Every ecommerce platform names its reports slightly differently, but the underlying KPIs that actually predict business health are the same everywhere. Here's the core set worth putting on a dashboard, regardless of platform.
Revenue Metrics
Gross sales, net sales (after refunds and discounts), and revenue growth rate. Net sales is the one most stores under-track — gross sales alone can hide a refund problem that's quietly eating margin.
Order Metrics
Order count, average order value (AOV), and orders per customer. AOV in particular is one of the fastest levers to pull — a 10% AOV increase through bundling or upsells is often easier to achieve than a 10% traffic increase.
Customer Metrics
New vs. returning customer split, customer lifetime value (LTV), and retention rate. These are the metrics that tell you whether growth is sustainable or entirely dependent on ad spend acquiring new customers who never come back.
Product Metrics
Best-sellers, sell-through rate, and stock levels for fast-moving SKUs. A KPI dashboard without a product view will miss stockouts on your best performers until they've already cost you sales — see our inventory analytics guide for the specific metrics to track here.
Profitability Metrics
Revenue is a vanity metric without a profit number next to it. Net profit margin, factoring in COGS, shipping, and payment processing fees, is what separates a KPI dashboard that drives decisions from one that just looks busy — read more in how to track Shopify profit.
"We had a dashboard full of metrics for two years before anyone asked what our actual profit margin was. Revenue was up the whole time; margin had been shrinking for six months."
— CFO, Multi-Brand Ecommerce Group
What Doesn't Belong on the Dashboard
Page views, social followers, and email open rates are useful for their own teams but don't belong on an executive KPI dashboard — they're inputs, not outcomes. Keep the top-level view limited to metrics that connect directly to revenue, retention, or margin. For Shopify specifically, see our Shopify KPI dashboard breakdown of how these metrics get calculated automatically from synced order data.
