Connect Shopify to Google Data Studio: A Comprehensive Guide

Do you want to visualize your Shopify data in Data Studio Are you looking for a simple fix? If yes, you’ve landed at the right page!

This article seeks to explain how you can connect Shopify to Google Data Studio using API’s offered by Shopify & extract the information about products and pipe them to create reports.

Follow our easy guide to master the skill of connecting Shopify to Google Data Studio and creating impeccably informative business reports to understand how your business fairs against others.

What is Shopify?

Shopify is a powerful e-commerce platform designed to allow people or businesses to sell their offerings/products online. Shopify helps you set up an online store and also offers a point of sale (POS) to sell the products in person. Shopify provides you with payment gateways, customer engagement techniques, marketing, and even shipping facilities to help you get started.

Various product or services that you can sell on the Shopify:

• Physical Products: Shopify allows you to perform the door-step delivery of the products you’ve manufactured that can be door-shipped to the customer. These include anything like printed mugs/t-shirt, jewellery, gifts, etc.
• Digital Products: Digital Products can include e-books, audios, course material, etc.
• Services and Consultation: If you’re providing services like Life consultation, home-cooked delicacies, event planning, or anything else, Shopify has got you covered.
• Memberships: Various memberships such as gym memberships, yoga-classes membership, event Membership, etc. can be sold to the customers.
• Experiences: Event-based experiences like adventurous sports and travel, mountain trekking, wine tasting, events, and hands-on workshops. You can use Shopify to sell tickets for these experiences as well.
• Rentals: If you’re running rental services like apartment rentals, rental Taxis, or gadgets, you can use Shopify to create ads and engage with the customer.
• Classes: Online studies, fitness classes can be advertised here.

Shopify allows you to analyze trends and customer interaction on their platform. However, for advanced analytics, you may need to store the data into some database or data warehouse to perform in-depth analytics and then move towards a visualization tool to create appealing reports that can demonstrate these trends and market positioning.

What is Google Data Studio?

Google Data Studio is a free visualization tool that can help you build effective and insightful reports with the help of its interactive dashboard. It allows bringing in data from multiple sources and lets you expand reports as per your business needs. You can visualize data using a bar chart, line graphs, etc., and easily share these reports. It supports dynamic reporting and hence can be used to generate reports that get updated in real-time.

Key features of Google Data Studio:

• Unlimited Reports: Google Data Studio lets you analyze unlimited reports to gain insights. It also provides various pre-built templates and layouts for you to start working.
• Live Data Connection: Google Data Studio offers in-built connectors that can connect with live data sources and stream records in real-time. It also supports the periodic data refresh.
• Dynamic Controls: Google Data Studio offers a feature to add data controls and filters over the charts & dashboard to control visualizations dynamically.
• Easy To Collaborate: Google Data Studio allows you to share the reports with others and also supports real-time collaborative working on the same report.
• Connectors: Google Data Studio has around 240+ pre-built connectors that can help you connect to various data sources.

Why Connect Shopify to Google Data Studio?

Google Data Studio is a powerful ad widely used Visualization tool that can help you connect to any data and turn it into charts, graphs, etc., for analysis. Users can get real-time data feeds directly into their dashboards from multiple data sources. 

Connecting Shopify to Google Data Studio enable users to analyze their E-Commerce and Sales data with powerful tools leveraged with Machine Learning. There is more to Shopify to Google Data Studio, users can monitor the order status with the fulfillment time of their orders, overview the information and map the purchases where they come from, etc.

Sending data from Shopify to Google Data Studio makes the job easier for shop owners to get an overview of the data and rich insights on the winning products, audiences, and help them build strategies that can generate maximum profit. 

Prerequisites

• Working knowledge of Google Data Studio.
• Working knowledge of Shopify.
• A Shopify account.
• A Google Data Studio account.
• A general idea about REST APIs and commands.

Connecting Shopify to Google Data Studio

You can connect Shopify to Google Data Studio and create exciting visualization to understand in-depth relations contained in the data. 

Shopify platform is fully accessible using its REST endpoints (Shopify API). It offers APIs such as billing, customer, inventory, etc. Use the following steps to connect Shopify to Google Data Studio using Shopify APIs:

• Step 1: Connecting to Shopify’s API
• Step 2: Saving data to Google Drive
• Step 3: Loading JSON data to Google Data Studio

Step 1: Connecting to Shopify’s API

Shopify follows the RESTful API principles that can be accessed using HTTP/CURL/Postman tools. It offers several API endpoints that provide information on products, orders, customers, and a lot more.

