Major Problem with New Reports / Analytics

Hi Michael, I have just encountered this unfortunate fact as well. The link no longer works and brings you to the standard new Reports section. It seems they have a report for everything you could ever imagine except of course the most basic fundamental report which was called Total Sales before.

What did I sell to Who, Where was it sent to and How much did it cost with breakdown of gross, net, discount, shipping tax. Should be obvious that the majority of owners doing their own basic bookkeeping would need access to a file like this. Keep it simple silly!

I used the customization to rebuild the old Total Sales file columns with no comparison for previous month and saved it as a template. Was a nuisance to do and not entirely the same but I guess it will have to do.

In case it helps anyone, here are the columns I went with to replicate the old file Total Sales. Of course they inconveniently changed the column names to something not quite the same so a direct search to find them didn’t work making it a pain in the patootie!

Day Order name Line type Billing country Billing region Billing city Shipping country Shipping region Shipping city Product title Product variant title Quantity ordered Gross sales Discounts Returns Net sales Shipping charges Taxes

Total sales

Continued:

Net sales Shipping charges Taxes Total sales

I agree! It is ABSOLUTELY HORRIFIC!!! It continues to baffle me as to why Shopify makes these changes without notifying customers (us) who pay for their services! As a brick & mortar storefront, nothing is worse than opening your doors in the morning only to find drastic changes to your POS system with NO NOTICE! This is unacceptable. If we are paying for a service, we expect that service. Not for it to be continuously changed without at least consulting a well through research within the industry paying for your service and a minimum of a well advanced notice to those customers paying for the services expected. I know for one, these continued actions by Shopify are making it much more difficult than necessary and continued costs increases for the stress are debatable.

Are you kidding me!!! Have we lost our customer data due to this “Shopify” change???

You are absolutely right!!! Someone behind a desk that has no comprehension whatsoever - only dollar signs.

OMG - If I hear that you have to open an App to obtain OUR financial data, that will be the final staw!

Couldn’t agree more. Not only is Shopify expensive, considering all the apps we need to install to compensate for basic features, the constant changes is making me nuts! Wordpress is starting to look all the more attractive, least we can control when and what changes will be happening.

1 Like

I Agree. The new analytics reporting feature is TERRIBLE. We have around 4000 skus in our site at any one time and we have hundreds added each month. Due to licensing with 3rd party apps, we need to remove products over time and now we cannot report on this data. I was just crunching sales x brand or sales x product type this year vs last and 30% of my data last year is now showing as “none”… what a joke!. Any product deleted should be recorded with key attributes (eg type, vendor, price, etc)… so we still have access to the data in reporting. Any good BI app does this and shopify has badly let us ALL down.

I had a similar issue long time ago, and I wished if there was a simple plain language answer for simple data query!

Have you figured out the solution to this problem yet, if yes what tool did you use for that situation?

Glad support helped - but ‘harder to find’ and ‘takes longer’ is still friction you shouldn’t have to deal with every time you need basic data…

Genuine question; Has it gotten any easier since you figured out the workaround?

‘Can’t pilot my business anymore’ is such an honest way to put it.

Curious - what does that actually look like day to day for you when you’re trying to make a call on something?

that’s rough, and what makes it worse is it wasn’t even a complex ask, it was one report you actually depended on, and now even that’s gone.

out of curiosity, when “Sales by Product” was there, what were you mainly using it for understanding what’s moving, planning restocks, something else?

“I get that updates are needed” - that part stands out, because the issue isn’t that things changed, it’s that adjusting a date range or swapping a SKU to answer a quick question about your store now requires an IT degree.

When you were making those quick adjustments, what were you mainly trying to figure out - what’s moving, what to reorder, something else?