Overview: Shopify's new Multi-store Analytics

Shopify just announced support for multi-store analytics. It's been a long-requested feature from merchants, so many will be glad that its finally native to Shopify. So, now that its finally here, how useful is it?

Eligibility

The bad news: multi-store analytics is locked behind the Shopify Plus paywall. Based on recent statistics, that means it's only available to the 1% of merchants paying about $2,500 per month for the top Shopify plan.

How to activate multi-store analytics in the Shopify admin panel

1. You have to be a Plus subscriber
2. Make sure you have the correct permissions. If you're a store owner or admin, these should be enabled by default. The permission you need is the "Analytics Overview" permission in the "Organization" section
3. You should now see an "Organization Overview" section in the Analytics section of the admin panel. If you've modified your analytics front page, you may need to search for it.
4. There will be a 'Stores' button with a small logo, next to the usual filters for time, comparison period and currency conversion. Clicking that opens a dropdown where you can select/deselect stores to filter the data.
5. The same button will be in any report, so you can filter those too.

Pros

This change makes it much easier for Plus stores who want to know their overall organization sales at a glance. Other useful features include:

• Currency conversion. Many sellers operate multiple stores for different geographies, so being able to convert back into a home currency is great
• ShopifyQL integration. ShopifyQL (Query Language) is Shopify's SQL-like coding language to generate analytics reports. It's loved by some power users, but more complex than most merchants want.

Cons

There's still some key features missing, like:

• Being able to track the same product across multiple stores. These still have distinct IDs, and grouping by metafield (commonly used to tag the same product across stores) is unsupported by Shopify. This makes it hard to see bestselling product performance or inventory levels across stores.
• In fact, if your stores share inventory and you use a third-party app to sync stock levels across stores, you may see duplicate inventory entries in your multi-store reports
• Merging customers can also skew customer data and cohort analyses.
• General poor quality of Shopify's analytics. Shopify's analytics discrepancies and update delays are well known, and all still apply to the multi-store setup.

On the whole, there will often only be some metrics you want to track on an organization level, and many that you want to track per store. Shopify's multi-store analytics is a blunt tool to do this. You're constantly going to need to toggle the selected stores, or create duplicate reports with different filters to get what you need.

As a result, many Plus subscribers are not interested in using Shopify's multi-store analytics and are pursuing their own solutions instead.

Alternatives

There are two great alternatives purpose-built for multi-store analytics on Shopify.

1. retailQ. We are a dedicated, multi-store analytics platform for Shopify. On retailQ, you get up-to-date data (synced twice a day and on demand), currency conversion, merging of product/customer data, multiple timezone support and so much more.
2. Ecomsolo. A longer established multi store analytics platform, Ecomsolo provides a lot of functionality like custom reports and scheduled report sends. Both Ecomsolo and retailQ support an unlimited number of stores.