Shopify is a SaaS (Software as a Service) Shopping Cart solution that allows you to create your own online store with only a few clicks. Setting up a Shopify Store is the greatest thing you can do for your business if you do not want to go through the effort of developing your own website. In other words, businesses will have access to basic in-built capabilities that are required to manage an online store using Shopify.
Shopify also provides a number of features to improve eCommerce productivity and provide useful insights. Shopify Analytics is one such feature that allows users to evaluate and understand the performance of their eCommerce businesses. It has a host of options that provide important information such as total revenue, total customer visits, visitor demographics, and assist users in better understanding their business.
In this blog, you will gain a brief insight into Shopify and Shopify Analytics.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
Introduction to Shopify
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Shopify is an all-in-one eCommerce platform that enables users to create their own online shop and sell their items across numerous platforms. Shopify is a Website Builder at its core, which allows you to create a website using a graphic user interface (GUI), without having extensive knowledge about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP programming language. Shopify also offers add-on apps that aid in the management of eCommerce websites. It provides them with extra features like inventory management, shopping cart features, shipment management, and more.
Shopify provides social network outlet selling capabilities in addition to the ability to establish an online shop, and it connects with marketplaces such as Amazon. The solution also includes payment features that allow businesses to take credit cards directly from Shopify, eliminating the need for third-party accounts.
Overall, its rising popularity comes from its user-friendliness, the large number of templates available and their total versatility, the SEO capabilities it provides, and the fact that it requires no technical skills to use.
Key Features of Shopify
- Templates: Shopify offers a theme shop of its own. All themes have a comprehensive range of customization options that you can use without writing a single line of code. The remarkable feature about Shopify theme templates is that they come with many design tools, self-help materials. There are some premium themes that have more customization options, but you may still have a great-looking site with a free theme. You can also filter themes by price, industry, popularity, and features, or click “View Demo” to see how they’ll appear in action.
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- Community Support: Shopify wants you to thrive on their platform, so they provide a wide range of support. Experts maintain a dedicated blog area on Shopify to give helpful tips for firms using the platform.
- Shopify Academy/Shopify Compass: It is a free online learning platform where you can take eCommerce courses at your own speed. It features a large number of customer service representatives that will gladly answer any queries you may have.
- Security: Shopify is PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant and comes with SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certifications to secure data. Shopify’s PCI Compliance guarantees a secure network, safeguards cardholder data, and checks and tests its networks regularly to ensure maximum efficiency.
- Shopify Inbox: Shopify Inbox is a solution designed to address the issue of resource accessibility for efficient business operations. It is a convenient application that allows users to keep in touch with their consumers around the clock from anywhere on the globe. Shopify Inbox allows users to automate the process of delivering personalized messages to online shop visitors. Customers can even employ this feature to manage client discussions across many channels, including Facebook Messenger and SMS.
- Scalability: Shopify is well-equipped to manage humongous levels of traffic and orders when it comes to business scalability. Shopify has a Dynamic-Scalable Infrastructure that can manage all of your business’ demands as it expands. When your business grows, you can easily upgrade your Shopify Subscription Plans without sacrificing any benefits.
- Integrations: Shopify’s integrations with a variety of different third-party applications makes it simple to expand your online eCommerce store’s functionalities. Shopify supports integration with popular social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Google, Pinterest, and even analytics tools like Google Analytics. From the Shopify App Store, you can find hundreds of applications to add to your shop.
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- Pricing: You can explore Shopify’s 14-day free trial before committing to any of their plans. In the trial subscription, you can create an eCommerce website for free, but you will not be able to sell your products or services. For each plan, Shopify offers five distinct price options:
- Lite Plan – $9 per month
- Basic Shopify Plan – $29 per month
- Shopify Plan – $79 per month
- Advanced Shopify Plan – $299 per month
- Shopify Plus Plan – $2000 per month
- Abandoned Cart Reminder: Shopify’s Abandoned Carts Checkout Emails functionality allows business users to identify customers who have items in their cart and send emails to remind them of completing the checkout. Businesses may also automate this process by upgrading to Shopify’s Advanced Subscription, which allows them to save a lot of time and generate more income.
- Dropshipping: This is a business concept in which eCommerce businesses purchase things from a third party and deliver them directly to their clients. Businesses leverage Dropshipping apps to connect with thousands of wholesale suppliers all over the world. Shopify boasts of a wide range of shipping options and can be integrated with other dropshipping platforms. Oberlo, for example, is an app that allows businesses to import items straight from AliExpress and offer them on their Shopify online store.
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What is Shopify Analytics? Key Components Explained
Shopify offers a variety of analytics tools to help users evaluate the performance of their eCommerce marketplace. Shopify Analytics provides actionable insights into Customer Activities, Marketing, Revenue, and other areas to help businesses improve their operations and make better-informed strategic decisions to boost Sales.
To get started with Shopify Analytics, You will just need to log in to your Shopify admin account and click ‘Analytics‘ on the left-hand side of the screen to get started. There you will notice that Shopify Analytics has three sections: Dashboards, Reports, and Live View.
1) Dashboard
The dynamic Dashboard of Shopify offers information based on decisive indicators like Product Analytics, Live View, Visitor Demography, Total Purchase, in short provides a view of Shopify Analytics.
This dashboard can be readily coupled with Google Analytics to extend the possibilities of Shopify Analytics.
