Tracking Your Total Sales on Shopify for Better Business Insights

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Shopify Analytics Dashboard: A Bird's Eye View
3. Decoding the Shopify Total Sales Formula
4. Step-by-Step: How to Access Detailed Sales Reports
5. Why "Total Sales" Isn't the Same as Profit
6. The Advantage of Native Shopify Integration for Sales Tracking
7. Using Sales Data to Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
8. Analyzing Sales by Channel and Product Type
9. Avoiding the "Success Fee" Trap in Your Sales Metrics
10. The Role of Shipping and Taxes in Your Sales View
11. Practical Scenario: The Boutique Coffee Roaster
12. Managing Refunds and Discounts in Your Reports
13. Exporting Your Data for Deeper Analysis
14. Tips for Maintaining Accurate Sales Records
15. Leveraging Shopify Finance Reports
16. Setting Realistic Expectations for Your Sales Growth
17. Conclusion
18. Frequently Asked Questions

Introduction

Did you know that the global e-learning market is projected to reach nearly $400 billion by 2026? For many Shopify merchants, this represents a massive opportunity to pivot or expand from traditional physical goods into the high-margin world of digital products. However, as you scale your offerings—blending hoodies with masterclasses or coffee beans with barista training—your accounting can quickly become a maze. One of the most common questions we hear from store owners is: "How do I accurately see my total sales on Shopify?" It sounds like a basic query, but the difference between "Total Sales," "Gross Sales," and "Net Sales" can mean the difference between a profitable quarter and a financial headache.

Understanding your numbers is the bedrock of sustainable growth. At Tevello, our mission is to turn any Shopify store into a digital learning powerhouse, and part of that power comes from having a crystal-clear view of your financial health. If you don’t know exactly how much money is coming through your checkout—and what that money represents—you cannot effectively reinvest in your marketing or product development.

In this guide, we will break down exactly how to see total sales on Shopify, explain the math behind the metrics, and show you how to leverage these insights to increase your brand's lifetime value. We’ll cover everything from the basic analytics dashboard to deep-dive financial reports, ensuring you have the tools to manage both your physical and digital inventory with professional precision.

The Shopify Analytics Dashboard: A Bird's Eye View

The most immediate way to see your total sales is through the Shopify Analytics Home. When you log in to your admin panel and click on "Analytics," you are greeted by the "Total Sales" card. This dashboard is your store's pulse. It provides a real-time summary of your sales across all active channels, whether you are selling through your online store, a POS system, or a social media integration.

However, the "Total Sales" figure shown on this main dashboard is a composite number. To truly understand your business, you need to know how Shopify calculates this. In the native Shopify environment, Total Sales is not just the price of the products you sold. It is a comprehensive figure that includes the product price, shipping costs, taxes, and even tips, minus any discounts or refunds you’ve processed.

For a merchant just starting out, this top-level view is often enough to gauge daily performance. But as your store grows, especially if you are integrating digital products via Tevello, you will need to dig deeper. Seeing how the app natively integrates with Shopify allows you to view these digital sales right alongside your physical product revenue, providing a unified financial picture without having to log into multiple platforms.

Decoding the Shopify Total Sales Formula

To master your store's finances, you must understand the "Shopify Math." The platform uses a specific hierarchy to arrive at the total sales figure you see in your reports.

Gross Sales vs. Net Sales

Gross sales are the starting point. This is simply the product price multiplied by the quantity sold. If you sell 50 digital courses at $100 each, your gross sales are $5,000.

To get to Net Sales, Shopify subtracts:

• Discounts: Any coupon codes or automatic discounts applied at checkout.
• Returns: The value of any products or services that were refunded during the selected period.

The Final Calculation for Total Sales

Once you have your Net Sales, Shopify adds back the following to reach Total Sales:

• Shipping: The amount your customers paid for shipping (which may be zero for digital-only stores).
• Taxes: All sales taxes collected based on the customer’s location.
• Duties: For international sales, any duties collected.
• Tips: If you have the tipping feature enabled at checkout.

The resulting formula looks like this: Total Sales = (Gross Sales – Discounts – Returns) + Shipping + Taxes + Duties + Tips.

Understanding this formula is vital because it explains why your "Total Sales" might be $10,000, but your bank deposit is significantly less. At Tevello, we advocate for predictable pricing without hidden transaction fees, which helps simplify this math. When you use our Unlimited Plan, you don't have to subtract an additional "success fee" or percentage from your sales for the platform, which is a common hidden cost in many other course platforms.

