Order changes register as a sale in reports & analytics

Shopify Discussion
1

Hello,

I have been facing this frustrating issue for a while now. Whenever an unfulfilled order is changed based on a customer’s request, the new product in the order is considered a sale, even if there is no price difference ($0 payable by the customer).

For example, I sell a product with multiple variants, all priced the same. When a customer requests to edit their order to change the variant of the product, we remove the existing product variant and replace it with a different one, with $0 payable.

After this change, the gross sales and total sales increase by the amount of the product, effectively duplicating the revenue for that order.

Surely this is a bug or a mistake and not intentional?

Due to this flaw in Shopify’s reporting and metric tracking, the issue persists when I use third-party analytics trackers like Triple Whale. These trackers rely on Shopify’s dataset, such as the pre-calculated total sales, gross sales, and revenue, which are inaccurately inflated in these scenarios.

This makes it impossible for me to track profit in real-time. As a result, I have to manually input each order’s value into a spreadsheet and calculate the gross expenses for each order to achieve accurate “real-time” profit and loss tracking.

I hope there is a solution to this issue or that Shopify addresses and fixes it soon.

Thank you.

Edit:

I noticed the issue occurs here in the gross sales analytic/report:

Skengdo_0-1735978764097.png

When the original product is removed (second entry in the photo), it does not account for it it rather its entry is marked as $0, removing the original product should offset the sale by -$299.99 rather than $0 to prevent duplicating the sale.

The first entry in the photo shown above is the new product variant being added to the order which practically duplicates the sale/revenue.

2

I have been in contact with Shopify about this issue and I can explain the issue. What you are doing is an exchange using the Shopify admin, which should result in the following:

  1. Original sale of Variant A
  2. Refund of Variant A
  3. New sale for Variant B

When doing POS exchanges, this works as expected. Unfortunately, with exchanges initiated in the Admin it doesn’t add the refund, which would effectively back out the original sale. Shopify is aware of the issue, but gave me no information on when it would be fixed. I would encourage you to reach out to them and raise it too. The more people contacting them about it the sooner they might address it.

3

Hey Sam,

Thank you for your response, good to know I’m not the only one. I’ll apply to Shopify to try and get them to push a fix for this.