Shopify Gross Sales Analytics

Gross Sales is the value of the products customers ordered, before any discounts or returns are taken off. It excludes tax, shipping, duties, and additional fees, so it measures merchandise demand and nothing else.

How Shopify Gross Sales is calculated

Gross Sales = Product price × Quantity ordered

Nothing is deducted. Discounts, returns, tax, shipping, duties, and additional fees are all left out, which is why Gross Sales is always the largest of the sales metrics and why it overstates what your store kept.

Why Gross Sales is worth reporting

On its own, Gross Sales flatters your store. Its real value is as a starting point: it is the merchandise total before discounts and refunds are taken off, which makes it the benchmark everything else gets measured against.

Reporting Gross Sales beside Net Sales tells you:

• How much of your top line discounts and returns are quietly consuming
• Which products move mainly when a discount is applied
• Whether a slow month was weak demand or unusually heavy discounting
• Which vendors and categories retain the most of what they sell

A product with strong Gross Sales and weak Net Sales is not the bestseller it appears to be. Much of what it earned went back out in discounts or refunds, which is worth understanding before you order more of it.

Add Gross Sales to a Shopify data worksheet

1. Open a supported Shopify data worksheet, then select an empty column or insert a new one. Empty columns have a non-green header; a green header means the column is already linked to Shopify data

2. Click the button in the column header

3. Choose Analytics

   

4. Under Which metric?, select Gross Sales

5. Under Over what time period?, choose All time, Fixed dates, Rolling period, Calendar year, or Calendar month

6. Under Limit which orders count, add any optional filters supported by the metric

7. Click Save Column

The new column calculates Gross Sales for each worksheet row. On a Products worksheet it shows Gross Sales per product; on a Customers worksheet it shows the Gross Sales associated with each customer.

Compare Gross Sales with a Pivot Table worksheet

Create a Pivot Table worksheet to rank Shopify performance by vendor, product type, product category, product tag, collection, market, or customer segment.

1. Click the + button beside the worksheet tabs
2. Choose Reporting worksheet
3. Select a ready-made Pivot Table report, or choose Blank pivot table
4. Choose the breakdown and add Gross Sales under Metrics
5. Select the timeframe and optional filters
6. Click Create Worksheet

Add Total Discount Amount, Total Refund Amount Excluding Tax, and Net Sales to the same report. Reading the four together turns a list of numbers into a story: what customers ordered, what came off in discounts, what went back out in refunds, and what you kept.

Track Gross Sales over time

Use a Time Series worksheet to watch demand move month by month or year by year, separately from your discounting.

1. Add an Reporting worksheet
2. Select a Time Series report, or choose Blank time series
3. Choose Store to show several store metrics as rows, or select vendor, product type, market, customer segment, or marketing channel
4. Select Gross Sales as the measure
5. Choose monthly or yearly columns and the number of periods to include
6. Click Create Worksheet

When Store is the breakdown, you can place Gross Sales beside Net Sales, Orders Count, Average Order Value, refunds, discounts, and other supported store metrics. Gross Sales rising while Net Sales stays flat means discounts and refunds are absorbing the difference, and the discount and refund rows in the same report will show you which.