Analyzing your Shopify store data is integral to maximizing your store's impact. One way you can dig deep into your data is by using Shopify's inbuilt Analytics feature. This is great if you want to run some ad-hoc analyses, get results, and act on it immediately. However, this route isn't enough if you want to present your data in a tool of your choice or if you want to combine data from various sources. For example, let's say you want to combine your inventory data from Shopify along with an Excel file listing costs by inventory item.
In this article, we're going to go through two ways to dive as deep as you want into your Shopify data and present your data. We're going to use Microsoft's Power BI as our visualization tool.
Power BI Connector is a Shopify app—with a free option— that lets you connect Shopify data sources to Power BI. A data source in this app is a single table you create by selecting fields from different categories. Their Free level only allows for a single data source (so, one table), no filtering, and a maximum of 500 lines in that table. Let's see how to set up a connection using Power BI Connector.
2. You're now on their Data Source page and you can select as many columns as you want to export. Of course, you're limited to 500 rows on the free plan and not allowed to filter your data.
3. Give your selected fields a name and click on the back arrow to see your data source.
4. You now have to click on the play button besides the Not Ready disclaimer to generate your data. This could take anywhere from minutes to hours based on the number of rows and query complexity.
5. Once the Pending disclaimer changes to Ready, click on the Copy link icon and your URL is now saved.
6. Although their documentation doesn't mention this explicitly, click on the Menu button in the top right, and select Settings. You'll see a login and a password that you'll need later.
7. Open up Power BI and click on File > Get Data. You want to click the OData Feed option, paste the URL in, and click OK.
8. You're then faced with this screen and I didn't know what to do right off the bat. After reading their documentation, you have to click on the Basic option and copy over the login and password from step (6).
9. Select the table that pops up and click Load. That's it!
Your data's now in Power BI ready to be analyzed. You can use the data source like any other data source in Power BI.
In the meantime, check out how you can use Dropbase to connect your Shopify store data to your pipelines by signing up for a trial here.
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