The 3 numbers most store owners can't actually answer
Ask any store owner "what's your real margin on your best-selling SKU after ad spend?" and watch the pause.
Most people running a Shopify or WooCommerce store can tell you revenue. Almost nobody can tell you:
True per-product margin — after COGS, shipping, payment fees, and returns, not just "price minus cost."
CAC by channel — what a customer from Meta ads actually costs you vs. one from organic or email.
Break-even per SKU — the exact unit volume where a product stops being a hobby and starts being profit.
Here's the thing: you don't need Shopify Plus or a $500/mo BI tool to answer these. A spreadsheet with the right formulas gets you 90% of the way there, and it takes about 20 minutes to set up per product line.
The bigger unlock is usually automation, not analytics. Order alerts, review requests, restock notifications — the stuff that eats an hour a day if you do it manually — can run on autopilot with a handful of workflows. You don't need to hire a dev to wire this up either.
If you're staring at 6 tabs of spreadsheets right now trying to figure out if last month was actually profitable: that's the sign to fix the system, not work harder inside a broken one.
Built a few tools around exactly this if anyone wants to skip the DIY phase — happy to answer questions either way.