After migrating to Shopify, you might notice that your Sales Report for the current month appears distorted, even showing negative values, while reports for previous months seem inflated. This discrepancy is primarily due to a known Shopify API limitation regarding the handling of refund transaction dates.
Here’s what happens:
- When you migrate to Shopify, orders in a refunded status are imported with their original creation dates intact. For instance, if a refunded order was originally created on August 10, 2024, it will appear in your historical data with that same date.
- However, due to technical limitations in Shopify’s API, the actual refund transaction dates cannot be backdated during migration. Instead, all refund transactions are recorded with the migration date (e.g., November 11, 2024).
- As a result, refunds for orders from previous months are now attributed to the month when you migrated. This causes the current month’s Sales Report to be reduced by these backdated refund amounts, while reports from previous months appear higher because they no longer include those refund deductions.
Luckily, any refunds processed after the Shopify migration will have the correct, current dates. Therefore, this issue only affects historical refund data imported during migration.
Additional Considerations:
Although the primary cause is the refund date re-assignment, there might be some reasons you need to take into account:
- Temporary data processing delays: Post migration, Shopify’s system can take up to 72 hours to fully process and update all transaction data. During this period, minor discrepancies may resolve themselves as the data refreshes.
- Default filters and time zones: Default date filters (often set to “Today”) or mismatches in time zone or currency settings can further contribute to reporting anomalies.
- System updates: Shopify’s analytics and reporting tools are periodically updated. Sometimes, these updates change how data is aggregated and displayed, which can add to the confusion immediately after migration.
In Summary:
This behavior isn’t a bug but an inherent API restriction during migration. It temporarily skews the net sales figures in the migration month while altering previous months’ figures. If you continue to experience these discrepancies beyond the initial processing period, please contact Shopify support for further assistance.
In case you have any other questions, please reach out to us via:
- Ticket system (highly recommended)
- Email us at [email protected]
