The primary objective of this project was to create a Looker Studio dashboard for the client to monitor and analyse their Shopify store’s performance.
Company Overview
The client is a leading e-commerce business utilizing Shopify as their platform to sell a wide range of products, including subscription-based offerings and one-time purchases.
The Problem
As a growing business with multiple product lines and stores, they needed a more effective way to analyse customer retention and revenue trends over time. The client was facing challenges in understanding the long-term value of their customers and optimizing their marketing strategies based on accurate retention data.
The Brief
The primary objective of this project was to create a Looker Studio dashboard for the client to monitor and analyse their Shopify store’s performance. The dashboard aimed to provide insights into customer retention, subscription trends, revenue growth, and other critical business metrics.
The Solution
Data Sources: Shopify API is used to fetch real-time and historical sales data.
Data Storage: The data is stored in Google BigQuery, a scalable data warehouse solution, to allow for large-scale analysis and real-time querying.
ETL Process: An automated pipeline is established to extract, transform, and load data from Shopify into BigQuery on a regular basis, ensuring that the latest data is always available for reporting.
Visualization Tool: The dashboard is built using Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) to create user-friendly, interactive visualizations, allowing the client to track retention and revenue patterns easily.
Automation: Scheduled jobs ensure that the data pipeline runs without manual intervention, automatically updating the dashboard at regular intervals.
Key Highlights of the dashboard:
(1) Customer Retention: The customer retention is based on a cohort analysis model, where customers are grouped by their initial purchase month, and their return behaviour is observed in subsequent months.
(2) Revenue Retention: Similar to customer retention, revenue retention is based on a cohort analysis model. It shows how much revenue is retained from existing customers over time.
(3) Subscription Status: The section visualizes the subscriber trends over time, including new subscriptions, cancellations, and net growth, allowing the business to manage subscriber churn effectively.
(4) RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) Summary: This segmentation helps understand customer value by breaking down customers based on how recently they made a purchase, how frequently they buy, and how much they spend. This enables businesses to target high-value customers more effectively.
(5) Revenue Breakdown by Order Type: Segments revenue into subscription orders, one-time purchases (OTPs), and activating transactions, offering a detailed view of revenue sources.
Workflow
Impact and Benefits
Impacts
Increased Data Accuracy and Consistency: Automating the extraction process minimizes the risk of human error, ensuring that the data collected is accurate and consistent across all reports.
Real-Time Data Access: Automated processes allow for near real-time data updates, ensuring that BI reports reflect the most up-to-date information, which is crucial for making timely business decisions.
Operational Efficiency: Automating data extraction and report generation reduces manual efforts, saving time and resources. Teams can focus on analysis rather than data preparation.
Scalability: As the business grows, the volume of data will increase. An automated process is scalable and can handle larger data loads without additional manual intervention.
Improved Decision-Making: Automated BI reports provide timely insights into critical metrics like customer retention, subscription trends, and revenue growth, allowing for more informed decision-making.
Increased Transparency: Automation creates a transparent and repeatable process, making it easier to audit and track how data flows from the Shopify API to the BI reports, which enhances accountability.
Benefits
Time Savings: Automating data extraction and report generation eliminates the need for manual data entry and report creation, significantly reducing time spent on repetitive tasks.
Cost Efficiency: With reduced manual labour, the business saves on labour costs and operational expenses associated with data handling and reporting.
Actionable Insights: The automated process provides insights into key business metrics like customer retention, subscription trends, and revenue growth, enabling proactive and strategic actions to drive business growth.
Improved Customer Retention: By analysing customer behaviour and subscription trends, the business can identify retention challenges and take targeted actions, such as personalized marketing campaigns or loyalty programs.
Scalable Solution: The automated setup can easily accommodate more data and additional reporting metrics as the business expands, making it a future-proof solution.
Consistent Reporting Standards: Automation ensures that all BI reports are generated using the same rules and standards, leading to consistency and reliability in reporting.
Faster Response to Market Changes: Real-time data access allows the business to quickly adapt to market changes, such as adjusting pricing strategies or optimizing marketing campaigns based on customer behaviour.
Enhanced Revenue Growth Analysis: Automated reports provide detailed revenue growth metrics, making it easier to identify trends, track growth patterns, and forecast future revenue potential accurately.
Improved Collaboration and Accessibility: Centralized and automated reports are easily accessible across the organization, enabling different teams to collaborate and work from a unified source of truth.
Predictive Analysis Capabilities: With automation and consistent data collection, businesses can implement predictive analytics to forecast future trends in customer behaviour, sales, and subscriptions, allowing for strategic planning.
Workflow
Conclusion
The Shopify business transition to Google Cloud transformed their business intelligence capabilities, enabling them to scale efficiently while cutting costs. By automating their data pipelines and leveraging a modern data stack, they now deliver faster, more accurate insights to their clients, positioning themselves as a leader in data-driven marketing. The cost and time savings allowed the agency to reinvest in client acquisition and strategic growth.
If your business faces similar challenges, consider exploring Google Cloud and custom data solutions to future-proof your reporting infrastructure.
Learn how The Data Lab can help you drive growth. Contact us now.
What Our Clients Say
Working with The Data Lab, we built a custom automated reporting platform and data warehouse that has drastically reduced the time, effort, and cost involved in generating monthly performance reports for our clients. What used to take days is now delivered in hours, giving us faster insights and allowing us to focus on strategic decisions. The solution has streamlined our processes and improved our overall efficiency, making a huge impact on our business operations.
Stephan Lange
CTO, Metropolis