Reports that answer harder questions than “how much today”
Profit and loss, inventory valuation, returns, funnels and channel comparison — across every channel at once, because the orders are already in one place.
Your dashboard shows revenue by day, which you already knew. What you cannot find out is whether eBay is actually making you money once fees and returns are counted.
Most ecommerce dashboards lead with revenue by day. It is the easiest number to produce and the least useful, because it is the one figure every merchant already carries in their head.
The questions that change decisions are comparative and they cross channels, which is precisely why they are hard to answer when each channel reports on itself.
Which channel is actually profitable
Gross revenue by channel is misleading in a specific direction. A marketplace producing your largest revenue can be producing your smallest profit, because referral fees, higher return rates and price competition all land on the same orders.
Comparing channels needs them measured the same way, after their costs. Because every order arrives in one system, that comparison is a report rather than an exercise in exporting three CSVs with different column names and hoping the date ranges align.
What your stock is worth
Inventory valuation is usually only calculated at year end, for accounts, by an accountant. It is more useful as a live figure, because it is where most of a merchant’s cash is.
Two things it exposes fast: how much capital is tied up in lines that are not moving, and what your gross margin actually is once landed cost is included rather than the supplier invoice.
Returns as a diagnostic
Returns analysed only as a cost tell you nothing you can act on. Analysed by product and by channel they name the cause.
Concentrated in one product, it is usually a description or a sizing problem — the listing is promising something the item does not deliver, and fixing the copy fixes the returns. Concentrated in one channel, it is that channel’s buyer expectations or its returns policy. Spread evenly, it is the category, and it is the cost of doing business.
Where people leave
Funnel and abandoned-cart reporting show where the drop-off is, which is more actionable than the fact of a drop-off. Heavy abandonment at delivery means your shipping cost is a surprise. At payment, a method is missing or something is failing. Spread evenly, the checkout is slow.
Search-gap reporting is the underrated one: what people searched for on your shop and got nothing for. That is demand you have already paid to attract, arriving at an empty page — sometimes a product you should stock, more often a product you do stock under a name nobody uses.
Low stock, before it is no stock
A low-stock report is only useful if it accounts for lead time. Telling you that you have three left is a fact; telling you that three left is a fortnight at current velocity against a supplier who takes three weeks is a decision.
Being honest about what this is not
This is operational reporting, not business intelligence. There is no warehouse, no custom query language, no arbitrary dimensional analysis. If you want to slice anything by anything, export and use a proper tool.
What is here is the set of questions ecommerce merchants actually ask, answered across every channel at once — and for most merchants, most of the time, that is what was missing.
Stop reconciling stock by hand
One catalogue, six channels, one stock figure that stays right.