April 2, 2026 - Stockful

The Shopify Inventory Reports You're Not Getting (and How to Fix It)

Shopify's built-in inventory reports have major gaps. Here are the reports you're missing and how to get the data you actually need.

Shopify Inventory Reports Inventory Management

Shopify gives you a few inventory reports out of the box: a month-end snapshot, daily units sold, and a percentage-of-inventory-sold view. For a store with a small catalogue and one location, these might be enough.

But if you are managing hundreds of SKUs, multiple locations, or trying to make real purchasing decisions based on data, Shopify's native reporting has some significant blind spots.

Here are the reports most Shopify merchants need but are not getting, and what you can do about it.

What Shopify actually gives you

Before diving into the gaps, it helps to understand what the built-in reports actually cover.

Month-end inventory snapshot. This shows how many units of each variant you had at the end of each month. It is useful for a broad view but only captures a single data point per month. You cannot see what happened day-to-day within that month.

Average inventory sold per day. This report tells you the average daily units sold per product variant. Decent for identifying your fastest-moving items, but it does not account for days when you were out of stock (which artificially lowers the average).

Percentage of inventory sold. This shows sell-through as a percentage of starting inventory. Helpful in theory, but it can produce misleading numbers if you restocked during the period.

Inventory adjustment history. Shopify logs every stock adjustment with a reason code and timestamp. This is useful for auditing, but it only goes back 180 days and it is not a report in the traditional sense. It is a log.

That is essentially it for native inventory reporting. Now here is what is missing.

Report gap 1: Inventory value over time

Shopify can tell you your current inventory value (if you have cost-per-item set for your products), but it cannot show you how that value has changed over time. You cannot see whether your total inventory investment is growing, shrinking, or staying flat.

This matters because inventory is usually a merchant's largest expense. If your inventory value is creeping up month over month without a corresponding increase in sales, you are tying up more and more capital in stock that is not moving. Without a trend line, this drift is invisible.

Report gap 2: Dead stock identification

Shopify does not have a dead stock report. There is no built-in way to see which products have not sold in 30, 60, or 90 days. You can manually cross-reference your sales reports with your inventory list, but that is a time-consuming process that most merchants never do.

Dead stock is a bigger problem than many merchants realise. Industry data suggests that well-run companies carry 20-30% dead stock in their inventory, and each unsold item costs roughly 25-30% of its value in holding expenses annually. For DTC brands, dead stock percentages often creep toward a third of total inventory.

You need a report that flags products with zero sales over a defined period so you can discount, bundle, or discontinue them before they drain more cash.

Report gap 3: Sell-through rates by location

If you operate multiple Shopify locations (warehouses, retail stores, fulfilment centres), you need to know how stock performs at each one. Shopify's native reporting does not let you combine location-level inventory data with sales performance in a single view.

This means you cannot easily answer questions like: Is Location A selling through product X faster than Location B? Should I transfer stock from one location to another? Which location has the highest overstock problem?

Report gap 4: Reorder recommendations

Shopify can tell you when stock is low, but it cannot tell you how much to reorder or when to place the order based on your sales velocity and supplier lead times. There is no native reorder point calculation.

Without this, merchants either reorder too early (tying up cash), too late (leading to stockouts), or in the wrong quantities. A basic reorder report should combine your average daily sales rate, current stock level, and supplier lead time to tell you exactly when and how much to reorder.

Report gap 5: Inventory trends and velocity

Shopify's adjustment history gives you a 180-day log of stock changes, but it does not calculate velocity or trends. You cannot see how your inventory levels have moved over time for a specific SKU at a specific location.

This is a problem for seasonal businesses in particular. If you sell products with annual demand cycles, six months of data is not enough to spot patterns. You need at least a year of daily data to compare seasons and plan purchasing accordingly.

Report gap 6: Scheduled and automated reports

Shopify does not send you inventory reports automatically. Every report requires you to log in, navigate to the analytics section, set your filters, and export manually. There is no way to schedule a weekly dead stock report to your inbox or post a daily low-stock summary to your team's Slack channel.

This means inventory visibility depends entirely on someone remembering to check. In practice, most merchants only look at their inventory data when something has already gone wrong.

How to fix the gaps

You have a few options, depending on how much time and budget you want to invest.

Option 1: Spreadsheets. Export your sales and inventory data from Shopify, then build your own reports in Google Sheets or Excel. This works but it is manual, time-consuming, and the data goes stale the moment you export it. For stores with fewer than 50 SKUs, this might be manageable. Beyond that, it becomes a part-time job.

Option 2: Custom ShopifyQL explorations. If you are on Shopify Advanced or Plus, you can write custom queries using ShopifyQL in the analytics section. This is powerful but requires technical knowledge and still has the same underlying data limitations (180-day history, limited location-level metrics).

Option 3: A dedicated inventory analytics app. This is the most practical solution for most merchants. Apps like Stockful sit on top of your Shopify data and provide the reports that Shopify does not: dead stock detection, ABC analysis, sell-through rates by location, inventory value tracking, reorder recommendations, and scheduled report delivery via email or Slack. They capture daily inventory snapshots independently of Shopify's 180-day limitation, giving you up to a year of historical data to work with.

The approach you choose depends on your store's complexity, but the important thing is to close these reporting gaps before they cost you money.

The real cost of flying blind

Inventory reporting might not feel urgent when things are running smoothly. But the cost of not having visibility shows up in ways that are easy to miss: the slow-moving stock you keep reordering because nobody flagged it, the stockout on your best seller because you did not see the trend, the warehouse space consumed by dead products that should have been cleared months ago.

Shopify is a great platform for selling. But when it comes to understanding your inventory, the native tools leave too much to guesswork.