The Best Shopify Dashboard Strategies for Scaling Your Business in 2025

The Best Shopify Dashboard Strategies for Scaling Your Business in 2025

Why basic Shopify reports aren’t enough

Shopify’s built-in analytics provide a good starting point for tracking sales and customer data. However, as your store grows, relying on these reports alone can limit your ability to make data-driven decisions. With data spread across Shopify, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and other platforms, getting a complete picture of your business performance becomes increasingly difficult.

Manually exporting reports and compiling spreadsheets is time-consuming and prone to errors. Without a centralized dashboard, important insights get lost, and optimizing key areas like revenue, customer acquisition, and marketing spend is harder.

A well-structured Shopify dashboard consolidates your data, eliminates manual reporting, and ensures you always have the insights you need to scale your store efficiently.

Where Shopify’s built-in analytics fall short

Many e-commerce businesses start by using Shopify’s default reports, which offer a basic overview of key metrics like sales trends, customer lifetime value, average order value, and conversion rates. However, these dashboards often lack the flexibility to track the most critical data points, especially regarding marketing attribution, multi-store management, and integrating external data sources.

Shopify’s built-in analytics may not provide the level of detail needed to:

• Connect marketing performance with actual sales and revenue
• Track customer acquisition costs across different channels
• Manage multiple Shopify stores efficiently, ensuring consolidated reporting
• Automatically update reports without manual exports

For growing businesses, this lack of visibility can make it harder to optimize operations and maximize profitability. Check out our guide on Shopify data use cases for more details.

Building a Shopify dashboard that drives growth

A Shopify dashboard should do more than just display numbers – it should provide actionable insights that help you scale. The most effective dashboards centralize all relevant data, track key business metrics, and update automatically to ensure accuracy. Here's three ways to build a Shopify dashboard:

1. Using Shopify’s built-in reports

Shopify’s analytics dashboard provides essential data, such as sales trends, order values, and customer reports. For smaller stores, this can be enough to monitor basic performance. However, businesses looking for deeper insights – especially those running ads or operating multiple stores – often find these dashboards too limiting.

2. Manually exporting Shopify data to a BI tool

Some businesses manually export Shopify data to business intelligence tools like Power BI or Looker Studio. These platforms allow for more advanced reporting and custom visualizations, giving you a clearer picture of your store’s performance. However, exporting data manually is time-consuming and doesn’t provide real-time updates, making it difficult to react quickly to changing trends.

3. Automating data integration for real-time insights

Automation is key for businesses managing multiple Shopify stores or consolidating data from marketing platforms like Google Ads, Klaviyo, and Facebook. Instead of manually compiling reports, using a data integration tool ensures that data is continuously synced and updated in real-time.

With an automated data integration tool, Shopify merchants can:

• Sync Shopify data to cloud warehouses like BigQuery, Snowflake, and Amazon S3
• Analyze sales, marketing, and inventory data in BI tools like Power BI, Looker Studio, and Metabase
• Automate reporting, ensuring that teams always have access to the latest performance metrics
• Use reverse ETL to push insights back into platforms like Google Sheets, HubSpot, and Klaviyo for better decision-making

By centralizing data with an automation tool, businesses can eliminate manual work, reduce errors, and confidently make data-driven decisions.

Understanding Shopify’s data structure and modeling

Shopify’s data is structured in a nested JSON format, which can make querying and reporting more complex. Orders, products, and customer data are stored in hierarchical relationships rather than simple tables, requiring transformation for effective analysis.

For example, orders may contain multiple transactions, products may belong to different collections, and customer histories require data joins across various tables. This complexity makes it challenging to create unified business metrics and optimize marketing strategies. Since every Shopify store operates differently – tracking unique metrics, categorizing products in various ways, and structuring promotions distinctively – having a flexible data model is crucial. This is where data modeling plays a critical role, enabling businesses to standardize Shopify data for more effective decision-making.

With Weld’s AI-powered assistant, Ed, businesses can streamline SQL query generation, making it easier to build custom metrics and dashboards tailored to their store’s needs. Instead of manually restructuring data, Weld automatically converts Shopify’s JSON-based structure into query-ready tables, helping teams:

• Track performance across multiple stores in a unified view.
• Accurately measure the impact of marketing campaigns.
• Gain deeper insights into customer behavior and lifetime value.

For a deeper understanding of how Shopify’s data structure works, check out our Shopify data diagram.

Setting up your Shopify dashboard with Weld

With a tool like Weld, setting up a Shopify dashboard is simple:

1. Sync Shopify data alongside other sources like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Klaviyo.
2. Transform and model data using SQL or Weld’s AI assistant, Ed, to simplify complex queries.
3. Visualize insights in BI tools like Power BI, Looker Studio, or Metabase to track performance trends.
4. Automate reporting, ensuring that reports are always up to date.

For those who prefer working in spreadsheets, Weld also supports data syncing into Google Sheets and Excel, making it easy to analyze trends and share insights without leaving familiar tools. Learn more about Shopify + Weld integration.

Watch our webinar on building Shopify dashboards

We recently hosted a webinar demonstrating how to connect Shopify data, automate reporting, and build a Power BI dashboard to track revenue, refunds, and trends.

📺 Watch the full webinar recording

Additional resources

For more insights on improving Shopify reporting, check out these resources:

• Shopify + Weld integration guide
• Learn how to create a Shopify dashboard in Looker Studio with Weld
• Get our Shopify SQL templates
• Read our Ultimate guide to scaling your ecommerce with data
• Discover how Holafly tranformed data management with Weld
• Read about how Roccamore unlocked better insights with Weld
• How to extract Shopify data with Weld
• Browse all data tables available for Shopify

Final thoughts

A Shopify dashboard is more than just a reporting tool – it’s the foundation for making smarter business decisions. Whether you use Shopify’s built-in analytics, a BI platform, or an integration tool like Weld, ensuring that your data is accurate, automated, and actionable is key to scaling successfully.

By eliminating manual reporting, consolidating data from multiple sources, and automating updates, you can focus on what really matters: growing your store.