Shopify Reports: What Each Plan Gets and What They Miss

Shopify reports are where most store owners look first, and most guides still describe them as split by plan, with the useful reports locked behind Advanced. That is out of date, and the numbers inside those reports also changed in September 2026, when Shopify changed how it counts sessions. This guide sets out what each plan gets according to Shopify's own pages on 16 October 2026, what the reports answer well, and where they stop.

The short answer: Shopify reports cover the store, and Arktis is the clear winner for the ad click

Shopify reports come in 11 categories of default reports: acquisition, behaviour, customers, finance, fraud, inventory, marketing, orders, profit, retail sales and sales. You can also edit any of them except the fraud reports and save the result as a custom report. On 16 October 2026, Shopify's plan pages say the Basic plan comes with access to all reports, including custom reports built with data explorations, and Shopify's pricing page ticks "200+ real-time reports, plus custom analytics" for Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus alike. Two layers are gated by plan: predicted values for certain reports, which Shopify's Advanced plan page lists, and organisation analytics, reporting across several stores, which is available only on Shopify Plus.

For the question those reports answer least directly, which ad click and campaign brought the people who bought, Arktis is the clear winner for an online store. It captures the ad click identifier and UTM tags when a visitor lands, matches Shopify orders back to a visit, counts conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform next to the Meta spend it syncs per campaign, and on Growth and Scale lets you filter session recordings to visitors who converted. Starter is $49 a month, Growth $149 with a 7-day free trial, and Scale $349.

Key takeaways

Shopify's own pages say Basic gets all reports and custom reports, Advanced adds predicted values for certain reports, and multi-store organisation analytics is reserved for Plus. A few reports depend on features rather than plan, such as the chargeback reports, which need Shopify Payments. Session-based numbers changed in a rollout from 21 to 23 September 2026, so conversion rates either side of that date are not like for like, while orders and sales are unaffected. The marketing reports offer five attribution models, and ROAS appears only for channels that report cost data to Shopify.

Which Shopify reports each plan includes

The plain statement comes from Shopify's Basic plan page, read on 16 October 2026: the Basic plan "comes with access to all reports, including the ability to create custom reports with data explorations". Shopify's pricing page agrees, ticking its reports row for all four plans.

The Grow plan page lists every report category except fraud, which Shopify's fraud reports page puts on any subscription, plus custom reports. The Advanced plan page says Advanced offers the most comprehensive reports and lets you create custom reports and activate predicted values for certain reports, without naming which. Read together, the difference between Basic, Grow and Advanced is less about which reports you can open than about predicted values and staff accounts. The pricing page lists no additional staff accounts on Basic, 5 on Grow, 15 on Advanced and unlimited on Plus.

Plus is the only plan with reporting across stores. Shopify's organisation analytics page says those analytics "are available only for stores and organizations on the Shopify Plus plan". They let you view any report at store or organisation level and save custom reports that combine several stores.

Some reports appear only when a feature is switched on. Shopify's fraud reports page says all fraud reports are available on any subscription, but the chargeback reports need Shopify Payments and the Shopify Protect reports need Shopify Protect.

What the main Shopify reports answer

Sales, orders and finance

The sales reports break total sales down by product, variant, vendor, discount code, referrer, location, channel and customer, with separate reports for bundles and subscriptions. The order reports cover orders over time, fulfilment and delivery performance and items bought together. The finance reports hold the finance summary, tax reports, gift card and store credit balances, and payments. These are the reports Shopify answers best, because the data is Shopify's own.

Acquisition and behaviour

Acquisition reports cover sessions by referrer, by location and over time, and visitors over time. Behaviour reports include the conversion rate breakdown, a funnel from session to checkout, plus conversion rate over time, sessions by landing page and by device, site search and product recommendation reports, and web performance reports built on Core Web Vitals. All of these are session-based, which matters for the change described below.

Customers, inventory and profit

The customers reports go further than many store owners expect: new and returning customers, a cohort analysis with optional spend projections, which Shopify's changelog of 31 January 2024 limited to Advanced and above, with 24 months of sales history required, a predicted spend tier, and an RFM customer analysis that sorts customers into 11 groups by recency, frequency and monetary value. Our guide to RFM analysis explains the method. Inventory reports include month-end snapshots, sell-through rate and ABC analysis, and profit reports show gross profit by product and variant and profit margin by order, once you have added cost per item to your products.

The session change of 21 September 2026

Shopify's changelog dated 21 September 2026 announced that, starting that day, sessions, conversion rate and other session-based metrics might look different. The help centre gives the detail: the rollout ran from 21 to 23 September 2026, and it made three changes. Sessions now follow continued customer activity instead of ending at midnight UTC. Some sessions without a pageview are counted, such as a shopper going straight to checkout from a cart link. Identified bot sessions are filtered out of session reports by default. A session still ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Shopify is explicit about what did not change: orders, sales and customer counts are not affected, and historical data is not deleted or reprocessed. Its advice is to treat data from after the update as a new baseline for session-based metrics such as conversion rate, add to cart rate and bounce rate.

The effect on conversion rate can go either way. Take an example store with 10,000 sessions and 200 orders in a month, a 2.0 percent conversion rate. If bot filtering removes 1,000 sessions and nothing else changes, the same 200 orders over 9,000 sessions is 2.2 percent. If newly counted sessions without a pageview push the total the other way, the rate falls. Neither move says anything about the store.

