Use your data exports to learn how your store evolves

Another benefit of taking regular exports from your Shopify store is that you can look back at the old data and do some data analysis on it.

Data changes often over your store's lifetime and while you might have historic data, sometimes that historic data gets updated over time so it's impossible to see how things really were.

For example, a customer last year might have had only two orders so your analysis would show them as a new-ish customer. This year they've placed ten new orders so now they're a repeat customer. A very good repeat customer.

Without having a copy of last year's data to notice the jump, it can get tricky to do some analyses and figure out what changed. You'd have to back-out the recent orders one at a time to figure out when their ordering behavior changed. Only then could you see if it's repeatable with other customers.

(Repeat Customer Insights does something like this for it's order sequencing analysis. As it goes it calculates metrics at each order stage, giving a unique view into the customer behavior)

If you had a set of order backups from each month though, you could easily refer to them in your analysis and make these calculations easy. You might find out that most of those orders came during the holiday season and the customer was ordering gifts shipped directly to different people. Might be an opportunity to sell gift wrapping services.

That's why my app will take a snapshot of your customer grids every month around this time. They make it easy to compare changes in the segments as customers shift their behavior around.

Eric Davis