% in November 2025 for some brands. An order that comes back is counted as a sale in Shopify until someone refunds or cancels it.
Marketplace and offline sales. If you also sell on Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, quick commerce or through retailers, Shopify sees one channel. Your real sales picture lives in Tally or your ERP.
Why a metric moved. Shopify can show that conversion rate fell from 2.4% to 1.7%. It will not tell you that the fall came from mobile users in Tier 2 cities on a Meta campaign that started on Tuesday, after a shipping-rate change.
Inventory and cash together. Stock in Shopify, purchase orders and payables in Tally, and receivables from marketplaces sit in three systems.
Third-party Shopify analytics apps compared
Starting prices from the Shopify App Store and vendor pages, November 2026, in USD unless stated. Most scale with order volume or GMV.
| App or tool | Best for | Starting price | Covers RTO | Joins Tally, marketplaces, ERP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lifetimely (by AMP) | Profit and LTV for small and mid stores | Free plan; $49/month for 500 orders | No | No |
| BeProfit | Profit tracking with ad costs | $49/month for 450 orders | No | No |
| Peel | Cohort and retention analysis | $179/month (annual) | No | No |
| Triple Whale | Ad-heavy brands, attribution | $219/month, scales by GMV, 12-month terms | No | No |
| Polar Analytics | Larger brands, custom metrics | $750/month, GMV-based | No | No |
| Daasity | Enterprise data warehouse for commerce | $1,899/month plus usage | No | Partial, via warehouse |
| Glew | Multi-channel reporting | Custom quote | No | Partial |
| FireAI | Indian D2C brands that also run Tally, marketplaces and COD logistics, and want to know why a metric moved | Free plan; Professional ₹3,499/month | Yes, when courier or 3PL data is connected | Yes, native Tally connector |
FireAI is our own product. The app-store tools above are purpose-built for Shopify and will give you deeper Shopify-specific cohort and attribution views than a general platform. Pick one of them if your whole business is one Shopify store and ads. Pick a platform like FireAI if Shopify is one of several systems and the questions you ask cross them.
Why did my Shopify sales drop? A 6-step diagnosis
Most "why did sales drop" guides list twenty possible reasons. This method narrows them down in order.
Step 1: Check tracking before anything else
Compare Shopify's order count with your payment gateway and with GA4 for the same dates. Shopify and GA4 never match exactly; a gap above about 10% means a tracking or attribution break (a theme update, a consent banner, an app that removed a pixel), not a real sales drop. A sudden spike in "direct" traffic is the usual symptom.
Step 2: Split revenue into its three factors
Revenue = sessions × conversion rate × average order value. Pull the three numbers for the bad period and the comparison period. Usually only one has moved. If sessions fell, the cause is traffic (ads, SEO, a campaign that ended). If conversion fell, the cause is on the site or in the offer. If AOV fell, the cause is mix, discounting or a bundle that stopped.
Step 3: Segment the factor that moved
Cut it by traffic source, device, city or state, new versus returning customers, and product or collection. The drop is almost always concentrated. A 25% fall in overall conversion is often a 60% fall on mobile from one paid source.
Step 4: Check stock and RTO
Open the inventory report for your top 20 SKUs by revenue. A best seller out of stock for ten days in a month is a 30% drop on that SKU with no change in traffic. Then pull RTO by payment method and city from your courier aggregator. A rise in COD share or a courier problem in one zone cuts net revenue weeks after the orders were placed.
Step 5: Check what changed in the last 72 hours
Theme or app installs, shipping rates and the free-shipping threshold, payment gateway changes, discount codes that expired, Core Web Vitals and page speed, a price change on a hero product, an ad account that hit its limit.
Step 6: Rank the causes
Put a number on each cause's share of the drop. If a Meta campaign ending explains 60% and a stock-out explains 25%, the fix order is obvious. This is the step most teams skip because it takes a day in spreadsheets.
What this looks like with causal analysis
FireAI does steps 2 to 6 automatically. Connect Shopify, your ad accounts, your courier aggregator and Tally, and when net sales move, Causal Chain decomposes the change across source, device, geography, product, payment method and stock, then ranks the drivers by contribution. You can ask the follow-up through Ask FireAI in plain English or Hindi ("show me RTO by city for COD orders last month"), and set an alert so a rise in RTO or a top-SKU stock-out reaches you on WhatsApp before it shows up in revenue.
Benchmarks to compare against
- Conversion rate. Shogun's analysis of Shopify stores for January to June 2026 found a mean of 2.61% and a median of 1.74%. Treat 2% as a reasonable mid-point; fashion and high-ticket categories run lower.
- Cart abandonment. Baymard's running average across 50 studies is 70.22%, with extra costs at checkout the top reason (40%).
- COD and RTO in India. 60 to 65% of orders are COD (Razorpay citing ET Prime). COD return rates of 58% in the FY26 festive season against under 15% prepaid (Unicommerce, April 2026). Brands that fixed address validation and COD confirmation brought RTO down to around 21% by March 2026 in the same report.
- Tier 2 and 3 growth. Unicommerce reports 66% of incremental D2C orders coming from Tier 2 and 3 cities, which is also where RTO is highest.
The bottom line
Use Shopify's reports for what they are good at: orders, products, customers and traffic inside the store. Add a profit app if ads are your main cost and Shopify is your only channel. If you sell through marketplaces too, run accounts on Tally and ship COD across India, you need the data joined in one place and a tool that tells you why the number moved, not just that it did.
Connect your Shopify store to FireAI for free or book a demo.
Sources
- Shopify Help Center, Shopify analytics overview, Reports overview, ShopifyQL editor
- Shopify Changelog, Turn business questions into analytics reports with natural language, October 2025
- Shopify, Winter '26 Edition and Analyzing - - - Shopify reports, September 2026
- Shopify, India pricing and GST on billing
- Unicommerce, India D2C report, April 2026
- Razorpay, Cash on delivery in India
- Baymard Institute, Cart abandonment rate
- Blend Commerce, E-commerce conversion rate benchmarks 2026 (citing Shogun, IRP, Dynamic Yield)
- Digital Position, Why your Shopify conversion rate suddenly dropped
- Shopify App Store listings: Lifetimely, BeProfit, Polar Analytics, Daasity; Triple Whale pricing via Venon; Peel via PricingSaaS
FireAI, Shopify integration and pricing