The most common cause is cash on delivery. Atlas excludes cash on delivery orders from all revenue tracking, so a store that sells mainly through COD will show close to zero in Atlas while Shopify shows real sales. Test orders, unpaid orders and refunded orders are excluded for the same reason. This is deliberate, not a fault, and it does not mean Atlas has stopped working.
In this article:
Why Atlas excludes these orders
Atlas revenue figures exist to answer one question: how much extra money did Atlas make for you? An order that was never paid for cannot answer that question honestly.
Excluded from all Atlas revenue tracking:
Excluded | Why |
Cash on delivery orders | No payment has been taken, and many are never completed |
Test and bogus payment gateways | Not real revenue |
Unpaid, refunded, partially refunded or voided orders | The money was never received or was returned |
Unusually large orders compared with your recent average | Almost always test orders |
Exceptionally high value orders | Held back and flagged for review |
Orders with no payment gateway recorded | Cannot be verified |
How to confirm this is what is happening
Open your Shopify admin and go to Orders.
Look at the Payment status column for your recent orders. Anything showing as pending, unpaid or refunded is excluded from Atlas.
Open one paid order and check the payment method. If it is a cash on delivery app, that order is excluded.
Compare the count. If most of your orders are COD or unpaid, an Atlas figure of zero is exactly what you should expect.
ℹ️ This is separate from, but often found alongside, a second COD issue: a checkout that bypasses the Shopify cart will not receive Atlas discounts at all. If your bundle discounts are also not applying, see Why don't Atlas discounts apply with my third-party checkout or COD app?
What this means for your bill
It works in your favour. Bundle revenue and cart drawer orders are two of the three things Atlas charges usage on, and excluded orders do not count towards either. A store running on cash on delivery will stay in the included tier for both far longer than its Shopify revenue suggests.
Published pages are unaffected by any of this, because pages are counted when you publish them rather than when you sell something.
What you can do
There is no setting that makes Atlas count these orders, and that is intentional.
What you can do instead:
Use Shopify's own reports as the source of truth for your total sales.
Use Atlas for the comparison it does well: which bundle or cart offer performs better than another. Those comparisons stay valid even when the absolute figures are low, because the same exclusions apply to every offer.
If you switch some traffic to prepaid checkout, that revenue will start appearing in Atlas.
If none of this applies
If your orders are paid, are not cash on delivery, and are not refunded, but Atlas still shows zero, start a chat from the bubble in the bottom right of Atlas, or email support@helloatlas.io, and include:
your store URL
two or three order numbers that should have been counted
the date range you are looking at
Include the order numbers. Support can check exactly which exclusion rule each one hit, which is much faster than working backwards from a total.