Is free analytics enough for an online store?

For traffic questions, yes, and switching away for those is usually a waste. For a cash-on-delivery store it cannot answer what you kept, because the deductions happen off your website entirely.

What does Google Analytics cost a COD business?

Nothing in fees. The cost is in three decisions it cannot inform correctly — which product to push, which channel to fund, and whether a month was good — because all three depend on money it cannot see.

Would a better free analytics tool fix this?

No. Cost of goods, freight, withholding and refusals do not happen on your website, so no web analytics tool of any quality can observe them. It is a category boundary rather than a missing feature.

Should I stop using free analytics if I buy something else?

Usually not. Free tools remain the best answer for where visitors came from, and most stores end up running both because the two answer different questions.

How do I know whether the gap is big enough to matter?

Work out one month by hand and compare it to the revenue your analytics reported. If the difference would not have changed a decision, keep the free tool.

Does this apply if I sell on Daraz or a marketplace?

The principle does — marketplace fees, returns and settlement timing create the same gap. The specifics differ, because the marketplace reports some of it to you and your own website reports none of it.

Free analytics is not free when every order is cash

Markazi Panel3 September 20265 min read

Free analytics is genuinely free, and for most websites it is also sufficient. The exception is a business where the gap between an order and the money is large, variable and invisible — which is every cash-on-delivery store. There the cost of a free tool is not paid in money. It is paid in decisions made on a number that was never the money.

What free tools do well

Where visitors came from. Which pages they read. Which campaign brought them. How many arrived on a phone. Whether traffic is growing. These are real questions, free tools answer them properly, and a store that pays for a tool to answer them has wasted money.

None of what follows is an argument that free analytics is bad. It is an argument that it is answering a different question from the one a COD business needs answered.

The three decisions it gets wrong

1. Which product to push

A free tool ranks products by revenue, because revenue is the only thing it can see. In a COD business the ranking by profit can be different, and occasionally reversed: a heavier product costs more freight, a cheaper one gets refused more often, and the bestseller by revenue can be the worst performer by money kept.

What it costs you: stock and advertising pushed behind the wrong item, for as long as nobody checks.

2. Which channel to spend on

Attribution in a free tool credits a channel with the order value. It has no way to know that one channel’s orders are refused at the door far more often than another’s. Two channels with identical revenue and very different return rates look identical, and in a COD business that difference is the whole question about a channel.

What it costs you: budget moved toward the channel that generates the most orders rather than the most delivered ones.

3. Whether the month was good

The revenue figure is available immediately and feels like an answer. The real figure arrives weeks later in a remittance, minus freight both ways on the parcels that came back and minus what was withheld. The first number is the one people plan on, because it is the one that exists when the planning happens.

What it costs you: commitments made against money that had not survived the journey.

Why this is not a flaw in the free tools

Nothing above is a criticism of Google Analytics, Plausible, Matomo or any of the others. None of those deductions happens on your website. Cost of goods is in your purchasing. Freight is with the courier. Withholding is applied to a remittance. A refusal happens at a customer’s front door.

A web analytics tool cannot see any of it, however good it is, and no amount of configuring one will change that. It is a category boundary, not a feature gap — which is also why “switch to a better free analytics tool” never solves this.

When free is the right answer anyway

You take card payments. The gap between order and money is a gateway fee. It is small, it is predictable, and a free tool plus one subtraction is fine.
Your margins are wide. If freight and returns are a small fraction of a large margin, being approximately right is being right enough.
Your volume is low. Do the arithmetic by hand once a month. That is more accurate than most software and costs an hour.
Your website is not a shop. If it generates enquiries rather than orders, none of this applies — what matters is which pages produce enquiries, and free tools answer that.

How to decide, with a number rather than a feeling

Take last month. Work out, by hand, what one delivered order actually left you with and what one refused order cost. Multiply by the counts. Compare that total against the revenue your analytics reported for the same month.

The difference between those two figures is what the free tool is not telling you. If it is small, keep the free tool and spend the money elsewhere — that is a real outcome and it happens. If it is large enough that you would have decided differently, you have your answer, and you got it for the price of an evening.

Questions people ask

Is free analytics enough for an online store?: For traffic questions, yes, and switching away for those is usually a waste. For a cash-on-delivery store it cannot answer what you kept, because the deductions happen off your website entirely.
What does Google Analytics cost a COD business?: Nothing in fees. The cost is in three decisions it cannot inform correctly — which product to push, which channel to fund, and whether a month was good — because all three depend on money it cannot see.
Would a better free analytics tool fix this?: No. Cost of goods, freight, withholding and refusals do not happen on your website, so no web analytics tool of any quality can observe them. It is a category boundary rather than a missing feature.
Should I stop using free analytics if I buy something else?: Usually not. Free tools remain the best answer for where visitors came from, and most stores end up running both because the two answer different questions.
How do I know whether the gap is big enough to matter?: Work out one month by hand and compare it to the revenue your analytics reported. If the difference would not have changed a decision, keep the free tool.
Does this apply if I sell on Daraz or a marketplace?: The principle does — marketplace fees, returns and settlement timing create the same gap. The specifics differ, because the marketplace reports some of it to you and your own website reports none of it.

The evening’s arithmetic in the last section is set out step by step in how to work out your real profit on one order.

Written by Markazi Panel, which does the arithmetic in this guide for you — see a dashboard with a month of data in it, or ask anything at hello@markazipanel.com.