Total Sales
Your top line after discounts and refunds — the number most other metrics are measured against.
What it means
Total Sales is your Shopify revenue for the selected period after discounts and refunds, with shipping and tax still inside it. It is not what you keep and not what reaches your bank: product cost, payment fees and ad spend are all still to come out, and the tax portion was never yours. It's the app's headline revenue figure and the denominator under most of the percentages sitting next to it.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Gross SalesGross SalesRevenue before discounts; compare with Product Revenue for markdown cost. is item price × quantity, before product-level discounts. Shipping and Tax are what customers were billed. Discounts and Refunds come off.
If your prices already include tax, it isn't added on top a second time — the app checks which way your store is set up before adding it.
Worked example. A month brings €100,000 of gross sales, €6,000 of shipping and €12,000 of tax, against €8,000 of discounts and €5,000 of refunds. Total Sales = 100,000 + 6,000 + 12,000 − 8,000 − 5,000 = €105,000.
Look at what's inside that headline. €12,000 of it is tax you'll hand over, and €5,000 of goods came back. The figure you'd quote as "we did €105k" contains about €12k that was never yours to begin with.
It answers the question
What did the shop actually take this period, after the discounts you gave and the refunds you paid back? Almost everything else on the page — margins, ratios, efficiency — is measured against this one number.
Why it matters
It's the denominator. MERMERWhole-business marketing efficiency across every channel.Under 30% is healthy, ROAS, % COGS, % Custom Expenses, Net Profit Margin and Contribution Margin all divide by Total Sales, so a change here quietly moves a dozen percentages that nobody edited. A refund-heavy month makes every cost ratio look worse without a single cost rising.
It's also the number whose meaning changes with the page you're on. On the Summary page with Amazon included, the card's own hover text reads "Total Sales = Shopify Sales + Amazon Sales" — a strictly larger figure under the same label. Comparing a month read with Amazon on against one read with it off is comparing two different metrics.
What good looks like
No benchmark applies to a revenue total: what's healthy for a 20-product shop isn't for a 2,000-product one, and no size is right or wrong. Judge it against your own trend, the same period last year, and — more usefully — against what it cost to produce. Growth that arrives with faster-growing ad spend, discounts or refunds isn't growth you keep, and MERMERWhole-business marketing efficiency across every channel.Under 30% is healthy and Contribution MarginContribution MarginProfit left after variable costs to fund the business.30% or more is healthy are where that shows up.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Retire the discount that isn't buying anything | Find the code that runs constantly and test two weeks without it on one channel | The same order count at a higher value each | 2–4 weeks | Some volume leaves with the code. Watch Orders for a full fortnight before you judge it — the first week always looks worse than the second. |
| Fast Raise the free-shipping threshold | Set it above your current average order value rather than below it | More per order at a similar order count | 1–2 weeks | A few baskets abandon at the new threshold. The loss is invisible in this figure and the gain isn't, which makes the change look better than it is. |
| Slow Put budget behind what already converts | Move spend to the products and channels that convert now, instead of funding discovery everywhere | Sales rise with spend | 1 quarter | Ad spend rises alongside the sales, so MER can worsen while this number improves. Check both or you'll buy revenue at a price you didn't agree to. |
| Slow Raise prices where you don't compete on price | Lift prices on lines with no obvious substitute and leave the price-checked ones alone | Higher sales on the same volume | 1 quarter | Conversion drops first. This figure can dip for a month or two before the higher prices carry it, and some customers don't come back. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
A revenue total hides which half moved. Next to the order count, it tells you whether you sold more baskets or bigger ones.
Real growth
More customers and more money. The cleanest shape there is, as long as discounts didn't grow faster than the sales they bought.
Fewer, bigger orders
Average order value carried the month. Fine for revenue, and it means fewer new customers entered the shop than last month.
Busier and poorer
More orders worth less each. Every one of them still costs a pick, a pack and a payment fee, so profit falls faster than this line does.
Demand fell
Both down together is a top-of-funnel problem far more often than a pricing one. Look at where visitors went before you touch the shop.
Revenue next to what it cost to buy. Sales up with MER steady is growth you can repeat; sales up with MER rising means you paid progressively more for each euro, and the day the budget stops the sales stop with it. The sales line alone never shows which one you're in.
The top and the bottom of the same period. They routinely move in opposite directions — a record sales month built on discounts, shipping promotions and refunds can land less profit than a quieter one. If you only ever read one of these two, read this one second.
Common misreads
It's the money customers were billed, less discounts and refunds. Tax is still inside it and belongs to the tax office; product cost, shipping, payment fees and ad spend all come out after. Net Profit is the number for that question.
It doesn't match. The app's AOVAOVYour average order size, and a direct lever on revenue. is gross sales less discounts, divided by orders — tax and shipping excluded — so dividing this figure by your order count gives a bigger number than the AOV card next to it.
Check whether Amazon is included in the view you're looking at. The combined card adds Amazon sales under the same label, and the Amazon side is Ordered Product Sales, which the app describes as being counted before refunds.
Also called
Net sales · net revenue · top line · turnover
See yoursYour Total Sales for the period, sitting next to the ad spend and the efficiency measured against it.
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