The practice of examining datasets to find patterns, trends, and insights that drive better decisions. This tag covers core analytics concepts, tools, and workflows.
28 articles
Shopify
Your operations lead needs last month's return rate by product category before a vendor call in an hour. She opens Shopify, clicks Export, waits for the CSV, opens it in Google Sheets, spends 20 minutes cleaning column headers, builds a pivot table, and then realizes the export does
Analytics
Every business owner has been told to track their key performance indicators (KPIs). Almost nobody gets told which ones to cut. The result: businesses that track 30 metrics and act on two of them. Or businesses that track nothing and run on gut feel until something goes wrong. Neither approach
Shopify
You had a good month. Shopify says $50,000 in sales, up 10% from last quarter. So you increase your ad budget, reorder your best seller, and plan a promotion. Next month the top line looks even better, but your bank balance tells a different story. Shipping costs spiked, returns
Data Analytics
You have a business question. You want to know why revenue dropped last quarter, or which products have the best margin, or whether your last marketing campaign actually moved the needle. The answer is in your data. But your data is in QuickBooks, Shopify, Google Sheets, and maybe HubSpot - and
Data Strategy
You open your laptop on Monday morning, and the first task is already manual: pull last week's sales from Shopify, match them against ad spend in a separate dashboard, then cross-reference inventory counts in a spreadsheet someone emailed Friday. By 9am you've touched four tools
Competitor Comparison
Power BI alternatives for non-technical teams Power BI is built for organizations with dedicated data modelers, analysts fluent in DAX, and IT teams managing on-prem gateways. Most SMBs searching for alternatives don't have those resources. They have a founder toggling between QuickBooks and Google Sheets, an
Competitor Comparison
Most small teams don't need what Sisense is selling Seven analytics tools handle the work most small teams need, at a fraction of the cost and complexity Sisense charges for. Sisense starts at $399/month and scales to $1,299/month on a credit-based model built around
Data Analytics
Most Shopify analytics apps solve one problem well but leave operators combining separate tools manually Most Shopify analytics apps specialize in one category (attribution, profit tracking, or behavior analysis), which means store owners end up managing three tools to get one complete picture. Shopify's built-in reports tell
Business Intelligence
Most startups under $5M in annual revenue do not need a business intelligence (BI) platform yet. (For subscription businesses, read "$5M" as $5M ARR, or annual recurring revenue.) They need BI when reporting becomes recurring, multi-source, team-wide, and slow enough to affect decisions. Before that point,
Data Analytics
Every article about data-driven decisions opens the same way. There's a McKinsey statistic. There's Netflix deciding to commission House of Cards based on 30 million viewing patterns. There's a flowchart with five steps. None of it shows you what a data-driven decision
Analytics
Why merchants are looking beyond Triple Whale The best alternatives to Triple Whale for Shopify fall into three categories: deeper attribution tools like Northbeam and Cometly, profit tracking apps like TrueProfit, and broader analytics platforms like AnalysisGPT that let you ask plain-English questions across connected data sources without a
Analytics
Most analytics listicles recommend tools built for teams with a dedicated analyst or a full-time data person. That's not helpful if you're running a five-person ecommerce operation and need answers between shipping orders and updating ad campaigns. The tools below were filtered for one