Reporting on sales and returns against sizes or variants in Shopify

I was recently asked to look at how different sizes perform (against a number of metrics, that would then be cross-referenced against availability) for one of our paid media clients – with the objective of then looking at how the availability of items impacts Google Shopping performance.

Although this is a relatively quick and easy report to build – I decided to write up how I created it to help others looking for the same information in Shopify. It’s worth noting that I also added in the returns column to understand the profitability of sizes (to support marketing and merchandising), but this may not be needed for your report.

So, the first thing you need to do is go to the top products report in Shopify, which can be found in the analytics section. If you click this, it’ll take you to the report below.

In this case, the variant title contains the size (along with colour, for a fashion retailer) and I’m then using net quantity, gross sales and returns to report back on. I’ve also added the returns and variant title columns into this report (which can be done by clicking edit columns) and I then exported this report into a CSV.

Once I pulled this into Excel, I then used the following formula to take references of size (as they’re combined with colour) and add a separate label in a separate column.

I then did a ‘SUMIF’ formula to add sales, revenue and returns against each size. I then also added a column for % of total against each, which was very interesting. We ended up using this data to dictate bids against products on Google Shopping, as it turned out that products, where the XS and S were out of stock, weren’t profitable or performing well generally. We also found conclusions around higher sizes having higher returns, which is interesting.

It’s worth noting that I ended up creating this same report by month to come to this conclusion and cross-referencing against when the sizes were out of stock.

Overall, this is a really useful report for Shopify users looking to merchandise their site (as if the most popular sizes aren’t available, items are less likely to sell) and also drive marketing activity.

If you have any questions on this, please feel free to email me or add them in the comments below.