Step-by-Step: How to Access Detailed Sales Reports

If the dashboard doesn't provide enough detail, you need to use the "Reports" section of Shopify. Here is how you can find and customize your total sales data:

1. Navigate to Analytics > Reports: From your Shopify admin, select Analytics and then click on Reports.
2. Locate Sales Reports: You will see a category specifically for "Sales." Click on "Show All" to see the full list of available reports.
3. Select "Sales Over Time": This is the most versatile report for seeing total sales. It allows you to see how your revenue is trending daily, weekly, or monthly.
4. Adjust the Date Range: In the top right corner, you can select the specific period you want to analyze. This is crucial for comparing year-over-year growth or checking the success of a specific launch.
5. Add Filters and Columns: This is where the real power lies. You can click the "Manage Columns" icon to add "Gross Sales," "Net Sales," or "Discounts" to your view. You can also filter by "Product Type" to see exactly how your digital courses are performing compared to your physical merch.

For many merchants, the goal is keeping customers at home on the brand website while they browse these products. By looking at these reports, you can see if your strategy is working. Are customers who buy a physical product also purchasing a digital add-on in the same transaction? Your Shopify reports will tell you exactly how those sales are bundled.

Why "Total Sales" Isn't the Same as Profit

A common mistake for new entrepreneurs is equating total sales with profit. As the formula above shows, total sales includes taxes and shipping—money that passes through your hands but doesn't stay there.

Furthermore, total sales does not account for your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) or your operating expenses. If you are selling physical goods, you have to subtract the cost of manufacturing, storage, and shipping labels. This is why many merchants are moving toward digital products.

Consider a merchant selling specialized gardening tools. While the tool sales contribute to the total sales figure, the profit margin is squeezed by rising shipping costs and raw material prices. By generating revenue from both physical and digital goods, that same merchant can offer a "Mastering the Home Garden" video course. The digital course has a near-zero COGS after the initial creation, meaning a much higher percentage of that "Total Sale" remains as net profit.

When you start your 14-day free trial and build your first course now, you are effectively building a high-margin revenue stream that improves your overall business health without increasing your logistics burden.

The Advantage of Native Shopify Integration for Sales Tracking

One of the biggest headaches for e-commerce owners is "fragmented data." If you use an external platform to sell your courses or memberships, your total sales on Shopify will only represent a fraction of your business. You end up having to manually export CSV files from two or three different platforms and stitch them together in Excel just to see if you made money this month.

We believe merchants should own their customer data and brand experience. This is why Tevello is built as a native Shopify app. When you sell a course, it happens through the Shopify checkout. This means:

• The sale is immediately reflected in your Shopify Total Sales reports.
• The customer uses their existing Shopify account.
• You use the payment gateways (like Shopify Payments, PayPal, or Stripe) that you already trust.
• Your conversion tracking and Facebook Pixel data stay accurate and unified.

By solving login issues by moving to a native platform, you aren't just making it easier for your customers; you're making your accounting life significantly simpler. You can see your total sales for the day and know that it includes every single cent earned across your entire ecosystem.

Using Sales Data to Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Once you know how to see total sales on Shopify, the next step is using that data to grow. High total sales are great, but high Customer Lifetime Value is the key to a long-term business.

Look at your "Sales by Customer" report. Are there customers who have bought from you multiple times? These are your brand advocates. If you notice a high volume of one-time physical product buyers, this is a prime opportunity to introduce a membership or a digital product.

For example, a store selling photography equipment can see in their Shopify reports that a customer just bought a high-end lens. That’s a great addition to the total sales for the month. But what happens next month? By retention strategies that drive repeat digital purchases, that store can offer a "Cinematic Lighting Masterclass" or a monthly "Pro-Photographer Community" membership.

This transforms a one-off transaction into a recurring relationship. Because Tevello allows for all the key features for courses and communities, you can host that community directly on your store. When you review your total sales a few months later, you’ll see those recurring membership fees providing a stable "floor" for your monthly revenue, making your business more predictable and less dependent on constant new customer acquisition.

Analyzing Sales by Channel and Product Type

Shopify allows you to break down your total sales by "Product Type" and "Sales Channel." This is where you can truly see the ROI of your efforts.

If you spend $500 on Instagram ads, you want to know which products those customers are buying. By looking at the "Sales by Product" report, you might find that your digital downloads are outperforming your physical inventory in terms of conversion rate.

