I dont post much in here, but im wondering what Shopifys beef is with displaying Totals on Order, Customer and Product tables.
We get the pagination for 50 per page, but how is a basic fundamental of a total not displayed?
There’s an actual reason behind it, even if the outcome is still annoying.
Their own API gives it away. The count endpoints don’t just return a number, they return it alongside a precision flag that reads either EXACT or AT_LEAST, plus a limit argument that defaults to 10,000. Past that ceiling they stop counting and just tell you it’s at least that many. That’s what a system looks like when counting a filtered set is expensive rather than free, which is what you’d expect once the tables are on cursor based pagination over a lot of shards.
So it’s a reason, not an excuse. Showing a count up to a ceiling, or an approximate one, would still beat showing nothing at all.
If you want the number today, those same count queries are available to you, and they take the same filter syntax as the admin search bar. ordersCount, productsCount and customersCount, each accepting a query string, and you can pass a null limit to drop the 10,000 cap and force an exact figure. Whatever filter you built in the UI, you can get its true total out of a short script or any GraphQL client pointed at your own store.
Customer segments are the one spot where the admin does show you a count, which honestly makes leaving it off the other three feel stranger rather than more understandable.
Is it the row count you’re mainly after, or the sum of the money column? Those two have quite different workarounds.
Hey wcolton48 @wcolton48
This is one of the more common frustrations with Shopify’s admin. lumine’s answer above is spot on for the technical “why”: counting filtered results across a sharded system is expensive, so Shopify caps the admin UI counts and pushes exact totals into the GraphQL API (ordersCount, productsCount, customersCount) instead of showing them inline on the table.
A couple of practical ways to work around it without writing custom API calls every time:
- Shopify’s own reports (Analytics > Reports) do show row counts and totals for orders and sales, but they’re pre-built and don’t let you total a filtered table view the way you’re describing (e.g. a specific tag, status, or date range on the Orders page itself).
- Bulk operations / exports: exporting a filtered order or product list to CSV gives you a file you can total in a spreadsheet, but it’s a manual step every time you want a number.
If you find yourself needing this often (running totals, row counts, sums by status/tag/date, that kind of thing), that’s really what a reporting layer solves. I work with Mipler reports and this exact use case, seeing a live total or count on a filtered table, is basically the default behavior there rather than something you have to query for. You’d build a report on Orders or Products, apply your filter, and the total row/count is just always visible and updates live.
Here is a screenshot from my test-store:
What are you mainly trying to total, order counts for a date range, or sums on a specific product/customer segment? That’ll help point you to the right approach.
Hello there @wcolton48
I get the frustration, especially if you have a large catalog / volume of orders to process as you’ve got an idea of how many in total that helps in planning and moving through. A good practical workaround is to create saved views & filters in admin for certain segments, and to monitor results on those segments more tightly. For more generalized reporting, Shopify’s reporting and export functions can also make the data a bit clearer.