A weekly e-commerce report that writes itself
Five numbers, one threshold each and one decision. How to build a Monday report you actually act on, and how to stop building it by hand.
Most weekly reports fail the same way. They grow. Every time someone asks a question, a new chart gets added, until the report is twelve pages long and nobody reads past the first one.
A good weekly report is short enough to read before your coffee is cold, and it ends with a decision.
The five lines
These five numbers cover almost every online store. Each one gets a value, the change from last week, and nothing else.
- Revenue. What came in, after discounts, before tax.
- Contribution margin per order. What you kept from the average order after product, shipping, fees and ads.
- New customers and the cost of each. Total ad spend for prospecting divided by first-time buyers.
- Returning customer share. The percentage of orders from people who bought before.
- One action. The single most useful thing to do this week, with a deadline.
The fifth line is the point of the other four.
Give every number a threshold
A number without a threshold invites a discussion. A number with one invites a decision. Write the thresholds down once:
- Contribution margin per order below $15 two weeks in a row: review discounts.
- Cost per new customer up more than 15 percent: review prospecting creative.
- Returning share below 30 percent: check the post-purchase emails.
When a line crosses its threshold, the action is already decided. The report just says so.
If you have to think about what a number means every Monday, the report is not finished.
Stop building it by hand
The report above takes an hour if you copy numbers from Shopify, two ad platforms and an email tool into a spreadsheet. It takes no time at all if something else fetches the numbers and checks them against your thresholds.
That something can be a well-built spreadsheet with connectors, a colleague, or an AI assistant that has read access to your tools. The approach matters less than the rule: the person who decides should not be the person who copies and pastes.
Whatever does the fetching, keep the format fixed. Same five lines, same order, every week. The value of a weekly report is that you can compare this Monday with the last ten without reading.