How Shopify Power BI Integration Helped Two eCommerce Companies to Succeed in European Market: Use Cases

The Shopify eCommerce space is a very competitive one. Customers have so many options to choose from. Only suppliers that can customize their prices, product offerings, and other terms to suit the buyer’s needs will be able to stay competitive. As a business selling on Shopify, you’ll need to understand the behavior of your customers to keep up with their expectations. This would require you to analyze Shopify data to gain valuable insights and adjust your eCommerce store accordingly.

The Shopify platform provides sellers with useful tools to analyze store activity, transaction history, and customer behavior. However, you’ll need a bit more than this to get more insights and visualize your data. This is why companies that are serious about driving real results choose to export their data to a Business Intelligence platform for deeper and more insightful analysis. There are several real-life examples of companies that are currently using this approach to drive remarkable results for their eCommerce business.

Power BI is one of the best tools to perform an in-depth analysis of your Shopify data. The platform provides powerful data modeling and visualization tools that will help you get a better understanding of your eCommerce data. Power BI also allows you to integrate Shopify data with other relevant data sources into a single interface where they can be analyzed together to drive better results. Here are some of the reasons you should integrate Shopify with Power BI.

Automation is one of the keys to improving work efficiency and system integrations can be a way to implement it. Connecting Power BI with Shopify automates the import and export of necessary data on a specific date and time. Automatically generated reports and dashboards with constantly updated eCommerce data ensures insights accuracy and avoids errors caused by human factor.

Analyzing your Shopify data with Power BI helps to eliminate guesswork from your business performance. You’ll get knowledge backed up by solid insights beyond what your Shopify Sales dashboard can give you. This helps to make better business decisions in the long run.

Power BI empowers you and your team to build advanced dashboards that are useful for all aspects of your eCommerce business. Gathering information from all teams including sales, marketing, logistics and customer service let you get the complete picture of business insights, from product performance to customer behavior.

With a Shopify Power BI integration, you get full control over your data exports. You can choose the major fields and tables you want to export in order to create the most complete and accurate report with all the information you need.

The Power BI Connector for Shopify allows you to transfer Shopify data into Power BI seamlessly. With this tool, you can easily add your Shopify store as a data source in Power BI. This way, you can view accurate data in a custom report and generate insights vital to planning business growth, discovering issues, and identifying opportunities as quickly as possible. Here are some of the connector features that you’ll find useful for your eCommerce business.

While you can generate some insights with the default Shopify data analytics functionality, you’ll need something more advanced to make sense of data and drive better results. Custom reports generated with Power BI are better optimized and more detailed compared to default reports. The ability to build templates yourself with the select data and metrics makes it easier for you to understand data inputs.

To make raw data from a Shopify store even more meaningful, seeing it in context data from other stores you run can be very valuable. Power BI allows you to take data from multiple stores and analyze them together to better understand, manage and plan your operations for better outcomes on all fronts.

Business intelligence solutions like Power BI integrate with several other tools and platforms aside from Shopify. This means you can take data from other aspects of your operation such as your CRM tools, sales records, and so on to create informative dashboards that highlight all the important metrics you should be paying attention to.

With the Power BI Connector for Shopify, you’ll be able to schedule an automated refresh for data or do it manually, if preferred. This way, you can schedule Shopify data export to refresh automatically at a specific time and date. This is useful for Shopify store owners that want to continually analyze their store data and keep reports up to date.

Ahead of the next sales season, a Shopify retailer that is located in the United Kingdom wanted to add new products to his webshop. To do this, he must analyze product sales performance to identify customer preferences, find products that are more likely to sell, and choose the best-selling product variants.

Although Shopify has a default analytics functionality for this, the standard reports simply don’t provide the relevant insights he needed. This store owner wanted to use BI Genius, a platform that offers users a custom dashboard for generating Shopify insights in Power BI.

The solution was to make use of our Power BI connector. This tool allowed the integration of Shopify with Power BI, so they could easily retrieve data and transform it using BI Genius. The store owner was able to use BI Genius to build a custom dashboard that could track the most important metrics and KPIs needed to decide on the products to choose.

At the end of the analysis with BI Genius, he was able to generate detailed insights which he shared with his team via Power BI Online. These Shopify Sales reports were also valuable for making predictions regarding which products to stock on the web store.

Consequently, the store reported a revenue increase of 30% as a result of implementing these insights. The benefits were also seen in the area of customer retention. Returning customer rate increased by as much as 20% as a result of the expanded product range which brought in more than 1000 unique site visitors monthly. All of these results were achieved organically so he didn’t have to spend money on paid ads.

Hecht fashion, a Dutch company that sells branded clothing on Shopify, wanted to compete better in the market by adjusting pricing to their advantage. Such a move had to be properly planned because price adjustments must be based on accurate data. Increasing or reducing prices without understanding how customers react to such a price change could backfire.

Hecht wanted to use the standard Shopify reports & analytics function to analyze data to better understand how price changes could affect sales. However, the standard Shopify reports lacked a tool to help them see what happens to markup when prices are indexed.

A much better alternative for Hecht was to use BI Genius to develop a dashboard where sales and purchase prices can be indexed easily to see their impact on the gross profit margin. With Alpha Serve's Power BI connector, Hecht was able to connect their Shopify store with Power BI and use BI Genius to analyze relevant data to create an insightful data model. This way, they could determine the best way to adjust data to give them an edge over competitors in the same category.

Then came the challenge of adjusting prices for Shopify products in bulk. Fortunately, they were able to use Alpha Serve’s Shopify bulk price change tool to edit prices for multiple products conveniently.

It worked. The company realized that by reducing prices, it could get ahead of the competition. With the reduced price, demand for Hecht’s products increased by up to 63%. Because the price adjustment was done based on intelligent data insights, they were able to achieve higher demand without compromising profit. In fact, the overall profit grew by 20% due to the increased sales and the store ranking moved to the top 3 among stores that list similar products.

Hecht was also able to do so while staying adherent to the strict data privacy policy in Europe. The tool gave them total control of the data export process so they were able to choose data that didn’t contravene privacy rules.

Read some Case Studies of using Power BI Connector for Shopify here.

As you can see, from these use cases, driving better results for your Shopify store does not have to be difficult. By simply analyzing Shopify traffic stats, sales stats, product stats, and other forms of eCommerce data, you can generate valuable insights needed to make better decisions for your business. All you need is the right tool such as Microsoft Power BI and a connector that helps you export your data seamlessly across these platforms. This way you can start generating Shopify advanced reports that help you visualize eCommerce data better and make better plans for future business decisions.