To retrieve the order information and get a list of all transactions for a particular order ID, you can use the following command:

GET /admin/orders/#[id]/transactions.json

You can use the Postman tool to retrieve data using the following command:

curl --user user:password GET /admin/orders/#[id]/transactions.json

This command will generate an output that represents the order details for a particular order ID in the JSON format as follows :

{
  "transactions": [
    {
      "id": 179259969,
      "order_id": 450789469,
      "kind": "refund",
      "gateway": "bogus",
      "message": null,
      "created_at": "2017-08-05T12:59:12-04:00",
      "test": false,
      "authorization": "authorization-key",
      "status": "success",
      "amount": "209.00",
      "currency": "USD",
      "location_id": null,
      "user_id": null,
      "parent_id": null,
      "device_id": null,
      "receipt": {},
      "error_code": null,
      "source_name": "web"
    },
    {
      "id": 389404469,
      "order_id": 450789469,
      "kind": "authorization",
      "gateway": "bogus",
      "message": null,
      "created_at": "2017-08-01T11:57:11-04:00",
      "test": false,
      "authorization": "authorization-key",
      "status": "success",
      "amount": "409.94",
      "currency": "USD",
      "location_id": null,
      "user_id": null,
      "parent_id": null,
      "device_id": null,
      "receipt": {
        "testcase": true,
        "authorization": "123456"
      },
      "error_code": null,
      "source_name": "web",
      "payment_details": {
        "credit_card_bin": null,
        "avs_result_code": null,
        "cvv_result_code": null,
        "credit_card_number": "•••• •••• •••• 4242",
        "credit_card_company": "Visa"
      }
    }

This is how you can connect with the Shopify API and fetch data regarding different orders using their order IDs.

Step 2: Saving data to Google Drive

Once you have extracted data from the API for sending it from How to Import Data from Multiple Shopify to Google Data Studio, save it as a JSON file on your system & your Google Drive. Carefully copy or save the entire Google Dive file path for this JSON file.

Step 3: Loading JSON data to Google Data Studio

You can load data from Shopify to Google Data Studio in a straightforward and simple way as follows:

Go to the official Google Data Studio site and sign in using your Google account. Once you have signed in successfully, you will reach the reports page. To create a new report, click on the blank report option as follows:

A small pop-up with three options namely report, data source, and explorer will now appear. Click on the data source option to bring in your data from a source of your choice. A list of google connectors for various sources will show up, select the desired source from these options. You can even search for a source with the help of the search bar located at the top.

Select the custom-JSON/CSVXML connector and choose Google Drive as your data source.

Once you’ve selected the correct connector and data source, a new window will now open up. You need to provide the connection details here. Select your team, desired file type and enter the Google Drive file path you had saved in the source URL option as follows:

Once you have established the connection successfully, you will receive the option to add the report to Google Data Studio. Click on the add to report button.

Google Data Studio will now load the data and create some default visualizations. You can customize the themes and layout and add more charts to develop metrics to generate insights.

This is how you can connect Shopify to Google Data Studio using the RESTful APIs.

Limitations of this method

• Extensive and Tedious Process: Repeatedly fetching JSON data and saving it to Google Drive is an exhausting task. Project timelines can be impacted if it is not done in an automated manner.
• Batch Process: Extracting the data using APIs & setting up this process in real-time is very complicated. Additional effort will be required to configure it and execute it on the pipeline.
• Difficult to Transform Data: Transforming JSON data is very challenging as Google Data Studio doesn’t provide any in-built data transformation methods. You might need to connect to a database or data warehouse to transform the data first and then load it back.
• Maintenance Overhead: APIs can be modified anytime by the source without any prior notice. Hence, data and scripts need constant monitoring and maintenance.

Shopify Dashboard Template

After successfully connecting Shopify to Googe Data Studio (or multiple data sources), you can start building or customizing your Dashboard using the pre-built templates. All the available data for Shopify to Google Data Studio then flow into the dashboards.

Switch to the Edit View to easily edit the reports and switch between different views. Some of the most used options while editing the report or customizing a dashboard are listed below:

• Add Control: This controls the page activities ad allows users to manage what’s happening on the chart.
• Add Data: It shows how you can add a new source connector to the data.
• Add Chart: You select different charts based on your requirements.

