How-to · Shopify

How to analyze Shopify sales without SQL

Connect Shopify to Tablize and ask about sales, top SKUs, margin after returns, and cohorts in plain English — no SQL, no CSV exports.

Most Shopify reporting stops at the numbers the admin dashboard hands you: gross sales, a few top products, a conversion rate. The questions that actually change decisions — true margin after returns, which cohort is slipping, which “bestseller” is quietly unprofitable — require joining orders, line items, refunds, and cost data. That usually means exporting CSVs and building pivot tables. With Tablize you just ask.

Why Shopify sales analysis is harder than it looks

A single sale touches several tables. Revenue lives on the order; the real money lives in the line items minus refunds, discounts, and cost of goods. Shopify’s own reports rarely net all of that out, so the “top SKU” by gross revenue can be a loss-maker once you subtract returns and ad spend. Answering it by hand means stitching exports together every time.

Connect Shopify

Connect your store in a couple of clicks — see the Shopify integration guide. Orders, line items, customers, products, and refunds sync into your workspace, and Tablize learns the schema so it knows how they relate. Syncs are incremental, so after the first backfill only new and changed records move.

Ask in plain English

Once connected, ask the way you’d ask an analyst. The agent writes the SQL, runs it on your live data, draws the chart, and explains the result — and shows you the query if you want to check it. The questions below are good starting points; tweak any of them to your store.

Keep it running

When an answer matters, keep it: save a weekly margin report, schedule a Monday sales brief, or build a dashboard that refreshes nightly. Browse ready-made analysis templates, or point Tablize at your database directly and chat with your data as your store grows beyond Shopify’s reports.

Questions to ask once connected

  • "Which SKUs lost the most margin last week after returns?"
  • "Show cohort retention by signup month for the last 12 months."
  • "What are my top movers and slow movers this month?"
  • "Forecast next week's revenue from the last 90 days of orders."

Try it on your own Shopify data — free, first answer in under a minute.