Should I use Shopify’s built-in ABC analysis, a dedicated inventory app, or a spreadsheet export?

Shopify’s built-in ABC analysis is the fastest choice if you are on a plan that includes it and only need a quick check. For regular buying decisions, longer date ranges, custom cut-offs, or scheduled delivery to a team, use a reporting app or a spreadsheet fed by an automated export.

Shopify’s built-in ABC analysis

Shopify grades every product variant with an A, B, C, or no-sales label on the Products page and inside Analytics. A-grade variants are the top 80% of revenue, B covers the next 15%, and C covers the final 5%. The grade is calculated on the trailing 28 days of sales. This is enough to spot bestsellers and dead stock at a glance, and it needs no setup.

Two things to know before relying on it:

• It is available on the Shopify, Advanced, and Plus plans. Basic plan merchants do not see ABC grades inside Shopify Analytics.
• It uses a fixed 28-day window, grades by revenue only, and cannot be exported on a schedule or sliced by collection, vendor, or custom field.

For a weekly glance at top and bottom movers on a recent-sales plan, this is enough. For planning, it has clear gaps.

Where Shopify’s view falls short

The 28-day window is short for seasonal catalogs, pre-orders, and slow-moving SKUs. A product that sells heavily every November looks like a C in July. A product sold only a handful of times a quarter is hard to classify at all. The native view also ignores products with zero sales, so you cannot use it to find stock that has never moved. And because it cannot be scheduled or emailed, anyone who needs the grades, such as a purchasing assistant, a VA, or an accountant, has to log in and pull them manually.

For teams that make reorder, markdown, or discontinuation decisions on a cadence, these limits start to matter.

A dedicated reporting or inventory app

A reporting app closes the planning gaps by letting you set your own date range and adding scheduled delivery. For example, Report Pundit has a prebuilt ABC Analysis template that lets you pick any date range (a quarter, a full year, or a custom seasonal window), grade within a specific collection or by a product metafield, and email the result daily, weekly, or monthly to anyone on your team. Because the grade recalculates for any window you choose, you can compare one period to another and see which products are climbing toward A or slipping toward C.

One detail to keep in mind: the current ABC template grades by units sold rather than by revenue. That is useful for replenishment, since units move stock. For a revenue or profit view, pair it with a sales-by-product or profit-by-product report.

If you also need reorder points, demand forecasting, and purchase orders, a dedicated inventory planning app is the better fit. A reporting app is usually enough when the main need is classification plus automated delivery.

A spreadsheet export

A spreadsheet gives you full control over the method. You can set your own cut-offs (for example 70/20/10 instead of 80/15/5), blend revenue and gross profit into a single grade, or layer in supplier lead times to flag A-items with long replenishment cycles. The trade-off is maintenance: every refresh is manual, formulas break when column orders shift, and the analysis is only as current as the last export.

Spreadsheets work best on top of an automated export, not as a replacement for one. A reporting app can push the underlying data to Google Sheets or Google Drive on a schedule, so your custom formulas run on fresh numbers without a manual re-export each time.

How to choose

• Small catalog, occasional check, on a plan that includes ABC: Shopify’s built-in view
• Regular buying decisions, team access, seasonal products, longer date ranges: Reporting app with scheduled ABC
• Custom grading logic, or combined revenue-and-profit ABC: Spreadsheet fed by a scheduled export
• Also need forecasting and purchase orders: Dedicated inventory planning app