As an eCommerce business owner (or Agency), you’re likely familiar with Google Sheets. This flexible tool is an essential part of many eCommerce reporting strategies due to its ease of use, collaboration capabilities and low cost of entry. But as your business grows and your data becomes more complex, you might start to wonder: Have I outgrown Google Sheets? It’s important to note that Google Sheets is a spreadsheet, not a database. A major disadvantage of Google Sheets is its limited advanced functionality, which means that it is not very scalable and is not the best tool for searching, filtering, or building more complex databases.
Understanding when it’s time to upgrade your eCommerce reporting can be a game-changer. Let’s explore seven signs that you’re ready to move beyond Google Sheets for your eCommerce data needs.
1. Increasing Data Complexity
Google Sheets is excellent for managing straightforward eCommerce data. But when you’re dealing with data from multiple sources, intricate calculations, or complex queries, Sheets might fall short. If your eCommerce data has outgrown a simple spreadsheet structure, it’s time to consider a more robust solution.
2. Performance Lags
When you’re working with extensive eCommerce data, Google Sheets can slow down — especially when the number of cells exceeds around 2,000,000. If you’re noticing significant lag or frequent crashes, these are clear signs that you need a more scalable eCommerce reporting tool.
3. Historical Data and Limitations
There are limitation for Google Sheets. At a high level, these are the key ones to note:
Up to 10 million cells for spreadsheets
40,000 new rows at a time
Maximum number of columns of 18,278 columns
Number of Tabs: 200 sheets per workbook
Maximum string length is 50,000 characters
Some of these numbers can seem quite high and can be more than enough for a low volume business but if you have a high number of transactions, you add in multiple sources, daily or hourly refreshes with a high number of fields of data, you can hit limits before you know it. You can remove old data to get around this problem and to lower the count but then you’re losing the ability to compare periods with historical data. Year-on-Year (YoY) or Season-on-Season comparisons. This can also break your downstream reporting such as dashboards and reports.
Here is a basic calculation to estimate volume of data generated from a Shopify store (can be same for Magento etc.)
No. of transactions per day x No. of fields of data
A sample list of fields of data from a Shopify store are shown below (~20 in this list):
Sales Data Total Sales: total_sales Sales by product: product_title, product_variant_title, quantity Sales by channel: source_name Customer Data Customer Names: billing_address.name, shipping_address.name Emails: email Purchase History: line_items Order Data Order number: order_number Order Status: financial_status Total Order Value: total_line_items_price Items Ordered: line_items Traffic Data Number of Visitors: visits_count Page Views: pageviews_count Bounce Rate: bounce_rate Referral Source: referring_site, landing_siteInventory Levels: Inventory Data inventory_quantity, inventory_item_id
So if we have an average 500 transactions per day x 20 fields, that’s 10,000 cells per day from Shopify. That’s 70,000 per week and 3,640,000 per year. It adds up fast and that is one data source.
4. Collaboration Challenges
Google Sheets is known for its collaboration features. But as your eCommerce KPIs and data become more complex, collaboration can become a challenge. If multiple people are updating the same large and complex sheet, conflicts and errors can occur, leading to data integrity issues and broken reporting systems.
5. Limited Analytics Capabilities
Google Sheets provides basic data analysis capabilities, which might be enough for a small eCommerce business. However, if your growth strategy involves advanced analytics, predictive modeling, or real-time reporting, you’re probably ready for a more advanced tool.
6. Security Concerns
If your eCommerce data requires advanced security features, compliance measures, or audit trails, Google Sheets might not meet your needs. A dedicated data analytics platform will offer more robust security features, protecting your valuable eCommerce data.
7. Time-Consuming Manual Tasks
Are you spending hours on manual tasks like data cleaning, updating formulas, and generating reports? Time is money in the eCommerce world, and an automated system can save you both by handling these tasks faster and more accurately.
8. Integration Difficulties
If you’re struggling to integrate your Google Sheets with other tools or data sources in your eCommerce stack, this might be a sign you need a more integrated solution. Advanced tools can seamlessly connect with your other systems, providing a unified view of your eCommerce data.
Conclusion
While Google Sheets is a valuable tool for many eCommerce businesses, there comes a time when an upgrade is necessary to continue growing. If you’re experiencing any of these signs, it’s time to explore more sophisticated solutions for managing your eCommerce data, tracking your eCommerce KPIs, and improving your eCommerce reporting. Remember, the right tools can make a huge difference in your ability to make data-driven decisions and scale your business effectively.
But what does the next level of analytics cost both in terms of time and money? The short answer is, it depends. There are a number of factors that can contribute to this but most importantly it needs to align with your business goals. The good news is there has never been a better time to take it to the next level with the amount of business friendly tools available on the market and the prices for these tools keep coming down as the competition in the market is intense. We’ll have another blog post covering this coming up so add yourself to our newsletter and find out!
If you want to talk to one of our experts about how we can take you to the next level, book a free consultation with one of our team and we’ll get you started. It could save you a lot of time and money.