If unifying your stack is a priority, start by a simple, all-in-one price for unlimited courses. This allows you to experiment with as many different digital product types as you want—quizzes, drip content, or full-scale video libraries—without worrying about your costs increasing as you add more items to your catalog. You can see exactly which course title or "mini-class" is contributing the most to your total sales, allowing you to double down on what works.

Avoiding the "Success Fee" Trap in Your Sales Metrics

When you are calculating your actual take-home pay from your total sales, you must be wary of transaction fees. Many platforms outside of the Shopify ecosystem (and even some apps within it) charge what they call "success fees." This might be 3%, 5%, or even 10% of every sale you make.

Imagine your store hits $10,000 in total sales for the month. If your course platform takes 5%, that’s $500 gone before you even pay for your ads or Shopify subscription.

At Tevello, we believe that your hard-earned money should stay with you. We offer a flat-rate plan that supports unlimited members for just $29.99 per month. We charge 0% transaction fees. Whether you sell $100 or $100,000 worth of courses this month, your cost to us remains exactly the same. This makes it much easier to project your profit margins because your platform cost is a fixed expense, not a variable one that eats into your growth.

The Role of Shipping and Taxes in Your Sales View

As we discussed in the formula, "Total Sales" includes shipping and taxes. This is often the reason for the "Missing Money" confusion. If you are looking at your Shopify reports and see $1,200 in total sales, but your bank payout is only $1,050, it’s likely that the difference is tied up in:

1. Sales Tax: Money you must remit to the government.
2. Shipping Fees: Money you spent on postage or that was collected to cover shipping costs.
3. Payment Processing Fees: Credit card fees (usually around 2.9% + 30 cents) taken by Shopify Payments or PayPal.

By generating over €243,000 by upselling existing customers, successful merchants often find that increasing their digital mix helps offset these costs. Digital products don't have shipping fees, and because the margins are higher, the payment processing fees feel like less of a burden. When you install Tevello from the Shopify App Store today, you can begin shifting your product mix toward these higher-margin items immediately.

Practical Scenario: The Boutique Coffee Roaster

Let’s look at a practical, real-world scenario to see how tracking total sales works in a blended business model.

Imagine "Mountain Peak Coffee," a Shopify store that sells premium coffee beans. Their total sales are steady, but they want to grow. They install Tevello and create a course called "The Ultimate Home Brewing Guide."

• Week 1: They sell 100 bags of coffee at $20 each. Gross Sales = $2,000.
• Week 1 Digital: They also sell 50 "Home Brewing" courses at $40 each as an upsell on the cart page. Gross Sales = $2,000.
• The Math: Their Shopify Total Sales report will show $4,000 (plus taxes and shipping).

Without the digital product, they would have had to roast, package, and ship 200 bags of coffee to reach that $4,000 figure. By tracking their sales by "Product Type," the owners of Mountain Peak Coffee can see that the digital course contributed 50% of their revenue with 0% of the shipping labor. This insight, found directly in their Shopify reports, allows them to realize they should spend more of their marketing budget promoting the course alongside the beans.

By reviewing the Shopify App Store listing merchants install from, you can see how other merchants are using this exact same logic to diversify their revenue streams and simplify their operations.

Managing Refunds and Discounts in Your Reports

A key part of knowing how to see total sales on Shopify is understanding how the platform handles "negative" money. When you issue a refund, it is subtracted from the "Total Sales" figure for the day the refund was issued, not the day the original sale was made. This can sometimes cause confusion if you are looking at a very short time window.

Similarly, discounts are a "contra-revenue" account. They reduce your gross sales to arrive at net sales. If you run a big "Black Friday" sale, your gross sales might be massive, but your total sales will be lower because of the heavy discounting.

By how one brand sold $112K+ by bundling courses, we can see that strategic discounting and bundling can actually lead to much higher total sales volumes. The key is to use your Shopify reports to monitor your "Average Order Value" (AOV). If your AOV is increasing because you are bundling a digital guide with a physical product, then your discounting strategy is working.

Exporting Your Data for Deeper Analysis

Sometimes, the built-in Shopify charts aren't enough for your accountant or your own deep-dive analysis. In any Shopify report, you have the option to "Export" your data.

Exporting to a CSV file allows you to:

• Perform custom pivot tables in Excel.
• Upload your sales data into accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero.
• Share specific data sets with business partners without giving them full admin access.

When you use a unified login that reduces customer support friction, your data remains clean. There are no "ghost sales" from external platforms that didn't sync correctly. Everything is tied to a Shopify Order ID, making your exported CSVs a source of truth for your business.

