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Shopify Terms & Definitions

Shopify Terms & Definitions

This article includes Shopify's terms and definitions for sales data.

Written by Abby Garland

Updated over a week ago

In some cases, Shopify defines data points differently than Polar. We've compiled this list of Shopify sales terms & their definitions to make it easy for you to see the differences.

Shopify sales reports use the following common terms:

Units per transaction	Equates to net quantity / total_orders.
Average order value	The average value of a staff's sales.
Orders	The number of orders that were placed on a given date.
Gross sales	Equates to product price x quantity (before taxes, shipping, discounts, and returns) for a collection of sales. Canceled, pending, and unpaid orders are included. Test and deleted orders are not included.
Discounts	Equates to line item discount + order level discount share for a collection of sales. The total dollar value reduction applied to a sale in the form of discounts on specific products or collections, or all products. Discounts that are applied to an all products in an order are proportionally applied to the sales for the order. All discounts are applied before taxes. Discounts are created using discount codes, not the compare at price.
Returns	The value of goods returned by a customer.
Net sales	Equates to gross sales - discounts - returns.
Shipping	Equates to shipping charges - shipping discounts - refunded shipping amounts.
Tax	The total amount of taxes based on the orders.
Duties	The total amount of duties based on the orders. Duties appear by default only on applicable reports for stores that have enabled the collection of duties and import tax at checkout. Duties do not currently appear on the following reports: Sales by product Sales by product variant SKU Sales by product vendor Sales by discount
Total sales	Equates to gross sales - discounts - returns + taxes + duties + shipping charges. Total sales will be a positive number for a sale on the date that an order was placed, and a negative number for a return on the date that an order was returned.

Note:

Canceled, pending, and unpaid orders are included in Shopify sales reports. Test and deleted orders are not included.
Gift cards are not included in Shopify sales reports because they are liabilities (you can read more about this on the Shopify Community here). However, gift cards are included in Polar's sales reports.

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