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Stop exporting orders to spreadsheets: a better weekly store review

By the IntelliCart team · October 20, 2026 · 2 min read

Ask an e-commerce manager how they start the week and you'll often hear the same answer: export last week's orders, paste them into the spreadsheet, fix the formulas that broke, then start answering questions. By the time the numbers are ready, half the morning is gone — and the spreadsheet is already out of date.

What goes wrong with the export habit

• It's slow. The same cleaning steps — removing test orders, splitting bundles, converting currencies — get repeated every week.
• It's fragile. One changed column name in the export breaks every formula downstream, quietly.
• It can't answer follow-ups. The moment someone asks “and was that new or returning customers?”, you're back to exporting.
• Everyone has their own copy. Marketing's spreadsheet and finance's spreadsheet drift apart, and so do their numbers.

A 20-minute weekly store review

Replace the export with a fixed set of questions answered from live data, in the same order every week:

1. Revenue and orders versus last week and the same week last year, net of refunds.
2. Conversion rate by device, and the funnel step that moved the most.
3. Average order value and the share of orders using a discount.
4. Top movers: the five products with the biggest change in units, up or down.
5. New vs. returning customers and the repeat-purchase rate of last month's new customers.
6. Channel efficiency: spend and revenue by campaign, using store revenue for totals.

Same questions, same definitions, every week. The value is in the comparison, not the spreadsheet.

Turn answers into a board, not a file

Once the questions are fixed, put them on one shared board that updates itself. The Monday meeting starts with the answers already on screen, and the time you used to spend cleaning data goes into the follow-up questions — which is where the decisions are.

In IntelliCart, each of these is a saved question on a shared board, refreshed automatically, with alerts when any of them moves more than usual.