Gone are the days when retail success relied solely on a founder's intuition. While gut instinct remains valuable, combining it with concrete data has proven to be a more effective approach to retail strategy.
Retail analytics helps identify trends, patterns, and behaviors, so you can reverse engineer a retail strategy that takes advantage of whatever insights you learn. It’s a growing market: brands are expected to spend $31.08 billion on retail analytics platforms by 2032.
Yet, such a high level of expenditure has opened the door for software brands to offer their own reporting dashboards and analytical capabilities. This guide shares seven top picks for scaling retailers, with a shortlist of features to check for.
Top features to look for in retail analytics software
Not all retail analytics software is created equal. Here’s a shortlist of capabilities and features to consider when shortlisting potential vendors.
Data collection
Traditionally, retailers had to pull data from various sources into a mismatched system. POS data didn’t update in real-time—by the time you’d pulled it from one tool and inputted it into another, the information was outdated. That’s before you address any issues in formatting and consistency between multiple data sources.
Choose a retail analytics tool capable of automatically gathering data in real time. This can be through integrations, though a unified business model is the best approach. When everything is built on the same platform, there’s no need to rely on patchy middleware or integration complexities. Data flows to the same platform it was created on.
💡Tip: Shopify is the only platform where POS and ecommerce are built on the same foundation. This means your customer, transaction, and inventory data naturally exists in one place—giving you accurate, real-time insights across your entire business. No connecting systems, no reconciling data, just complete visibility wherever you sell.
Customer insights
Customers are the lifeblood of a thriving retail business. Only when you know who you’re serving, why they shop with you, and what they expect can you fine-tune their shopping experience and turn one-time buyers into loyal customers.
Retail analytics solutions should help you collect customer data and keep tabs on the touchpoints customers make online and offline. The modern shopper uses multiple channels to complete a single purchase. You should be able to track these interactions to figure out which touchpoints influence a sale so you can double down on what does (and doesn’t) work.
Inventory management
Aside from the upfront investment of acquiring inventory, storing large amounts of stock is expensive. You’re also sitting on cash from unsold inventory stuck on your shelves.
Confirm that shortlisted retail analytics software can offer unified inventory visibility across all channels. This includes stockchecks from your retail stockrooms, shipping warehouses, and any third-party logistics partners’ fulfillment centers.
The obvious benefit to this feature is that you can run inventory reports to understand bestselling, poorly performing inventory.
Centralized inventory data also allows you to cater to omnichannel shopping preferences. With real-time inventory data that flows back to a central commerce operating system such as Shopify, you can offer alternative fulfillment options such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS,) and ship-to-home. This has enabled brands like Parachute to increase the portion of their revenue derived from BOPIS by as much as 500%.
Real-time commerce insights
Retail is fast-paced—your strategies to acquire customers last year likely won’t be optimal now. Similarly, customer preferences change throughout the year. Summer bestsellers likely won’t claim the same top spots in other months.
Before implementing a new retail analytics platform, consider how fast it is to generate reports. Flexible reporting tools and prebuilt dashboards surface your most important metrics faster.
💡Tip: Shopify Sidekick can retrieve answers to your questions within seconds—no need to manually search for the right metrics. For example, tell Sidekick “Show me the sales, costs, profits, returns, and discounts for my top 100 products,” and have it generate a custom data exploration for you to analyze product performance within seconds.
Predictive analytics
The best retail strategy anticipates what a customer needs before they take steps to ask for it. Predictive analytics within retail analytics software helps you do this at scale.
Confirm that shortlisted tools offer AI capabilities for cross-channel demand forecasting, dynamic pricing, and personalization. Look for features that can predict online-to-offline behavior patterns. For example, you might learn that 25% of customers who view a store’s landing page use a BOPIS service. Retarget visitors to these pages who exit the site without purchasing with an offer to redeem on an in-store pickup order.
Usability and accessibility
Retail analytics software surfaces a wealth of data that can be difficult to interpret. Take a demo—or ideally, a free trial—to confirm that the interface is intuitive not just for C-level executives, but also store associates and cashiers.
Mobile access and customization options are particularly important. Shopify caters to this with a mobile POS app that lets you complete POS tasks, including referencing retail analytics, from your smartphone or tablet.
Security
Every retailer has a legal obligation to protect sensitive data. Retail analytics software is the home of this information—whether it’s employees’ personal details, supplier contact information, or transaction data.
Confirm that your vendor offers the following data protection measures to keep this data from falling into the wrong hands:
- Data encryption
- Immutable audit logs and trails
- User access controls with two-factor authentication
- Compliance with retail industry standards and regulations
- Secure APIs through authentication and input validation
- Regular system and software updates
Best retail analytics software picks
1. Shopify
Shopify Analytics gives you complete visibility into your retail business because it's built on the same platform as your POS and ecommerce operations. Unlike traditional analytics tools that need to connect different systems, Shopify Analytics provides real-time insights across all your sales channels automatically.
Shopify has over 60 ready-made dashboards and the option to customize your reports. Filter findings by behavior, customers, sales, marketing, and acquisition to monitor every aspect of your store’s performance. That includes:
- Sales trends
- Inventory reports
- Marketing effectiveness per channel
- Customer behavior, including where visitors are coming from
- Benchmarking against similar Shopify stores
With Shopify Analytics baked into every plan, 58% of survey respondents reported a positive business impact due to the POS implementation speed.
“Creating custom dashboards lets us focus on our core product performance without needing to export and clean the data,” says Shelby Adams, operations manager at Cleverhood. “It allows us to stay nimble and reactive.”
Pricing: Included as standard in every Shopify plan.
