Shopify Admin gives you a handful of built-in reports, but most stores eventually need more — sales broken down by channel, customers grouped by lifetime value, products running low on stock. Instead of building each of these from scratch, it helps to know which report answers which question.
Sales Reports
All Orders is your baseline — every order, filterable by status, channel, or date. Sales by Channel breaks revenue down by where the order came from, which matters the moment you sell on more than just your online store. Canceled and Refunded Orders surfaces the orders quietly eating into your net revenue, and High-Value Orders flags your biggest transactions so you can make sure they get white-glove fulfillment.
Product Reports
All Products gives you a full catalog view with price, stock, and vendor. Product Count by Vendor is useful the moment you work with multiple suppliers and need to see how concentrated your catalog is.
Inventory Reports
Low Stock Products and Out of Stock Products exist for one reason: stockouts cost sales. Checking these weekly — or automating an alert when a product crosses a threshold — is one of the highest-leverage habits a growing store can build.
Customer Reports
All Customers and Most Valuable Customers are self-explanatory, but the two worth paying closest attention to are Customer Distribution by RFM Segment and Customers at Risk of Churning. The first shows you the shape of your customer base — how many Champions vs. how many Hibernating. The second is your early-warning system for customers who used to buy regularly and have gone quiet.
Financial Reports
Financial Summary by Channel ties revenue back to where it came from, and Discounted Orders shows you exactly how much margin your promotions are costing — useful context before your next sale.
"We used to build the 'customers at risk' report manually every month in a spreadsheet. Having it as a live template we can check anytime changed how often we actually look at it — from monthly to weekly."
— Retention Lead, DTC Skincare Brand
When a Template Isn't Enough
Templates cover the questions most stores ask most often, but eventually you'll want something more specific — say, high-value orders from a single channel over a custom date range, grouped by product vendor. That's where a no-code, Excel-style report builder becomes useful: pick your entity, choose your columns from every available field, filter, sort, group with aggregation, and export straight to CSV, Excel, or PDF.
The right approach is usually both: start from a template for the reports you check often, and reach for a custom builder for the one-off questions that come up during a planning meeting. If you want the customer side of this covered automatically too, see how automatic RFM segmentation keeps the "at risk" list current without manual work.