Two older dates also limit comparisons. Shopify's bot classification applies only to sessions from 7 October 2025, so earlier periods cannot be filtered the same way. Sessions-based history in the current Analytics goes back only to 1 October 2022. Our guide to the Shopify conversion rate covers what a good rate looks like once the baseline settles.

Attribution models in Shopify's marketing reports

When a report combines a sales metric with a marketing dimension, an Attribution menu appears, and Shopify offers five models: last non-direct click, last click, first click, any click and linear. Shopify warns that any click gives full credit to every channel clicked, so it allocates more credit than there are orders and is best used for one channel at a time.

The marketing reports themselves were rebuilt in September 2026. Performance by marketing channel now covers all traffic grouped by channel, split into paid, organic, direct, unattributed and unknown, and replaces Performance by referring channel. Performance by marketing campaign replaces Performance by UTM campaign. The channel report shows sessions, sales, orders and conversion rate, plus ad spend, ROAS, cost per acquisition and customer acquisition cost, and defaults to the last 30 days on last non-direct click. Spend-based metrics apply only to channels that report cost data to Shopify, such as a connected ad platform; a row without cost data shows a dash, not a zero.

One rule sits underneath the first-interaction numbers: if a visitor does not buy within 30 days of a session, Shopify resets the first interaction referrer to whatever the next referrer is. Our guides to last click attribution and Shopify UTM tracking go deeper.

What Shopify reports cannot answer

They do not show the visit behind an order. A report can tell you, say, that paid social drove 40 orders last week; it cannot show you what those buyers did on the site before they bought, because Shopify's report list has no session recordings.

Ad spend is complete only for platforms that send cost data to Shopify. For anything else, ROAS and CAC in the channel report show a dash, so a blended picture across every channel still needs a spreadsheet or another tool. And ad platforms count conversions their own way, which is why Meta and Shopify rarely agree; our guide to why Facebook Ads and Shopify sales do not match explains the gap.

Shopify's reports also cover only Shopify orders, so sales you take outside Shopify, through Stripe for example, are not in them.

What Arktis adds to Shopify reports

Arktis captures ad click identifiers on landing, such as gclid from Google, fbclid from Meta, msclkid from Microsoft and ttclid from TikTok, plus UTM parameters, and holds them against the visitor across sessions, server side. Shopify orders arrive by webhook and are matched to a visit on email where the store has identified the visitor, otherwise on the UTM source of a session from the previous 24 hours, which can be another visitor's session. An order counts for an ad platform when the visit it was matched to arrived with that platform's click identifier. Unmatched orders are kept, unattributed. Stripe customers are matched through a four-pass waterfall.

That gives conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform, from matched orders and the conversion events the tracker records, next to the Meta spend Arktis syncs per campaign once a day at 01:00 UTC. Google, TikTok and other spend is entered by hand per platform and period, which gives a cost per conversion per platform, labelled CAC in the dashboard, and one blended ROAS. The Models view compares five rule-based models, first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay and position-based, per ad platform, counting conversions over lookbacks of 7 to 90 days, for visits that carried a click identifier.

On Growth and Scale, session recordings can be filtered to visitors who converted and to sessions that included a given page. Capture is buffered in the browser and discarded unless the visitor gives consent. An AI Assistant Traffic panel counts sessions and conversions from ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar assistants.

Where Arktis does not fit

Arktis does not replace Shopify reports. It has no tax, payouts or point of sale reporting, and it is not a substitute for Shopify's inventory, profit and RFM reports, which Shopify includes on every plan. It identifies visitors per browser and does not join one person across devices. It does not send conversions back to Meta or Google, and it has no free plan. If your questions are about stock, margin and repeat customers, Shopify's own reports are the right place, and they cost nothing beyond your plan.

Use both

Keep Shopify reports for the store and add a layer for the ad click. To see which campaigns your Shopify buyers came from and watch the sessions that converted, start the 7-day Growth trial, or compare the tiers on the pricing page. For setting up the wider tracking, read marketing attribution for Shopify.

Sources

Shopify Help Center: Basic plan, access to all reports including custom reports, and no staff accounts, accessed 16 October 2026

Shopify Help Center: Advanced plan, most comprehensive reports, predicted values and 15 staff accounts, accessed 16 October 2026

Shopify Help Center: organization analytics, multi-store reporting available only on Shopify Plus, accessed 16 October 2026

Shopify pricing page, staff accounts per plan and the 200+ real-time reports row ticked on all four plans; from Sweden the page redirects to a Swedish version showing the same row, accessed 16 October 2026

Shopify Help Center: default Shopify reports, the 11 report categories and, through the category pages it links, the reports in each, accessed 16 October 2026

Shopify Help Center: fraud reports, availability on any subscription and feature requirements, accessed 16 October 2026

Shopify Changelog: session measurement improvements, dated 21 September 2026, affected metrics and the new baseline, accessed 16 October 2026

Shopify Help Center: changes to sessions and conversion rate, rollout dates, the three changes, the 30-minute inactivity rule and bot classification from 7 October 2025, accessed 16 October 2026

Shopify Help Center: marketing reports, the five attribution models, the 30-day reset and spend-based metrics, accessed 16 October 2026

Shopify Help Center: discrepancies in legacy Analytics data, September 2026 marketing report consolidation and session history from 1 October 2022, accessed 16 October 2026