How Portfolytics Works Behind the Scenes

Most Shopify analytics app are made for analysts, not for ecommerce managers or digital marketers. Portfolytics aims to offer simple Shopify analytics dashboards that anybody can use. That is not to say that the Shopify native reports or some of our competitors like Better Reports or Report Pundit are bad. They all serve a purpose, just a different one than Portfolytics.

Portfolytics was built busy eCommerce managers, founders and marketers in mind who don’t have time or perhaps the knowledge to learn how to use complex tools. That’s why I have wanted to automate everything possible to create an instant and frictionless experience to make you understand better which collections or categories sell, which don’t, and how to improve them.

What is different

I think the best example about the easiness of Portfolytics is how you can get an interactive dashboard that shows your product hierarchy data without any setup that also updates every time you update it in your store. As far as I know, no other Shopify app does this.

Another example is how we show your (sub)category sales. By default, if a product belongs to several collections (remember, categories are just organized collections) all those collections will get that sale. Portfolytics offers two ways to look at the sales.

In the Collection reports all the collections get the sale. But in the Hierarchy reports the subcategory that is the first in the hierarchy will get the sale 100%. Two ways to look at the same thing to give you better insights to your store.

Below is a ste-by-step guide how Portfolytics works and how that might change how you see your store.

Step 1: Connect Portfolytics to Your Store

Head to the Shopify App Store and search for “Portfolytics”, click install, accept the read-only scopes that we need to analyze your data, and that’s it. You will automatically get a free trial.

Once connected, we pull your main menu (via the Shopify API) and check which items there link to collections. Pages and links that don’t lead to products — like “About Us” or “Blog” — are automatically filtered out.

So all that’s left is your real product structure.

You’ll immediately see:

• Each top-level menu item (like “Men” or “Home Goods”)
• Its subcategories (like “T-Shirts” or “Vases”)
• And all the products inside them

Plus of course all your collections in a separate view.

Step 2: Automatically Generate Product Hierarchy Analytics

Behind the scenes, Portfolytics maps every product to the first subcategory it belongs to, based on your menu.

This means:

• Each product shows up only once
• No double-counting if it appears in multiple collections
• The structure always follows your live menu

You don’t have to worry about logic or filters. We handle all of it for you.

And because this is based on your Shopify menu — not manual tagging — the setup is always accurate, fast, and based on how your store actually works.

Conclusion

Analytics for eCommerce managers shouldn’t require support tickets, expensive solutions or complex Excel sheets. What most people want is different from what is available. And that’s why Portfolytics exists. I have worked in many roles in eCommerce which hopefully helps me to understand what people in marketing or in top level positions need. And usually that is not complex data dumps, but simple and interactive solutions.

I sincerely hope that Portfolytics makes your work life easier. If you have any feedback, requests or anything at all you want to share, feel free to contact me by the chat window that you can find here or in the app.

Yours,

Ville – The Founder of Portfolytics