A sales dashboard should be checkable in under a minute. That means picking metrics with discipline. Here are the 9 worth a permanent spot.
1. Gross Sales
The top-line number, always visible first, with a period-over-period comparison so a change is obvious without doing mental math against last week.
2. Net Sales
Gross sales minus refunds and discounts. The gap between gross and net is worth watching on its own — a widening gap signals a refund or discounting problem before it shows up anywhere else.
3. Order Count
Paired with revenue to separate "more orders" growth from "bigger orders" growth — two very different stories that look identical on a revenue-only chart.
4. Average Order Value (AOV)
One of the fastest levers available — small upsell or bundling changes tend to move AOV faster than driving new traffic moves order count.
5. Refund Rate
Refunds as a percentage of orders. A rising trend usually points to a specific product issue worth catching before it's a pattern.
6. Sales by Channel
For any store selling through more than one channel, this shows which one is actually driving the numbers you're seeing in aggregate.
7. Top-Selling Products
A short, ranked list — useful for restocking decisions and for catching a best-seller that's about to sell out. See inventory analytics for the stock-level metrics that pair with this.
8. New vs. Returning Customer Sales Split
Shows whether sales growth is coming from acquisition or retention — a store growing entirely through new customers has a different risk profile than one with a healthy returning-customer base.
9. Period-Over-Period Trend Chart
A rolling 30-day chart underneath the KPI cards, so a slow decline is visible as a line trending down, not hidden inside a single-period snapshot.
"Cutting our sales dashboard down to these nine metrics made our Monday check faster and, honestly, more useful — we stopped skimming past the important numbers to get to the vanity ones."
— Ecommerce Director, Multi-Brand Shopify Group
For a deeper look at what to check weekly, monthly, and quarterly beyond the daily glance, see our Shopify sales report guide.
