[smickie]

Magento does everything if you wade through the data. Like if you wanted stats on... off the top of my head, abandoned shopping carts by region and product, you could.

I think in Shopify you can view how many abandoned carts there are in the orders section, and it's not filterable.

I mean how difficult would be for Shopify devs to add a reports section on stuff like this. Just tabulated data would do, I don't need any animated graphs. It's very frustrating because the data is just out of reach in Shopify.

Edit: I'm not a Magento advocate here, I really really want Shopify to get better quick so I can stop using Magento.

[jmccree]

Reporting can be surprisingly complicated. You can allow users to run raw SQL queries, or have a reporting interface that is basically is an SQL query builder behind the scenes, and have extremely powerful reporting abilities. The problem is you might have a user create a query that takes 5 minutes to run, and then refresh the page 15 times killing your db server/s. Many places have a separate DB read replica (or multiple replicas) just to allow this type of reporting run by certain users.

For an environment like shopify (which I've never used, so speculating), their reports are much more likely optimized database queries or views, or even created from specially stored statistics data not from querying raw db tables, with caching or pre-generation at some point. This means there's a lot of thought behind every report, and what's possible with the current db/stats schema. Adding a column to a report might mean modifying the db schema.

The final issue is that user interface complexity goes up as reporting flexibility goes up. A super powerful interface that few people take the time to use is worth less than a limited interface that provides value to more people. The task is attempting to satisfy power users and more complex needs, while providing a very useful default functionality out of the box.

[jacques_chester]

This sounds like a case where providing users with a dimensionally-modelled reporting schema would be a big win. It would help both with the slow query problem and the super-complicated interface problem.

[orenmazor]

I appreciate the difficulty of trying to run a business without this information being available to you.

Once you start juggling the vast amount of data that needs to be stored, fetched, calculated and referenced to provide a report, it becomes a lot more than "why dont you just". And thats before scaling the system to the non-fail-whale standard that we run our infrastructure at.

But it is coming very soon. In fact, it's already available to PoS customers.

As I mentioned, feel free to ping me to talk more about this. I would love to have more input.

[snookca]

Specific to your abandoned carts comment, the view is filterable. Type in "Canada", for example, and it'll show all abandoned carts in Canada. We'd love to learn more about what you're looking to accomplish that is difficult to do right now.

[solaris152000]

What if you wanted sales by category?