2. Looker
Looker is a business intelligence platform that’s operated by Google Cloud. The software offers advanced retail analytics for enterprise brands, with features such as trusted modeling and an AI assistant capable of creating analytical workflows.
Best features include:
- Part of the Google Cloud
- Robust API coverage
- Vertex AI to create custom AI workflows
- Real-time reporting dashboards
- 800+ data sources and connectors
Pricing: Google doesn’t share pricing plans for Looker Studio publicly, but it does state that its pricing plans have two components: standard platform fees and an additional cost per user seat.
3. ThoughtSpot
ThoughtSpot is an enterprise retail and business intelligence platform. It offers a native AI analyst that’s capable of delivering automated insights alongside an extensive ecosystem of apps to unify your data in one reporting platform.
Best features include:
- Built-in AI analyst
- Customizable reporting dashboards
- Natural language search
- Automated insights to detect trends, correlations, and outliers
- Custom workflows
Pricing: TheEssentials plan starts at $1,250 per month. This includes up to 25 million rows of data and five permission groups.
4. Tableau
Tableau’s visual analytics platform is part of the Salesforce software suite. Its cloud-based software offers an intuitive reporting interface that’s easy to navigate, Slack integration and a community of Tableau users to connect with.
Best features include:
- Intuitive dashboards
- Data visualization tools
- Collaborate and publish reports with Tableau Cloud
- Slack integration
- Role-based licensing
Pricing: Plans start at $75 per user, per month when billed annually.
5. Microsoft Power BI
Microsoft’s Power BI software uses artificial intelligence to make sense of large datasets. It offers a user-friendly report creation tool and hundreds of prebuilt reporting templates to quickly get up and running.
Best features include:
- Part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem
- Semantic modeling
- Data governance controls
- Sharable analytics reports
- Incorporates retail business intelligence
Pricing: Free plan available. Paid subscriptions start from $10 per user, per month.
6. Polar Analytics
Polar Analytics is a retail analytics tool available in the Shopify App Store. It offers one-click integration with major sales channels and custom reporting dashboards to surface the data you want, quickly and easily.
Best features include:
- Real-time alerts
- Library of preloaded metrics
- Private, secure database
- Omnichannel reporting
- Integrates with Shopify and related apps: Klaviyo, TikTok, Amazon, etc.
Pricing: Plans start at $300 per month.
7. Triple Whale
Triple Whale is a multichannel reporting tool that integrates with Shopify. Designed to connect first- and zero-party data from various sources into a centralized retail analytics dashboard, it offers AI features to make sense of your business data.
Best features include:
- Automated business intelligence
- Data visualization tools
- Moby—an AI-powered assistant
- Data enrichment through Sonar
- Integrates with Shopify
Pricing: Free plan available for stores that process up to $500K GMV in the last 12 months. Paid plans for stores over this threshold start at $2,990 per year.
How to choose retail analytics software
Total cost of ownership
Many vendors have complex pricing structures that span beyond the initial monthly subscription. Consider all financial aspects, including implementation costs, user license scaling, staff training, maintenance, hardware upgrades, and potential integration expenses.
Shopify’s unique ability to unify data from all scales and channels means retailers benefit from significantly lower total cost of ownership—no middleware, integrations, or custom development required. In fact, data compiled in a recent report found that retailers using Shopify POS benefit from:
- 22% better total cost of ownership compared to major global competitors
- 34% lower data migration and transition costs
- 25% lower annual software and subscription costs
Integration framework
Retail analytics software should streamline data flow where partner, order, customer, and inventory data automatically sync. This reduces the amount of integration points required in retail operations.
“When all sales are coming through Shopify, you don't have to maintain the integrations required when you use different systems to manage each channel,” says Alexandra Mcnab, COO of Bared Footwear. “We can re-invest where it matters: delighting customers with impeccable products and service, and growing the business.”
Time to value
Implementing a new retail analytics tool that promises access to a unified data library is great. But if it takes six months to get the new software up and running, it’ll take a long time to see value from your investment.
Because Shopify Analytics is already collecting data from its unified sales channels, no extensive setup time is required. So much so, Shopify POS retailers experience a 20% faster implementation time than the market set surveyed.
“In a period of rapid growth, the ability to set up and control a store’s POS system with a single click was a game-changer,” says Corey Hnat, director of marketing at Pepper Palace. “It allowed us to open 60 new locations in a year.”
Grow your retail organization with Shopify
Retail analytics software unlocks insights that help you drive your business forward. But not all systems are created equal. Some enterprise vendors offer a wealth of data supplemented with business intelligence, but if it’s difficult to interpret data or reports require complex configuration, it can decelerate time to value and inflate costs.
Shopify solves these problems by natively unifying data from wherever you sell. Order, customer, and inventory data flows back to Shopify Analytics. From here, you can use prebuilt reporting templates or lean on custom data explorations to get the insights you need, fast.
Retail analytics software FAQ
What is retail analytics software?
Retail analytics software is a tool that collects data on your store. Retailers use these insights to analyze inventory, customer behavior, marketing effectiveness, and benchmark store performance against other businesses.
What are the four types of retail analytics?
- Descriptive analytics
- Diagnostic analytics
- Predictive analytics
- Prescriptive analytics
What is the most widely used data analytics software?
Shopify Analytics is the most widely used analytics software amongst Shopify merchants. It connects data from every sales channel into one data analytics tool, so you can simplify data collection and analyze every aspect of your business.
What software do retail stores use?
Retailers use point-of-sale (POS) software to operate every aspect of their business, from payment processing and inventory management to analytics.
