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What is Total Sales?

What is Total Sales?

Updated over 2 months ago

When reviewing your revenue data in Strique, you'll come across three core figures: Gross Sales, Net Sales, and Total Sales. Each of these represents a different stage in your revenue lifecycle, and together, they offer a complete view of your store’s financial performance.

Here, we’ll focus on total sales.

What Does Total Sales Mean?

Total Sales reflects the actual amount of money received from the customer after all adjustments have been made to the order. This includes not only the product value, but also additional charges like shipping and taxes, minus any discounts or returns.

In Strique, this is calculated using the following formula:

Total Sales = Gross Sales – Discounts – Returns + Taxes + Shipping Charges + Fees

This number represents the final revenue from a transaction. It’s the closest representation of how much your business has truly earned from customer orders.

What’s Included and Excluded

To better understand what Total Sales captures, it’s helpful to break it down into what’s added and subtracted.

Included:

  • The base product price

  • Shipping charges (if paid by the customer)

  • Applicable sales tax or VAT

  • Platform or handling fees, if applicable

Subtracted:

  • Any discount or promotion applied at checkout

  • Returned or refunded items

Total Sales will be a positive number when an order is placed and a negative number when an order is refunded. This allows for more accurate trend analysis and better visibility into your real-time revenue.

Total Sales vs. Gross Sales vs. Net Sales

Here’s how Total Sales differs from the other common metrics:

  • Gross Sales only reflects the original product price times quantity ordered. It does not account for discounts, returns, or additional charges.

  • Net Sales adjusts Gross Sales by subtracting discounts and returns, but it excludes shipping charges and taxes.

  • Total Sales brings everything together: it starts with Gross Sales, subtracts returns and discounts, and adds back any taxes, shipping, or fees that were charged to the customer.

This makes Total Sales the most comprehensive sales metric in Strique.

Why Total Sales Matters

Total Sales gives you a more accurate reflection of the revenue your business is actually bringing in. It’s especially useful when you’re:

  • Analyzing the financial impact of taxes and shipping charges

  • Calculating key marketing metrics like ROAS and ROI

  • Comparing revenue performance across different sales channels or locations

  • Auditing the financial contribution of promotions, discounts, and returns

When combined with Net and Gross Sales, Total Sales helps you identify where revenue is increasing or leaking—whether it's through frequent returns, heavy discounting, or unexpected fees.

Where You’ll See Total Sales in Strique

Strique pulls Total Sales data from connected platforms like Shopify, Amazon Seller Central, and GA4. It’s available in:

  • Product Performance Reports

  • Amazon and DTC dashboards

  • Manager’s Overview

  • Custom reports with scheduled delivery

The metric updates in real time, aligning with your active campaigns and sales cycles so you can monitor performance as it happens.

Understanding Total Sales is key to evaluating the health of your business. It not only shows how much your products are worth at checkout—it tells you what your customers actually paid and what your business retained after all the variables were accounted for.

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