Sales jumped on a Tuesday in March. Six months later, nobody on the team remembers why.
Was it the newsletter? The influencer post? The price change on the bestseller? Someone probably knew at the time. That knowledge now lives in an old Slack thread, a spreadsheet tab or nowhere at all.
Since October 1, Shopify Analytics lets you write it down where it belongs. Right on the chart.
What annotations are
An annotation is a note pinned to a date, or a date range, on a time-based report in Shopify Analytics. You add the moments that shape your numbers: a campaign launch, a creator mention, a supplier change, a promotion, a new shipping partner.
When you or your team open the report weeks or months later, the context is sitting right next to the spike or the dip. No detective work.
Each annotation can have:
- A title (up to 75 characters)
- A description (up to 150 characters)
- A date or date range, with optional times
- A category, either one Shopify suggests or your own
Anyone with the Reports permission can see, add, edit and delete annotations, and each one shows who created it.
Your notes, Shopify's notes and your apps' notes
Your own annotations sit alongside two other sources of context.
Shopify adds some automatically, such as when a product is published or unpublished, a theme is published, an app is installed or removed, or a metric definition changes. These only appear for stores with steady order volume. Shopify's threshold is an average of at least 10 orders a week, for 12 weeks within the past six months, plus at least one order in the past two weeks.
Installed apps can add annotations too, shown with the app's name and icon. Think of an email platform marking when a campaign went out.
You can search and filter across all three, so the chart becomes one shared history of what happened and why.
How to turn them on
Annotations are hidden by default. Open a report where time is the first dimension, like sales over time, and switch on Show annotations in the configuration panel or the annotations panel. From there you can add your own.
What we'd annotate before Black Friday
Peak season is when annotations earn their keep. Next autumn, someone will open this year's Black Friday report to plan the next one. Give them the full story.
- Campaign start and end dates, including early access for your email list or loyalty members
- Discount levels, and when they changed during the weekend
- Email and SMS sends, especially the ones that went out at unusual times
- Influencer and creator posts
- Theme or checkout changes, including any scheduled with Shopify Rollouts
- Stock-outs on key products
- Site issues, payment problems or slow shipping, even if they were brief
That last one matters more than it sounds. A dip with no explanation gets read as "the campaign didn't work". A dip annotated "payment provider down 45 minutes" tells a different story.
A few things to know
- Annotations only show on time-series charts. Tables, donut charts and cohort grids don't display them.
- They're not available in multi-store reports or in report exports. If you analyse data outside Shopify, the notes stay behind.
- The panel shows up to 10 events per activity type, ranked by impact. On a busy week, keep your own notes focused.
- Shopify and app annotations can't be edited or deleted. Only staff-created ones can.
- Apps can read the titles, descriptions and dates of your team's annotations, but not who created them. Keep that in mind before writing anything sensitive.
Our take
Most stores don't have a data problem. They have a memory problem. The numbers are all there. The reasons behind them walk out the door with whoever was on the team at the time.
Annotations are a small habit that fixes that. The trick is to agree on it as a team. Decide which categories you use, who logs what, and make it part of every launch checklist. Five seconds per event now saves hours of guessing next year.
If you'd like help setting up a reporting routine that your whole team actually uses, from annotations to the reports worth checking each week, get in touch. No pitch. Just a conversation.
