Your dashboard is now completely different. It provides, essentially, a dashboard for your online store with a statistics panel and an activity feed. Let's take a better look.

Sales overview

At the top you'll find the sales overview for today, yesterday and for the last 7, 30 and 90 days. For each time period it shows the overall revenue generated and how many orders were passed. The currently selected time period will be highlighted in white and the visitor and sales statistics below will be based on that time period.

Choosing the time period

You can also look at a specific time period of your choice using the date selector at the top right. Click on the date selector to reveal a choice of start and end dates for the period that you are interested in. After choosing the dates, the statistics in the dashboard will be updated. You can click somewhere off the date selector to hide it.

If you wish to return to one of the standard time periods, the last 30 days for example, just click on that time period in the light-blue bar with the sales overview.

Visitor statistics

Under the sales overview, you'll see two tabs: visitors and total sales. The visitor statistics are shown by default so let's look at that first. On the tab itself, you'll see a figure for the number of visitors that came to your store during the active time period.

Let's look at these statistics one section at a time:

• Visitor source breakdown: On the left there's a breakdown of these visitors based on how they got to your store: direct to your store; referred from another website (known as referrals); or referred from a search engine. For direct traffic, it's not actually known how they got to your store. It could be from a bookmark, an offline email client (like Microsoft Outlook) or perhaps they typed in the address in their web browser.
• Unique visitors: Below the breakdown you'll notice the starred figure for unique visitors. The overall figure for visitors may include some repeat visits from the same individuals. Unique visitors is a more accurate figure for how many individual visitors actually came to your store.
• Top referrals: This list shows the websites that are referring the most visits to your store. These referrers show you how people found your store: from what websites they clicked to end up on your store.

• Top search terms: This is a list of the top search terms used on the search engines to find your store.
• Visitors graph: On the right-hand side, there's a graph of visitors to your store during the selected time period.

• The traffic report: You'll notice the Traffic Report button at the bottom right of the visitors statistics. Clicking this will open up a more detailed report on a full page. It provides you with breakdowns of visits from the social networks; visits from the search engines; and visitors to your store based on their whereabouts in the world. There are also the top 10 referals and top 10 search terms. Click Dashboard at the top left to get back to the main dashboard.

Total sales statistics

Next let's click on the "Total Sales" tab to see more detailed statistics for your store's sales during the time period. You'll see figures for total sales and the number of orders passed on the left-hand side.

You'll also see:

• Conversion funnel: Below the total sales, you'll see a graphic that illustrates how your store's visitors made it through the checkout process. How many visitors added a product to the cart? How many reached the checkout? And how many ended up making a purchase? This graphic shows you what percentage of your visitors become customers, a figure generally known as the conversion rate.
• Top sellers: This is a list of your top-selling products for the time period.
• Total sales graph: Lastly on the right-hand side, there's a graph of your store's sales during the time period.
  

To return to visitor statistics, simply click on the "Visitors" tab.

The Activity Feed

Below the dashboard statistics, you'll see the activity feed. It's a list of the most recent activity in your admin. It includes among other things: new orders, newly created products, visitor blog comments and announcements from Shopify.

Make sure that you've set up notifications in the notifications settings so that you're getting email or SMS notifications for new orders. It's essential to be on top of the new orders coming in.

It's now time to start the marketing of your store. Get the word out to all your contacts, the social networks, blogs in and beyond your niche, newspapers, magazines, forums: all with the goal of getting a flow of customers to your store.