Tips for Maintaining Accurate Sales Records

To ensure your "Total Sales" figure is always accurate and useful, follow these best practices:

1. Consistent Tagging: Tag your products correctly as "Digital" or "Physical." This makes filtering your reports much easier.
2. Monitor Your "Other" Sales: Check the "Sales by Channel" report regularly to ensure your POS or social sales are syncing correctly.
3. Account for "Test" Orders: If you are testing your checkout process, remember to delete or archive those orders so they don't inflate your total sales data.
4. Regular Reconciliation: Once a month, compare your Shopify Total Sales report with your bank deposits and payment processor statements to account for fees and timing differences.

Many merchants have found success by migrating over 14,000 members and reducing support tickets through a more streamlined system. When your system is simple, your data is clean. When your data is clean, your business decisions are better.

Leveraging Shopify Finance Reports

For those who need even more detail, Shopify provides a specific "Finance" section under Analytics. The "Finances Summary" provides a comprehensive look at your sales, payments, liabilities, and gross profit.

The Finance reports are particularly useful for seeing:

• Payments: Which payment methods (Shopify Payments, PayPal, etc.) are being used most often.
• Liabilities: Tracking gift card balances and outstanding taxes.
• Total Sales (Adjusted): A view that accounts for returns and cancellations more clearly than the standard sales report.

This level of detail is essential as you scale. If you are managing a growing community, you might be avoiding per-user fees as the community scales by using Tevello's Unlimited plan, but you still need to track the incoming revenue from those memberships. The Finance reports will help you see exactly when that membership revenue hits your account.

Setting Realistic Expectations for Your Sales Growth

While tracking total sales is exciting, it is important to maintain realistic business expectations. E-commerce success is rarely an overnight phenomenon. It requires consistent effort, high-quality products, and a deep understanding of your audience.

Adding digital products is a powerful way to diversify revenue streams, increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), and build recurring revenue stability. However, the app is a tool—a robust one that amplifies your existing efforts. Your total sales will grow as you improve your marketing, refine your product offerings, and provide excellent customer service.

Our goal is to provide an all-in-one ecosystem where physical products, digital courses, and community engagement live side-by-side. This holistic approach is what leads to sustainable, long-term growth. When you look at your total sales on Shopify, we want you to see a diverse, healthy business that isn't dependent on a single product or a single marketing tactic.

Conclusion

Understanding how to see total sales on Shopify is the first step in taking full control of your e-commerce destiny. From the basic dashboard to the detailed Finance reports, Shopify provides the data you need to steer your ship. By mastering the formula of Gross Sales, Net Sales, and the additions of shipping and taxes, you can move past the "top-line" vanity metrics and start focusing on real, sustainable profit.

Integrating digital products and communities into your store is one of the most effective ways to boost those numbers while keeping your overhead low. With our Unlimited Plan for $29.99 per month and 0% transaction fees, you can scale your digital empire without being penalized for your success. You keep 100% of what you earn, and your customers stay right where they belong—on your own URL, under your own brand.

To build your community without leaving Shopify, start by reviewing the Shopify App Store listing merchants install from. Install Tevello today to start your 14-day free trial. You can build your entire curriculum and set up your community before paying a cent. Let’s turn your Shopify store into a digital learning powerhouse together.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Does Shopify's Total Sales figure include shipping and taxes?

Yes, Shopify's Total Sales metric is a gross figure that includes the price of the products sold, shipping charges, and all taxes collected. It also includes tips and duties. To see the actual revenue from product sales alone, you should look at the "Net Sales" figure in your reports.

2. How can I see sales for a specific product like a digital course?

You can navigate to Analytics > Reports and select the "Sales by Product" report. From there, you can filter by product title or product type. If you use Tevello, your digital courses will appear here just like any other product, allowing you to see exactly how much revenue your educational content is generating.

3. Why is my Shopify payout different from my Total Sales?

Your payout is usually lower than your Total Sales because Shopify subtracts payment processing fees (like credit card fees), and it does not include the taxes or shipping costs that you must pay out to other parties. Additionally, if you use platforms that charge transaction "success fees," those are also taken out before the money reaches you. Tevello helps keep your payouts higher by charging 0% transaction fees.

4. Can I see total sales for a specific period, like last year?

Absolutely. In any Shopify report or on the main Analytics dashboard, there is a date picker in the top right corner. You can select "Last Year," "Last 30 Days," or set a "Custom" range to compare your performance across any timeframe you choose. This is essential for tracking growth and the success of seasonal promotions.