How to create reports for Inventory Turnover Ratio?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A user seeks a way to calculate inventory turnover ratio (COGS divided by average inventory value) for products in Shopify. The built-in “Percent of inventory sold” report is insufficient because it uses only starting inventory quantities rather than period averages, and operates at the variant level instead of aggregated product level.

The core challenge is that Shopify doesn’t natively track historical inventory data, which is essential for calculating average inventory values over time.

Suggested solutions include:

  • Using the Shopify API to export daily inventory snapshots, storing them in SQL or CSV files for custom reporting (via tools like Tableau)
  • Third-party apps mentioned: Glew, Polar Analytics, Inventory Planner, and Prediko (confirmed to track historical inventory data)
  • Manual daily exports as a temporary workaround

Multiple participants express frustration that this basic retail metric isn’t available as a standard Shopify feature, particularly given the platform’s “POS Pro” tier pricing.

Summarized with AI on October 31. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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Is there a Shopify app that can make reports of inventory turnover ratio for products? Or another way to get reports for this? (the way to calculate this for a certain period is the COGS/[average inventory value])

I did look at the “Percent of inventory sold” report that Shopify has in it’s standard reports, but that does not do what I want: there only the starting quantity for the inventory is taken into account, and not the average quantity in a period. Also, that report looks at the variant level, whereas I’d like to look at the aggregated number for all variants of a product.

What probably is problematic, is that Shopify (as far as I know) does not track historic inventory data…And you need this for the Average Inventory Value. So I reckon I can not ask for instance Better Reports to make a report for this.

Does anyone know anything that could help?

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I know this may be a more niche skillset, but the way I was able to figure this out was using the Shopify API. We export everything daily and take a snapshot. We store in SQL and use Tableau for reporting. If you’re not good at SQL you can also write to like a CSV. If you don’t have time to learn the API, the other alternative is just exporting the inventory levels manually. Not a great solution, but we went through the same thing for a while before deciding the tech nerd route was the best course of action.

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An update: I have heard in the meantime that probably the apps Glew, Polar Analytics and Inventory Planner could do this

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@Shopify_77 Support Folks:

Once again, I search for basic retail functionality, and find only post with no reply. At least this time the official Shopify response wasn’t to push us to buy a paid app.

It looks like Shopify has a policy of not building basic retail functionality into Shopify, because you prefer to make a cut of app sales to providing functionality. “Turns” or “Turnover” is such a basic piece of retail analysis that you even have a blog article that shows how to calculate it manually. Why am I paying for “POS Pro” if you don’t have Retail for Dummies level features built in?

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Ugh. I was really hoping there would be an easy reporting function :-(. Really does seem like basic stuff.

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Hey @FloorvdP
We use Prediko for our inventory reporting. So far have been satisfied with it. Yeah Prediko does track historic inventory data.