The different types of charts that are most used while building a dashboard for sending data from Shopify to Google Data StudioThe following charts are listed below:

Pie and Bar Charts

To add a chart on your dashboard, click on the Add a chart option located at the right-side panel. From here, you select the type of chart you want your data to fit in. We chose the bar chart for its simplicity.

You can set the Data Source as the data stream you have selected for Shopify to Google Data Studio that you might have connected till now. After that, you can select the various options such as Dimension, Metrics, Sort type, Data Range Dimension. 

You can also choose SKU as a Dimension for a better understanding of data. Similarly, you can add more charts such as pie charts to the dashboards by selecting the data source and configuring their properties to properly fit the data into charts.

Tables with Multiple Dimensions and Metrics

Tables are one of the simplest charts in Google Data Studio. Tables can help you showcase multiple data from Shopify to Google Data Studio table that can include columns such as prices, inventory quantity, etc. 

You can select the Data Source as the products from the Shopify data, once you loaded the data from Shopify to Google Data Studio tables. Then, you can set the Data range dimensions to a date column, Dimension column as inventory SKU or product titles, and set Metric as price, quantity, and cost.

Pivot Tables

You can create pivot tables to get your complex data or group data coming from Shopify to Google Data Studio into a simpler form. Pivot tables allow you to simplify and add multiple data to get a holistic view. 

You can select the Data Source as the orders from your Shopify data that has line items. Then, you can choose the Data range dimension as date data. You can use data like the title of the items, financial information, etc in the Row and Column dimension. Then fill the Metric with SUM or AVG properties, numbers, like total price, etc.

Scorecards and Blending Data

One of the essential parts of any Dashboard is charts that can show the summarised information such as average count, percentage, etc. The scorecards mainly demonstrate sales, conversions, and any data that can be described with a number coming from Shopify to Google Data Studio.

It relies on a single Metric so it doesn’t require any Dimension. All you have to do is select the Data Source for connecting Shopify to Google Data Studio and it will automatically select the data. You can also create individual filter criteria for each chart. This feature automatically selects the type of data you want from a table.

Google Data Studio also comes with the feature blending data, where you can blend two scorecards to get a new metric such as avg, percentage, etc. Once you blend any data, a new card with the resultant data will appear. Besides, general measuring terms, you can also apply some formulas while blending the data.

Blending Data from Different Sources

There is always a case when you want to evaluate some data by blending two data points and those data points are from different sources. Connecting Shopify to Google Data Studio gives the power to blend data from different data sources. 

You can do this by creating a table dashboard then clicking on the Blend data option from the right-side panel. Then choose the Data Source and select metrics, dimensions, etc. After that do the same for another Data Source. Once, you added another Data Source for connecting Shopify to Google Data Studio, you can see a new option Join Keys. Here, select the joint dimension in both the data. To blend data, you need a common dimension whose values are the same, so that the 2 records will merge.

Data Control

Data Control is one of the essential parts of a dashboard. It allows users to control the timeline and change the data range and have the numbers auto-update for them.

You can the Data Control feature to your Dashboard by clicking on the Add a control button from the menu and then selecting the Date range control option. Then you can place it on the chart.

How to Import Data from Multiple Shopify to Google Data Studio?

As Google Data Studio supports loading data from multiple Data Sources that means you can bring your data from multiple Shopify to Googe Data Studio and blend the data.

You can also create a single Google Sheets file and import data from each store into separate tabs and then you can connect the Google Sheets files into Google Data Studio.

Conclusion

This article teaches you how to connect Shopify to Google Data Studio. It also provides in-depth knowledge about the concepts behind every step to help you understand and connect to import data from Multiple Shopify to Google Data Studio efficiently.

With importing data from Multiple Shopify to Google Data Studio, shop owners can automate some of their tasks and apply data-driven strategies to their store.

Using APIs and executing ETL jobs can be challenging, especially for a beginner & this is where Hevo saves the day. Sign up with Hevo Data, to transfer data from a source of your choice in a fully automated and secure manner without having to write the code repeatedly. Hevo with its strong integration with 150+ sources (free sources like Shopify, Shopify Webhook, etc., as well as paid sources) & BI tools, allows you to not only export & load data but also transform & enrich your data & make it analysis-ready in a jiffy.

Tell us about your experience of connecting Shopify to Google Data Studio! Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.

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