How to find your total inventory value on Shopify

Value at cost is the accounting number: the cash currently sitting on your shelves, the one that belongs in month-end reporting. Value at retail is the commercial one: what that stock would bring in if it all sold at current prices. The gap between them is your unrealized margin, and watching it per location tells you where your buying is strongest.

The trend line matters more than either single number. Stock value climbing while sales stay flat means cash is quietly converting into shelves - usually the first visible sign of an overbuying problem.

Start from the value, then ask which part of it has stopped moving. The products not selling report, on the Pro plan, lists the stock with no recent sales alongside its cost, its price and the likely reason it is sitting there, which turns a number on a shelf into a shortlist you can act on.

The inventory profit health report, on Business, goes further and scores where stock value and profit pull in opposite directions - the lines carrying cash but little margin, the ones heading for a markdown, and what you would recover by clearing them at various prices.

For the month-end routine, schedule the inventory value report by email so the numbers arrive without anyone remembering to pull them. Scheduling needs Pro; viewing the report and exporting the spreadsheet work on the free plan.

You can, for a small catalogue and a single location. Every variant already carries what it cost you in the Cost per item box on the product page in your admin, and your on-hand counts live under Products > Inventory. Export both to a spreadsheet, multiply cost by units, and add the column up.

That works fine if you have thirty products, one place to store them, and you need the number once a year for the accountant. I would not pretend otherwise, and if that is you, close this page and go do it.

It stops working at the point you need the number more than once. A spreadsheet cannot tell you what your stock was worth on 31 March once April has moved it, so a month-end figure has to be captured on the day or reconstructed from memory. It also cannot split the answer by location without a lot of manual filtering, and it goes stale the moment a delivery lands.

That is the whole reason the report keeps saved snapshots: the past is the part you cannot recreate. Shopify has the same blind spot on movements rather than values, which we wrote up in seeing inventory history past 90 days.

Nearly always because some variants have no cost set. A variant with an empty Cost per item counts as zero at cost, so the total comes out low, and the report puts a banner at the top when stock on your shelves is missing costs. Fill them in on the product page, or use a cost rule to cover a whole vendor or product type at once.

Three other things move the number and surprise people. The report values what is on hand right now, so goods you have paid for that are still in transit are not in it. Retail value uses today's prices, which means a sale changes your inventory value without a single unit moving. And the per-location tables show the hundred most valuable items each, so the on-screen list is a top slice while the totals and the spreadsheet export cover everything.

The last one only bites European stores. Your listed prices include VAT on a tax-inclusive store, so retail value and the margin sitting in your stock would both read high if they were taken at face value. Easy Profit Calculator works out how much tax is inside your prices from your own recent orders and takes it out before comparing retail against cost, so the margin you see is the money you would keep and not the tax you would collect.