Is there a Google Analytics alternative that understands cash on delivery?

Not among the general web analytics tools — Plausible, Fathom, Matomo, Umami and the rest measure visits, and a COD deduction never touches your website. You need either a tool built for it or a spreadsheet you maintain by hand.

What is the best free Google Analytics alternative?

Umami if you are willing to self-host, and Microsoft Clarity alongside whatever else you run, because session replay is free and shows you things no counter can. For most people GA4 itself remains the most capable free option.

Do I have to stop using Google Analytics?

No, and most stores should not. Analytics answers where visitors came from better than anything else. It simply cannot tell you what you kept, so the two tools end up doing different jobs.

Can I track profit per order if my store is not on Shopify?

Yes, but your options narrow sharply — most profit dashboards are Shopify apps and will not connect to anything else. That is the specific gap Markazi Panel is built for.

Will switching analytics tools lose my history?

Yes. None of these import Google Analytics history, and GA4's export options are limited. Run the new tool alongside the old one for a month rather than cutting over, so you have an overlap to compare against.

Does any of this work if my site is not an online store?

The traffic half does. If your website generates enquiries rather than orders, the profit arithmetic on this page does not apply to you — what matters is which pages produce enquiries, which every tool listed here can answer.

Google Analytics alternatives for a store that sells cash on delivery

Markazi Panel3 September 20267 min readChecked September 2026

Most lists of Google Analytics alternatives are lists of privacy-first web analytics tools. They are good tools and this page names nine of them honestly. But if you sell cash on delivery, none of them — including ours, for the traffic half — answers the question you actually have, which is not how many people visited. It is how much of what they ordered you kept.

Why people leave GA4, and whether you should

The complaints are consistent and mostly fair. GA4 is built on an event model that is powerful and genuinely hard to configure; above certain thresholds it stops reporting exact numbers and starts estimating; and it was not designed around a shop. If you have opened it, failed to find “how much did I make last month”, and closed it again, you are not doing it wrong.

The honest counterweight, and we would rather say it than have you find out: GA4 is free, and it does more than anything on this list. Audience building, ad-platform integration, funnel exploration, unsampled data at small volumes. If your problem is that nobody has set it up properly, the cheapest fix is to set it up properly, not to replace it.

The alternatives, and what each one is for

Grouped by the job, because they are not competing with each other. The first group replaces GA4. The second does something GA4 never did.

Privacy-first web analytics — the direct replacements

Plausible — a single readable page of traffic numbers, cookieless, very light script. Best for someone who wants the visit count and nothing else. Limitation: it is deliberately shallow, and that is the point of it.
Fathom — the same shape as Plausible, same trade. Best for simplicity and privacy compliance.
Simple Analytics — again the same category. The three are close enough that the choice between them is mostly taste and price.
Matomo — the closest thing to a true GA4 replacement, self-hostable, with real depth. Limitation: that depth costs the same setup effort you left GA4 to escape.
Umami — open source and self-hostable. Best if you already run a server and would rather own the data. Limitation: you now run a server.
Microsoft Clarity — free session replay and heatmaps. Not a replacement at all; a complement. Watching ten checkout sessions tells you things no table will.
Looker Studio — free dashboards over data you already have. Only useful if something else is already producing the numbers.
Google Analytics 4 itself — kept on the list deliberately. For a store with no cost data and no returns problem, it is free and sufficient.

The other job: what the money did

Every tool above measures traffic. None of them knows what your goods cost, what the courier charged, what was withheld before the remittance reached you, or which parcels came back. That is not a gap in those products — it is outside what a web analytics tool can see, because none of it happens on your website.

Markazi Panel is on this list for that half. It records traffic like the others, and then does the arithmetic between an order being placed and the money arriving. Its limitation, stated plainly: it does not integrate with Shopify, so if your store is a Shopify store the profit apps in that ecosystem will serve you better today.

What each tool can see. Capability, not price — see the note below on why.
	Privacy analytics (Plausible, Fathom, Simple)	Matomo / Umami	GA4	Markazi Panel
Visits and sources	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Set up in an afternoon	Yes	Self-hosting is a project	Rarely	Yes
Cost of goods per order	No	No	No	Yes
Courier freight, each way	No	No	No	Yes
Withholding on the remittance	No	No	No	Yes
Returned parcels taken back off revenue	No	No	No	Yes
Works with Shopify	Yes	Yes	Yes	Not yet
Reports in PKR by default	Configurable	Configurable	Configurable	Yes

What each tool can see. Capability, not price — see the note below on why.

Why there are no prices in that table

Because we would have to keep them true. Pricing in this category changes constantly, and a comparison page carrying a figure that was right in March is worse than one carrying none — it is the single fastest way to find out a page cannot be trusted. Every product above publishes its own pricing page; those are the numbers to use.

The one comparison worth making is structural rather than numeric. The profit-analytics tools built for Shopify brands are priced per month and often per order on top; Markazi Panel is priced per year, in rupees, with no per-order component. Whether that matters depends entirely on your order volume, which is why it is a structure and not a claim.

Checked September 2026. Prices and features of other products change often. These were read from each company’s own site on that date — check them yourself before deciding anything, and tell us if one is out of date.

How to choose, in three questions

Is your problem traffic, or money? If you cannot see where visitors come from, any tool on the first list fixes it, several of them free. If you can see the traffic and still cannot say what you earned, no tool on the first list will ever fix it.
Is your store on Shopify? If yes, the Shopify profit apps are the shortest path and we are not one of them — and what that subscription costs a Pakistani store is worth knowing before you add another one on top. If no — WooCommerce, a custom build, your own checkout — most of that ecosystem is closed to you, which is the situation this product exists for.
Do you take cash on delivery? If you do, the gap between what you sold and what you banked is the whole question, and it is the one thing no general analytics tool is built to answer.

Questions people ask

Is there a Google Analytics alternative that understands cash on delivery?: Not among the general web analytics tools — Plausible, Fathom, Matomo, Umami and the rest measure visits, and a COD deduction never touches your website. You need either a tool built for it or a spreadsheet you maintain by hand.
What is the best free Google Analytics alternative?: Umami if you are willing to self-host, and Microsoft Clarity alongside whatever else you run, because session replay is free and shows you things no counter can. For most people GA4 itself remains the most capable free option.
Do I have to stop using Google Analytics?: No, and most stores should not. Analytics answers where visitors came from better than anything else. It simply cannot tell you what you kept, so the two tools end up doing different jobs.
Can I track profit per order if my store is not on Shopify?: Yes, but your options narrow sharply — most profit dashboards are Shopify apps and will not connect to anything else. That is the specific gap Markazi Panel is built for.
Will switching analytics tools lose my history?: Yes. None of these import Google Analytics history, and GA4's export options are limited. Run the new tool alongside the old one for a month rather than cutting over, so you have an overlap to compare against.
Does any of this work if my site is not an online store?: The traffic half does. If your website generates enquiries rather than orders, the profit arithmetic on this page does not apply to you — what matters is which pages produce enquiries, which every tool listed here can answer.

The short version

If you want simpler traffic numbers, pick any of Plausible, Fathom or Simple Analytics and stop reading — they are good, and the choice barely matters. If you want to know what a cash-on-delivery order actually left you with, no amount of switching web analytics tools will produce that number, because it is not a website measurement. It is arithmetic across your orders, your costs and your courier, and it is worth reading what a COD order actually costs before you buy anything at all.

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.