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Some of the widely used metrics users can find on the dashboard are:
- Total Sales: This shows the total money made by your store over a certain time period, expenditures like the point of sale, recharge recurring billing, and more
- Online Store Sessions: This tracks the total number of consumers that visited your website in a specific period, including repeat users. This has the following separate subtypes:
- By Conversion Rate: The percentage of visits that result in a purchase.
- By Device Type: The total number of sessions and the kind of device used by the visitor.
- By Location: The number of sessions in your store, categorized by nation.
- By Traffic Source: The number of sessions divided by the method by which visitors arrived at your site.
- From Social Media: The number of sessions in your business originated from social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.
- Returning Customer Rate: This shows the percentage of consumers who have purchased from your shop more than once. The higher rate value will imply consumers are loyal to the business and will yield a greater lifetime value.
- Online Store Conversion: This measures the number of visits that result in a purchase. Here, users can keep track of:
- Sessions: The number of customers who have visited your store.
- Added to Cart: The number of times a shopper has added a product to their shopping cart.
- Reached Checkout: The number of times a shopper has reached checkout with a product in their cart.
- Sessions Converted: The number of times a consumer bought a product in a single session.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of sessions that resulted in a purchase is known as the conversion rate.
- Average Order Value (AOV): The average dollar amount spent each time a customer places an order in your Shopify store. It is determined by dividing the total order income by the number of orders.
- Top Landing Pages: These are the pages on your website where customers first visited your store.
- Top Products by Units Sold: The most popular items in your business.
- Top Referrers by Sessions: The top five external websites your business received traffic from.
2) Reports
Shopify Analytics also provides a Reports feature where all of your Shopify Reports are organized into categories based on the data they present on this page.
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Depending on their Shopify subscription, users can access various sorts of reports. Some of the primary examples include:
- Finances Report: It gives you a snapshot of your Sales, Payments, Pending Payments, and account information like Shopify fees.
- Sales Report: It summarises all of the data pertaining to the orders that have been placed. Your Sales may be viewed by month, hour, channel, location (for Point of Sale), personnel, and product.
- Customer Report: Under this, users can get information on your customers over time, customers by expected value, and new customers by country.
- Behaviour Report: It may help you learn how your Shopify store’s customers and visitors engage with it, such as what they’re looking for, which pages they visit, and how they browse your site.
- Acquisition Report: It encompasses visits over time, visitors by the referrer, visitors by a Marketing Campaign, and visitors by location. While it does not display converted Sales or the number of orders, it shows the number of individuals that have visited your website.
3) Live Reports
The Live View tab gives you a real-time glimpse of your store’s activity. It has a globe map that shows where the action (customer activity) is coming from, as well as crucial metrics that show you what’s going on at any given live moment. This allows you to keep track of all activity in your business as well as Sales from various sources. During peak shopping seasons, such as Black Friday and Independence Day Sale, Live View is essential for viewing the results of Brand Marketing efforts and boosting.
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Key Benefits of Shopify Analytics
The benefit of leveraging the Shopify Analytics feature is making intelligent business decisions and integrating it into your eCommerce Marketing efforts to achieve organizational goals.
Shopify Analytics provides you with the data you’ll need to watch your store’s activities and analyze transactions so you can make informed decisions.
Overall, Shopify Analytics helps users in the following ways:
- Understanding how your customers behave and engage with the brand website.
- Enhance the shopper’s experience.
- Improve your online Product Catalog Marketing.
- Upsell to your most loyal customers.
- Offer personalized, customer-focused Marketing and Customer Service.
- Track the impact of Marketing Strategies and set benchmarks to help improve campaign results.
- Monitor shoppers’ trends.
- Compare Sales channels by performance.
- Identify what products or variant SKU are most profitable.
- Top online searches and top online searches with the most results.
- Get insight into Customer Retention and Churn.
- Make product bundles and limited-time offers.
- Increase your store’s average order value.
Sometimes, Shopify Analytics alone may not be adequate to help a business gain a competitive edge in its niche. In those cases, they can integrate Shopify Analytics with Google Analytics. When paired with Google Analytics, users can get detailed information of customer data that can be resourceful to:
- Calculate the true lifetime value of a customer.
- Analyze campaign performance, referrals, and more using acquisition reports.
- Review website visits, segment visitors by user type (and potential ROI of retargeting them).
- Carry conversion rate optimization (CRO) testing.
- Analyze drop-offs in the checkout funnel.
- Keep track of which landing pages bring in the most money.
- Keep an eye on your target keywords and adjust your store messaging as needed.
Conclusion
Shopify has already established itself as the leading eCommerce building platform in the niche. With lucrative features like free templates, email alerts for abandoned carts, dropshipping app integration, this Cloud solution has been catering to the eCommerce website solutions for businesses of all sizes.
Backed by Shopify Analytics functionality, users can also get basic information about the customer activity on their Shopify store from the Analytics Dashboard. Besides, it also allows users to create reports for their needs ranging from sales by location, online store conversions, and more. In addition, it enables companies to keep tabs on the visitors’ activities on the website in real-time.
As you get started with Shopify Analytics, vast volumes of data linked with your customers, products, and services will be generated. Handling this massive amount of data across all of your company’s applications can be a difficult to undertake hence, A Cloud-Based ETL tool like Hevo Data can successfully automate all of this.
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Share your experience with Shopify Analytics in the comments section below.
Preetipadma is passionate about freelance writing within the data industry, expertly delivering informative and engaging content on data science by incorporating her problem-solving skills.