eCommerce Businesses that are successful today have a presence on 5-7 platforms on average, spanning marketplaces like Shopee, TikTok Shop, social commerce channels, and various advertising networks. This multi-platform strategy is essential for reaching customers wherever they shop.
However, this approach creates a significant challenge: data fragmentation. Each platform operates with its own dashboard, export formats, and unique metrics. While extracting raw data is simple, obtaining clean, unified, and actionable insights across channels remains complex. Teams struggle with inconsistent data formats, duplicated efforts, and incomplete visibility into their overall performance.
This blog explores solutions for consolidating multichannel eCommerce data into a centralized, usable system that drives better decision-making.
The challenge of fragmented data isn't unique to eCommerce. It's a fundamental issue that arises when organizations collect data from multiple sources in different formats. However, the nature of online commerce amplifies these problems significantly.
One of the most deceptive challenges lies in seemingly identical metrics that actually measure different things across platforms. Take "Orders" as an example: Shopee might define this as total sales transactions completed, including all orders regardless of their final status. Meanwhile, TikTok Shop could define "Orders" as completed sales minus cancelled or refunded transactions.
Let’s say you're comparing performance across channels and see 1,000 orders on Shopee versus 800 on TikTok Shop. Without understanding these differences, you might conclude that Shopee is outperforming TikTok Shop by 25%.
However, if Shopee's number includes 250 cancelled orders while TikTok's excludes them, the actual performance gap is minimal. This can lead to misallocated marketing budgets, incorrect inventory planning, and strategic decisions based on false assumptions.
Marketing and sales teams often operate in separate ecosystems, using different tools and dashboards for their respective functions.
Marketing tracks campaign performance through Facebook Ads Manager, Google Analytics, and TikTok Ads, while sales teams monitor transactions through Shopee Seller Center, Lazada dashboards, and other marketplace interfaces.
This creates information gaps where marketing spend cannot be directly correlated with sales outcomes. Teams make decisions in isolation, leading to duplicated efforts, conflicting strategies, and missed opportunities for cross-channel optimization.
Most teams still rely on downloading CSV files from platforms, manually stitching data in Excel spreadsheets, and creating reports days or even weeks after the actual events occurred. This process is time-consuming and also renders insights practically useless in any dynamic market.
While customer behavior doesn’t shift in a day or two, demand patterns may. They change within hours, especially during flash sales, viral trends, or competitive promotions. When your analysis is based on week-old data, you're essentially driving while looking in the rearview mirror. Critical opportunities are missed, inventory shortages go unnoticed, and marketing campaigns continue burning budget long after they've stopped being effective.
Now that we understand how challenging multichannel reporting can be, the next step is to simplify the tracking. While it's beneficial to monitor every metric for a complete overview, not every data point holds equal importance.
For effective multichannel eCommerce analytics, we need to prioritize the right metrics that drive actual business decisions.
The foundation of unified reporting lies in focusing on metrics that translate consistently across different channels, allowing meaningful comparisons and consolidated insights.
Revenue and Performance Metrics: Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), conversion rates, and product performance can be tracked uniformly across Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop. While each platform may calculate these slightly differently, they represent comparable business outcomes that enable cross-platform performance analysis.
Marketing Efficiency Metrics: Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) provide standardized measures across Meta Ads, Google Ads, and TikTok Ads. These metrics allow teams to compare channel effectiveness and optimize budget allocation based on performance rather than platform preference.
Product-Level Insights: SKU-level contribution analysis across all platforms combined reveals which products drive the most value regardless of where they're sold. This unified view helps with inventory planning and cross-channel promotion strategies.
The same data serves different purposes depending on the use case. CXOs need topline metrics like total GMV growth, ROAS trends, and market share shifts across channels. These executive dashboards should focus on strategic indicators that inform major business decisions and resource allocation.
Meanwhile, eCommerce managers and operational teams require granular data to execute daily optimizations. Campaign managers need hourly ad performance data, inventory managers need real-time stock levels across platforms, and customer service teams need detailed order status information.
The key is ensuring each team gets the right level of detail without overwhelming them with unnecessary complexity.
Now, how do you give everyone access to the right data so they can make informed decisions? We'll tell you what the answer is not—it's not manually creating dashboards on a regular basis, constantly updating spreadsheets, or asking team members to log into multiple platforms daily.
Let's explore what the real solution looks like.
Graas' Extract functionality, integrates seamlessly with all your sales and marketing channels. Instead of logging into 10-15 different platforms every time you need an update, Extract provides real-time data collation from Shopee, TikTok Shop, Lazada, Meta Ads, Google Ads, and other key channels in one centralized location.
This eliminates the platform-hopping that consumes hours of productive time. Your team gets instant access to consolidated performance data without the friction of multiple logins.
Extract goes beyond simple data aggregation by intelligently aligning naming conventions, filters, and metric definitions across platforms. Remember our earlier example of "Orders" meaning different things on different platforms? Extract resolves these inconsistencies by standardizing definitions, ensuring that when your team sees "Orders," they're comparing apples to apples across all channels.
If you were to manually create dashboards for different departments and stakeholders, dashboard creation would become your full-time job. Graas changes this dynamic entirely. Extract enables you to create multiple customized dashboards with different metrics, visualizations, and time frames tailored to specific roles and responsibilities.
Perhaps most importantly, Extract provides no-code access to powerful analytics capabilities. Team members don't need technical expertise or SQL knowledge to generate insights. The intuitive interface allows anyone to create reports, apply filters, democratizing data access across your organization.
Data is only useful when it's unified, structured, and actionable. Multichannel eCommerce doesn't have to mean fragmented insights and delayed decisions. With the right approach to data centralization, your team can move from reactive reporting to proactive strategy execution.
Ready to eliminate the manual mess? Try Graas’ Extract and get the eCommerce metrics you need without any complexity!
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