What is the Exclude $0 Order feature?
SourceMedium’s Exclude $0 Orders feature removes any order with a Total Revenue of $0 - and associated order components such as shipping, tax, revenue, etc. - from reporting on your Executive Summary, YoY performance, and Retention / LTV modules. These orders are not removed from any of the deep dive pages (e.g. Orders Deep Dive, Customer & Product modules etc).
Why turn on the Exclude $0 feature - the benefits & implications
There are many scenarios in which an order could come out to a Total Revenue of $0, such as:
- fully refunded orders
- fully discounted orders
- free promo / gift orders
These orders aren’t necessarily useful - and in some situations should be removed from the picture - to ensure the most accurate analyses. Consider the example in the section above - having a fully refunded order inflated ROAS vs removing that order from the equation, due to lower net revenue with that order included. CPO was similarly impacted, but to a more extreme degree - CPO was $50 with the refunded order included, compared to having it excluded with a CPO of $56.
Depending on which view of macro-level KPIs you consider to be “pure” (from the above example), should inform whether or not you should enable the Exclude $0 Orders feature.
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Our view
In our view, it’s usually a good idea to exclude these orders so metrics like AOV, Cost Per Order/Acquisition, ROAS etc. are more accurate. Since your marketing spend for the period wasn’t really effective in generating a successful order / revenue, our opinion is that marketing spend should only be measured against the effective/successful orders when looking at overall business health (Executive Summary) - e.g. ROAS should not use revenue from fully refunded orders, CPA should not reflect you paying money for a fully refunded order, that spend should be spread over the remaining successful orders. The Shopify sales report does not do this, which is why we focus on data cleaning and accuracy.