Graphed LogoGraphed
Login

How to Create an E-commerce Dashboard in Google Sheets with AI

Cody Schneider•

Building an ecommerce dashboard might sound like a job for a data scientist, but you can create a surprisingly powerful one right inside of Google Sheets. By pairing the familiarity of a spreadsheet with a few AI tricks, you can turn raw sales data into clear, actionable insights without needing to learn a complex business intelligence tool. This article will walk you through setting up an automated dashboard to track your most important ecommerce metrics.

Why Use Google Sheets for Your Ecommerce Dashboard?

Before diving into the “how,” let’s talk about the “why.” While powerful tools like Power BI and Tableau exist, they often come with a steep learning curve and a hefty price tag. For most ecommerce store owners, marketers, and small teams, Google Sheets hits the sweet spot for several reasons:

  • It's Free and Familiar: Almost everyone has used a spreadsheet. There's no new software to learn, and no subscription cost to get started.

  • Highly Collaborative: Sharing your dashboard with your team or clients is as simple as sending a link. Multiple people can view and edit the data in real-time.

  • Customizable: You have complete control over what your dashboard looks like and which metrics you track, unlike the rigid reports in some SaaS platforms.

  • Automatable: With the right setup, you can have your sales, marketing, and customer data flow into your sheet automatically, eliminating tedious manual exports.

Step 1: Get Your Ecommerce Data into Google Sheets

A dashboard is useless without data. Your first and most important step is to create a reliable pipeline for getting information from your platforms (like Shopify, WooCommerce, or Amazon) into a single Google Sheet. The goal is to move beyond manually downloading CSV files every week.

The Manual Method (Not Recommended)

The old-fashioned way involves visiting your Shopify or WooCommerce admin, exporting order or traffic data as a CSV file, and then copying and pasting it into a “Raw Data” tab in your Google Sheet. While simple for a one-off analysis, it's tedious, prone to error, and impossible to keep up-to-date. Your dashboard will be stale the moment you create it.

The Automated Method (The Right Way)

To create a truly useful, real-time dashboard, you need to automate the data flow. This is easier than it sounds using connector tools and add-ons.

  • Automation Tools (Zapier, Make): These platforms act as a bridge between your ecommerce store and Google Sheets. You can create simple workflows, or "Zaps," like: "When a New Order happens in Shopify, create a New Spreadsheet Row in Google Sheets." You map each piece of order data (date, product, price, customer location, etc.) to a specific column in your sheet. This keeps a running log of all your data without you lifting a finger.

  • Direct Google Sheets Add-ons (e.g., Coefficient, Supermetrics): These are extensions you install directly into Google Sheets. They provide pre-built connectors to popular marketing and sales platforms. You can schedule regular data imports (e.g., "pull all Facebook Ads data from yesterday every morning at 8 am") to keep your information fresh.

For your dashboard, create a separate tab for each data source. For example, you might have a "Shopify Orders" tab, a "Google Analytics Traffic" tab, and a "Facebook Ads Spend" tab. The automation will feed data into these tabs, while your main "Dashboard" tab will pull from them to create visuals.

Step 2: Decide Which Ecommerce Metrics to Track

A common mistake is trying to track everything. A great dashboard is focused, displaying only the key performance indicators (KPIs) that help you make better decisions. Here are some essential metrics to start with, grouped by category:

Sales Performance

  • Total Revenue: The top-line sales figure tracked over time (daily, weekly, monthly).

  • Average Order Value (AOV): Total Revenue / Number of Orders. Helps you understand if customers are buying more or less per transaction.

  • Conversion Rate: (Number of Orders / Number of Website Sessions) * 100. The percentage of visitors who make a purchase.

  • Sales by Product/Category: Identifies your best-selling items and those that might need a marketing boost.

Marketing Effectiveness

  • Traffic by Source/Channel: Shows where your visitors are coming from (e.g., Organic Search, Paid Social, Email, Direct).

  • Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Ad Revenue / Ad Spend. Measures the profitability of your advertising campaigns.

  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Total Marketing Spend / Number of New Customers. How much it costs to acquire a single new customer.

