Shopify Product Orders by Year and Month Template

The Product Orders by Year and Month template tracks how many distinct Shopify orders included each product. It creates one annual worksheet and one monthly worksheet, giving you both long-term direction and recent detail.

Orders Count is different from quantity sold. One order can include several units of the same product.

Why order frequency is worth its own report

Sales value tells you what a product earned. Order count tells you how often customers reached for it, and those can point in opposite directions.

A product appearing in many orders is doing work beyond its own revenue: it pulls people into baskets, it is likely a repeat purchase, and going out of stock on it costs you more than the item’s sales suggest. A product with high revenue across very few orders is the reverse, valuable but fragile.

Use this template to see:

Which products appear most often in customer baskets
Whether revenue rests on many customers or a handful of large orders
Which products have a recurring seasonal rhythm
Which are appearing in fewer orders over time, even if revenue looks stable

What the template creates

Annual Orders Count

Product Title
Handle
Orders Count All Time
One Orders Count column for each available calendar year from the current year back through 2018

Monthly Orders Count

Product Title
Handle
Orders Count All Time
One Orders Count column for each of the latest 24 calendar months

Create the Product Orders spreadsheet

Install Mixtable Analytics Spreadsheet
Open your Mixtable dashboard and click Create spreadsheet at the top of the page. If you haven't created a spreadsheet yet, click Browse all templates below the dashboard's suggestions instead. In the Create spreadsheet window, find Product Orders by Year and Month under Analytics & Reporting, or type its name in the search box, and click it. Mixtable creates the spreadsheet and fills it with data from your Shopify store.

What Orders Count tells you

Orders Count helps answer:

How often a product appears in customer baskets
Whether demand is spread across many orders or concentrated in a few
Which products have recurring seasonal order patterns
Which products are becoming more or less common in orders

It does not tell you how many units were sold. Add Gross Quantity Sold and Net Quantity Sold when customers may buy several units per order.

Use the annual worksheet

The annual worksheet is best for:

Long-term product adoption
Products with slow but durable demand
Year-over-year assortment reviews
Finding products whose order frequency has steadily declined

The current year is year to date. Compare completed years or use matching fixed dates for a fair in-year comparison.

Use the monthly worksheet

The monthly worksheet is best for:

Seasonality
Recent launches
Promotion effects
Reorder cadence
Finding abrupt drops caused by inventory or publication changes

Compare the same month across years to separate seasonal patterns from true growth or decline.

Pair orders with value and quantity

Add:

Net Sales to understand retained merchandise value
Gross Quantity Sold to understand original unit demand
Net Quantity Sold to understand units after reductions
Refunded Quantity or refund metrics to understand after-sale activity

A product with high Orders Count and low quantity is frequently purchased one unit at a time. A product with lower Orders Count and high quantity may be bought in bulk.

Add spreadsheet calculations

Useful formulas include:

Year-over-year Orders Count growth
Month-over-month change
Units per order using quantity divided by Orders Count
Net Sales per order

Keep the raw counts beside the formulas so ratios remain connected to their sample size.

For storewide order and sales trends, see the Monthly Store Performance template.