Overwhelmed by the types of reporting and data tools out there. Before I can pick one out and really sit down and learn how to get the most out of it, what’s the one insight from your data that surprise you or rather deserves the most of our attention?
Hi @WingSpan
Honestly, the most surprising insight for many merchants isn’t some fancy metric , it’s usually repeat customer rate.
Everyone focuses on traffic, CTR, or conversion %, but seeing how often customers come back (and what drives that behavior) tends to shift strategy the most.
Other close seconds: cart abandonment reasons and LTV by acquisition channel. Both can uncover leaks you didn’t even know existed.
If you’re just starting, track who’s coming back and why. That single number can tell you more about the health of your store than 50 dashboards combined.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
David
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Data can be incredibly overwhelming. I’ve been a consultant for 10 years and what you’re expressing is a common feeling.
As a Shopify store, your sales/order history data is an incredibly valuable asset and usually the first place I would start (if you have at least a few hundred orders). I like to look at sales trends over time for top selling products/categories in the last 3-6 months. By looking at sales more granularly, you can often find products that “flat-line” or have big drop offs, or others where sales have risen significantly. If I want to optimize pricing for example, I will typically start with understanding the sales trends and recent pricing changes for the top 50 products and use this to guide pricing adjustments. As you can imagine, fine-tuning prices can have a huge impact on the bottom line.
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Hello @WingSpan ,
I hope you are well!
We have Online store customer journey. So, yhe most surprising insight overall:
Despite 15,000 sessions, only 50 orders are being placed, with steep drop-offs at every step—especially from checkout start to payment submission.
So, we can target 50 customers who submitted the payment for Email marketing, SMS marketing, and WhatsApp marketing which will help in increasing the revenue.
We can also target the checkout started customers who have reached to the checkout.
It’s one of the most useful feature we have.
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Interesting. Have you found out the reasons for abandoned checkouts?
@PieLab So basically it’s focused on customer retention and tweaking strategies to stay on the edge. How do we look into the reasons for abandoned checkouts?
@c.cooper I feel like holiday seasons and regional occasions play a big part in the sale trends. Any other factors that affect the orders?
For most Shopify (or any ecommerce) businesses, the most surprising—and most actionable—insight tends to be:
How many first-time buyers never come back.
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In many stores, 60–80% of customers make only one purchase.
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That’s shocking, because so much effort (ads, SEO, social) goes into winning that first order.
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If you shift even a small fraction of those one-time buyers into repeat customers, your growth compounds without increasing ad spend.
Why it deserves your attention:
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Profitability: Repeat customers cost 5x less to convert than new ones.
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Gift Registries: They bring in new customers who often come to buy gifts. Tracking if those gifters return later is a goldmine insight.
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Retention vs. Acquisition: Most stores obsess over new traffic and ignore retention, but the bigger wins often come from nurturing past buyers.
How to act on it (without deep reporting tools yet):
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Pull a simple cohort report in Shopify:
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Customers who bought once vs. customers who bought 2+ times.
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What % repeat within 90 days?
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Focus on that gap. Ask: “What would need to happen to bring just 10% more of those first-timers back?”
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Better post-purchase emails
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Personalized offers
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Loyalty program
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Follow-ups tied to occasions (birthdays, anniversaries, registry events)
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If you only looked at this one metric—your repeat purchase rate—and built strategies around improving it, you’d be ahead of most businesses drowning in dashboards.
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Yes! I want to inform you that there is no direct way to get the reason, but through the internal checks and research, we can conclude that:
Complicated checkout flow — too many steps or required fields.
Payment issues — limited options or failed transactions.
The good part is, with AiTrillion, we can address these drop-offs by:
1.) Sending automated cart abandonment emails/SMS/WhatsApp reminders.
2.) Offering discount codes/free shipping incentives.
3.) Adding trust signals like reviews & ratings right before checkout.
4.) Segmenting customers who reach checkout but don’t buy, and retargeting them with personalized campaigns.
This way, we not only reduce abandoned checkouts but also convert them into additional revenue.
Hey @WingSpan,
There are hundreds of metrics that can pull you in different directions, but you can usually keep it simple by splitting them into two groups:
- Website performance metrics – traffic, conversion rate, and returning customer rate are usually the most meaningful ones.
- Financial metrics – revenue matters, but net profit margin is the one that really tells the truth.
Do you know that stores running under 5% net profit margin are almost impossible to grow?
We’ve helped nearly 10,000 merchants track their profitability, and this is one of the biggest lessons we’ve seen. Many owners get caught up in chasing revenue and use it to decide when to scale. But as they grow, hidden costs quietly eat away at their margins. By the time they realize it, they’ve already hit a wall — some end up forced to sell, others have to shut down.
That’s why choosing the right metrics to guide decisions is more important than most people think.
Happy to dive deeper if you’d like.
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How do you pick out the 50 customers for the tracking? Are they based on segmentations or something else data based?
Tell me more about this!
Yes! Basically, whenever customers signup, they are tracked through api. The data can be synced and fetched through API. The data is automatically fetched and synced through Shopify.
Hey @WingSpan - sure thing!
To keep it simple and specific, if your store has a net profit margin below 5%, you should never try to pour more money into ads or other expensive marketing channels. A common mistake is that many merchants rely on ROAS and think that as long as they maintain a good ROAS around 5-7x, they’re still profitable no matter how low their profit margin is. This is dead wrong.
To explain, ROAS only monitors the relationship between your revenue and your ad/marketing cost. There are lots of other costs that aren’t calculated into ROAS, like Shopify transaction costs, shipping costs, taxes, and other potential costs (like chargebacks). Once you account for these, you’ll realize that your actual ROAS is much lower than you think. Translated into absolute numbers, these costs can surpass your net profit (since your margin is already very low), causing losses in your financial metrics even though you’re seeing a positive, up-to-benchmark ROAS.
To prevent this, you must either (1) have a super high ROAS (above 10-20x), which is not common, or (2) put all of your costs in one place and calculate your net profit margin.
- 10% net profit margin is the minimum benchmark. Unless your store meets this, don’t spend money on ads—focus on improving your margin first. You can see this article for practical tips.
- 15-20% net profit margin is healthy. Once you hit this, you can start testing different ad creatives or marketing channels. The higher your margin, the more room you have to scale safely.
Of course, this won’t cover all the diverse and complex aspects of e-commerce, but it’s enough to give you a solid idea of when to scale and when to step back. Even if you’re just starting or already an 8-figure store owner, checking these points is critical for success.
Let me know if you have any other questions—I’m happy to share more insights here.
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I found this formula:
ROAS = (Total Revenue from Ad Campaign / Total Cost of Ad Campaign) x 100
So going along your suggested x10-20, that would be at least 10 times of return? What if the business is still struggling with getting positive return? To identify the target audience and the most perceptive channel for that audience can take some testing and time. How to balance out stuff among these?
For me, it was seeing how much repeat customers actually drive the numbers. I used to obsess over new visitors and ads, but when I checked the returning customer data, it kinda flipped my perspective. Turns out a few loyal buyers were doing most of the heavy lifting.
Now I pay a bit more attention to that report whenever I look at sales. It’s a nice reminder that growth doesn’t always mean “more people,” sometimes it’s just “the right people coming back.”
How different platforms record the same event in different ways.
About 60-80% of sales come from the top 10% of customers. We’ve found this to be the case with almost all of our clients across the board. Have a strong understanding of who your top customers are, so you can acquire and retain more like them. Know their demographics, interests, behavioral traits, best acquisition channels, etc. and tailor your campaigns’ creative and targeting around this.