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Magento BI usually means one of three things: the built-in reports in the Reports menu, Advanced Reporting (a free dashboard service powered by Adobe Commerce Intelligence), or exporting Commerce data into your own data warehouse and BI tool. Built-in reports answer "what sold yesterday?" A warehouse answers "which customers are profitable after returns, shipping and discounts?" Most growing stores need to climb from one to the other in steps, and the right step depends on the questions you need answered, not on the tools.
The reporting maturity ladder
Use this ladder to place your store and decide what to build next. Each level adds questions you can answer, and also adds cost and ownership.
| Level | What it is | Questions it answers | Where it falls short |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Built-in reports | The Reports menu: sales, tax, invoiced, refunds, coupons, bestsellers, low stock, search terms, abandoned carts | What did we sell, refund and ship last week? Which coupons were used? What are people searching for? | Fixed layouts, cached statistics, no cohorts or margin, hard to combine with other data |
| 2. Advanced Reporting | Dashboards for orders, customers and products, included with Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source, using Commerce Intelligence behind the scenes | How are revenue, average order value and repeat customers trending? Which products and customers lead? | Store data only; requirements include working cron and a single base currency since install |
| 3. Web analytics plus commerce reports | A properly configured analytics tool with server-confirmed purchases, alongside Commerce reports | Which channels, campaigns and landing pages drive orders? Where does the funnel leak? | Two sources that never fully agree; no costs, returns or ERP data |
| 4. Data warehouse and BI | Commerce, analytics, ad spend, ERP and CRM data loaded into a warehouse, modeled once, reported in a BI tool | What is contribution margin by product, channel and customer cohort? What is customer lifetime value net of returns? | Needs data modeling and an owner; definitions must be agreed and maintained |
| 5. Activation | Modeled data flows back into marketing, CRM, search and personalization | Which segment should get which offer, today? | Only worth it once levels 1 to 4 are trusted |
Level 1: the built-in reports
The Reports menu covers marketing (products in cart, search terms, abandoned carts), sales (orders, tax, invoiced, shipping, refunds, coupons), products (views, bestsellers, low stock, ordered) and reviews. Adobe Commerce adds customer reports such as order totals, new accounts and segments. Many sales reports read from pre-calculated statistics, so they show stale numbers until someone refreshes statistics. That one detail explains a lot of "the report is wrong" tickets. If you run Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service, note that Adobe marks several Reports sections (including Reviews, Statistics and Commerce Intelligence) as applying only to cloud infrastructure (PaaS) and on-premises projects, so check what your admin exposes.
Built-in reports are fine for operations. They are not a good basis for decisions that involve marketing spend, margin or customer behavior over time.
Level 2: Advanced Reporting and Commerce Intelligence
Advanced Reporting is included with both Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source and sends product, order and customer data to an Adobe service once a day for dashboards. You do not need a Commerce Intelligence account to use it. Its requirements are worth checking before you rely on it: the store needs a valid SSL certificate and secure URLs, cron must be running, and the store must have used a single base currency since installation. Adobe also notes it temporarily cannot support Advanced Reporting when an AWS S3 bucket is the source data medium for Commerce Intelligence, and its Advanced Reporting documentation is marked for PaaS and on-premises projects. Adobe Commerce Intelligence itself is a separate analytics product, activated through Adobe, that adds more dashboards and reports.
Level 3: analytics that agree with your orders
Most stores already run web analytics, but the numbers rarely match Commerce because ad blockers, consent choices and failed tags drop purchases. Sending purchase events from the server, keyed to the order ID, closes most of that gap. Our guide to server-side tracking for ecommerce explains how. Use analytics for acquisition and funnel questions, and Commerce for the order of record. Benchmarks help sanity-check the results; see ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks for how to read conversion rates by industry and device.
Level 4: building a data warehouse
A warehouse becomes worth it when your questions cross systems: margin needs ERP costs, lifetime value needs returns, and attribution needs ad spend. The architecture is simple to describe: extract, load into a warehouse, model, report. The hard part is the Commerce data model, which has traps that catch most first attempts.
Data pipeline options
| Option | How it works | Good for | Risks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Database replica extract | Read from a MySQL read replica on a schedule, using updated_at columns for increments | Full detail, low cost, fast to start | Couples you to the schema; never query the primary database during trading |
| API extract | Pull orders, customers and products through the REST or GraphQL APIs | Hosted setups without database access; upgrade-safe contract | Slower for large backfills; mind rate limits and admin load |
| Managed ELT connector | A third-party connector loads Commerce tables or API data into the warehouse | Teams without data engineers | Check which tables are covered, sync frequency and how deletes are handled |
| Event streaming | Commerce publishes events (order placed, shipped, refunded) through a message queue, webhooks or Adobe I/O Events, and a consumer writes them to the warehouse | Near real-time dashboards and alerts | Needs replay and deduplication; events alone rarely replace a full extract |
| Data Connection to Adobe Experience Platform | Adobe's extension sends storefront events, back-office order events and profile data to the Experience Platform Edge Network | Stores already licensed for Adobe Real-Time CDP, Customer Journey Analytics or Journey Optimizer | Requires those Adobe entitlements and the Adobe Client Data Layer |
Commerce data traps to model correctly
- Parent and child order lines. A configurable product appears in
sales_order_itemas a parent row and a child row linked byparent_item_id. Summing every row double-counts quantities; pick one side consistently. - Refunds live elsewhere. Refunds are credit memos, not changes to the order. Net revenue needs the credit memo tables.
- Base versus order currency. Orders store both. Report in base currency unless you deliberately convert.
- Order status is a workflow, not a fact. Agree which states count as a sale (placed, invoiced or shipped) and write it down.
- Tax and discounts. Decide whether revenue is before or after tax, discounts and shipping, and use the same definition everywhere.
- Customer identity. Guest orders have no customer ID. Match on a normalized email if you want lifetime value to include them.
CRM data often sits next to Commerce data in the warehouse. If you are syncing customers and orders to a CRM as well, our Magento CRM integration guide covers the integration patterns.
Choosing the next step
- Write down the ten questions leadership asks most often.
- Mark which level of the ladder answers each one.
- Fix the cheapest gaps first: refresh statistics, enable Advanced Reporting, add server-confirmed purchase events.
- Start a warehouse only when several top questions need data from more than one system, and assign an owner for metric definitions.
- Reconcile the warehouse with Commerce order totals every month until the numbers match.
Mistri builds the Commerce side of these pipelines, including extracts, event publishing and order data models, through its Adobe Commerce development work, and custom dashboards and internal reporting tools through web application development.
Sources
Reports menu (Adobe Experience League); Commerce Intelligence tools and Advanced Reporting (Adobe Experience League); Data Connection overview (Adobe Experience League); Message queues (Adobe Commerce developer documentation).