Customer Behavior

  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total revenue you can expect from a single customer over their entire relationship with your brand.

  • Repeat Purchase Rate: The percentage of customers who have made more than one purchase. A key indicator of brand loyalty.

  • Top Customers by Revenue: Identifies your VIP customers who you might want to engage with special offers.

Step 3: Build Your Dashboard with AI Assistance

Now for the fun part. You have clean, automated data flowing into your "raw data" tabs. Your goal is to summarize this data into charts and key numbers on your main "Dashboard" tab. This is where AI can be a massive time-saver.

Manually writing complex formulas like QUERY or nested SUMIFS can be a headache. Instead, you can describe what you need in plain English and let an AI tool like ChatGPT or Google's built-in features do the heavy lifting.

Using ChatGPT to Write Formulas

Think of ChatGPT as a formula-writing expert who is available 24/7. The trick is to give it clear context about your spreadsheet.

Example Prompt:

I have a Google Sheet with a tab named 'Shopify Orders'. In this tab, Column A contains the order date (MM/DD/YYYY), Column E contains the Product Name, and Column H contains the total price.

Can you please write a Google Sheets formula for my 'Dashboard' tab to calculate the total sales for the product 'Classic Black T-Shirt' in the last 30 days?

ChatGPT will likely give you a formula like this to copy and paste directly into a cell on your dashboard:

This trick saves you the time of looking up syntax and debugging formulas. You can use it for nearly anything, from calculating AOV to finding your top 10 products by revenue.

Using Google's Built-in "Explore" AI

Google Sheets has its own AI feature called Explore, which is great for quick analysis and chart creation.

  1. Navigate to one of your raw data tabs (e.g., "Shopify Orders").

  2. Select a range of data you want to analyze.

  3. Click the Explore icon in the bottom-right corner (it looks like a square with a star).

A panel will slide out with suggested charts and pivot tables based on an automatic analysis of your data. It might show "Total Sales by Date" or "Count of Orders by Product." You can drag-and-drop these charts directly onto your main "Dashboard" tab. You can also type questions into the Explore bar, like "bar chart of sales by product name," and it will generate a visual for you.

Structuring Your Dashboard

Organize your dashboard logically. A common layout is:

  • Top Row: The "big number" KPIs like Total Revenue and AOV

  • Main Body: Charts and graphs showing trends over time, such as daily sales or traffic by channel.

  • Sidebars/Bottom Section: Tables that give more granular detail, like top-selling products or campaign ROAS.

Use colors, bold text, and borders to separate sections and make the key information pop.

Step 4: Make Your Dashboard Interactable and Actionable

A static dashboard is good, but an interactive one is even better. Use built-in Google Sheets features to allow viewers to dig into the data.

  • Date Range Filters: Use Data > Data validation to create a dropdown menu with options like "Last 7 Days," "Last 30 Days," and "This Quarter." You can then link your formulas to reference this dropdown, allowing your whole dashboard to update based on the selected time frame.

  • Conditional Formatting: Make trends easy to spot at a glance. Set up rules under Format > Conditional formatting to turn a cell green if your conversion rate is above your goal, or red if it's below.

  • Slicers: If you use pivot tables on your dashboard, add slicers to quickly filter your data. For example, add a slicer for "Product Category" so you can view sales performance for just "Apparel" or "Accessories."

Final Thoughts

Creating an ecommerce dashboard in Google Sheets is a practical and cost-effective way to get a clear view of your business performance. By automating your data flow and using AI to help you summarize it, you can move from staring at raw numbers to making insight-driven decisions that grow your business.

While building a dashboard in Sheets is a major step up from manual report pulling, a lot of time still goes into connecting data sources, writing prompts for formulas, and arranging the charts just right. At Graphed, we’ve designed a platform to eliminate these manual steps entirely. We directly integrate with all your sources like Shopify and Google Analytics, and when you’re ready to build, you just describe what you want in plain English - no wrestling with worksheet formulas needed. Our AI builds a real-time, shareable dashboard for you in seconds, so you can spend less time being a builder and more time acting on the insights.