‘Exclude $0 Orders’ feature, what’s it for?
Source Medium’s Exclude $0 Orders feature removes any order with a Total Revenue of $0 — and associated order components such as shipping, tax, revenue, etc. — from reporting on your Executive Summary, YoY performance, and Retention / LTV modules. These orders are not removed from any of the deep dive pages (e.g. Orders Deep Dive, Customer & Product modules etc).
Why turn on the Exclude $0 feature — the benefits & implications
There are many scenarios in which an order could come out to a Total Revenue of $0, such as:
- fully refunded orders
- fully discounted orders
- free promo / gift orders
These orders aren’t necessarily useful — and in some situations should be removed from the picture — to ensure the most accurate analyses. Consider the example in the section above — having a fully refunded order inflated ROAS vs removing that order from the equation, due to lower net revenue with that order included. CPO was similarly impacted, but to a more extreme degree — CPO was $50 with the refunded order included, compared to having it excluded with a CPO of $56.
Depending on which view of macro-level KPIs you consider to be “pure” (from the above example), should inform whether or not you should enable the Exclude $0 Orders feature.