What is an e-commerce dashboard?
An e-commerce dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Shopify, Google Analytics, Amazon Seller Central) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., sales, conversion rates, average order value), enabling teams to monitor store performance and create presentations for stakeholders and executives.
E-commerce dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in an e-commerce dashboard?
An actionable e-commerce dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive e-commerce dashboards
Executive dashboards for CEOs, CFOs, and stakeholders show the e-commerce business's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Sales performance analysis: by channel, using attribution for large budgets.
- Unit economics analysis: CAC, LTV, payback, ARPU from e-commerce customers
- Cohort analysis: retention, expansion, and LTV by customer cohort (purchase period, acquisition channel)
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
E-commerce manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-channel views with drill-downs to see performance by product, category, region, team member, and sales funnel stage. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-channel reporting: overall sales, product, category, or region reporting across channels
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for market and product mapping
- Product, pricing, customer, audience research
Operational E-commerce Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and channel managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Inventory: stock levels, turnover rates, reorder points
- Website: traffic metrics, bounce rates, conversion rates
- Customer service: response times, satisfaction scores
- Logistics: shipping times, delivery success rates
Operational e-commerce dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build an e-commerce dashboard?
To build an e-commerce dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are Shopify and Amazon for sales performance, GA4 for web analytics, CRM for customer data, and social media platforms for marketing insights.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of e-commerce dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like sales monitoring, inventory management, customer analysis, and logistics tracking.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom conversions, CRM contact data, GA4 events, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "conversions" and "revenue".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your e-commerce reporting use cases, such as sales monitoring, inventory management, customer analysis, and logistics tracking.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Sales, orders, Sessions, AOV, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, product category, customer segment, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your e-commerce dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your e-commerce dashboards:
Share
Share your e-commerce dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in an e-commerce dashboard?
E-commerce dashboards should include a mix of funnel—visibility, engagement, conversion—, efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and cost metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of e-commerce operations towards business goals. They include:
E-commerce funnel KPIs measure the buying process (from the seller perspective), regardless of the channel:
- Visibility metrics: page views, unique visitors, email deliveries
- Engagement metrics: add to cart, checkout initiations, Sessions, average time on site
- Conversion metrics: transactions, revenue, key events
Efficiency KPIs compare your e-commerce outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: CPM (Cost per Mille)
- Engagement: CPC (Cost per Click)
- Conversion: CPA (Cost per Acquisition), CPP (Cost per Purchase)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one funnel stage to another
- Visibility: Frequency
- Engagement: CTR, engagement rate
- Conversion: Conversion rate
Sales and cost KPIs show the bottom-line impact of your e-commerce performance:
- Sales: customers, revenue
- Cost: ad spend, OPEX, payroll
- Efficiency: ROI, ROAS, CAC
- Effectiveness: AOV, ACV
To analyze these e-commerce KPIs, segment them by:
- Channel: paid, organic, direct
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior
- Content: creatives, format, topic, keyword
