Salla and Zid reports: the treasure Gulf stores never open
Salla and Zid both ship a full reporting layer that most merchants glance at once. Here is every report they offer, what each one is for, the four that decide your growth, and the two questions neither platform answers on its own.
Short answer: Salla's reports page has eight families (Sales, Products, Customers, Visits, Most ordered, Most searched, Payment & shipping, Sales channels) and its new dashboard adds conversion rate, abandoned carts and delivery success by payment method. Zid's analytics has five (Marketing, Financial, Products, Operations, Zid Pay) plus sales reports with cost of goods and profit margin, and custom reports — the last two on Professional and Enterprise plans only. Four reports decide growth on either platform: net sales after coupons, best-selling and most-profitable products, returning-customer share, and delivery success by payment method. Neither platform gives you a cohort table or more than 30 days of visitor history — that is where Google Analytics 4 has to come in.
We run Saudi stores on both platforms, and the pattern is the same as on Shopify: the owner opens the home dashboard daily and the reports page a few times a year. The difference in the Gulf is that two of the most valuable reports — the order heatmap and delivery success by payment method — exist only here, and almost nobody uses them.
reports that decide growth on Salla or Zid. The rest are operations, not marketing.
is all the visitor history Salla's Visits report keeps, refreshed every 10 hours. Anything longer lives in GA4 or nowhere.
cohort reports on either platform. Returning-customer share is the proxy, and an orders export builds the real thing in twenty minutes.
Salla, mapped to the four questions
Names below are as they appear in the Salla dashboard (Reports → Report type, and the new "Store performance" dashboard). Starred reports are the ones we open every Monday.
Where do they come from?
- Visits (الزيارات)Visitors by city; last 30 days only, refreshed every 10 hours. Fine for a weekly look, useless for a season comparison.
- Sales channels (قنوات البيع)Orders by channel — store, app, POS, Salla Chat, marketplaces.
- New dashboard · VisitsDevice, browser, location and pages visited. Expect 85–95% mobile.
- GA4 (connected in settings)The only source of traffic older than 30 days, sessions by campaign, and landing-page conversion.
What do they do?
- Abandoned carts (السلات المتروكة)Under Products. Value and count of carts that stopped before payment — the size of the recovery opportunity, and a WhatsApp list.
- Most ordered (الأكثر طلباً)A weekday × hour heatmap of orders. The best dayparting and confirmation-staffing tool in the Gulf, and almost nobody opens it.
- Most searched (الأكثر بحثاً)What visitors type into your store search. Free product list and ad keyword list.
- New dashboard · Conversion rateConversion by stage and by source — the funnel report Salla did not have before 4.0.
What do they buy?
- Sales → Summary (ملخص)Total sales, coupon discounts, net sales — read net, after coupons, always.
- Products → Best-selling & Most profitableTwo lists, not one. Best-selling feeds the ads; most profitable (needs product cost filled in) feeds the offer.
- Sales by product / category / brand / code / coupon / city / branchTen sub-reports under Sales. City and coupon are the two worth a monthly look.
- Notify me when availableDemand you could not fulfil. Restock and retarget.
Do they come back?
- Customers (العملاء)Total customers, bought vs never bought, satisfaction share, top customers by spend. New dashboard adds new vs repeat.
- Payment & shipping (الدفع والشحن)Per carrier: shipping cost, shipping revenue, shipping profit, orders. New dashboard adds delivery success by payment method — your COD leakage number.
- No cohort reportBuild it from the orders export (below).
Zid, mapped to the same four questions
Zid organises analytics by department rather than by data. Names are from the new dashboard (Analytics). Reports marked "Pro+" require the Professional or Enterprise plan.
Sales trend, visitor journey, top customers and products, sales by city. Conversion rate here is orders ÷ visits — the Zid funnel in one number.
Q1 · Q2Orders, average basket, total sales, net revenue, cost of goods sold, discounts, shipping revenue and cost, payment fees, VAT, profit margin %, returned orders. Filter by city, channel, product, coupon, payment method, carrier. The only native profit report on any of the three platforms.
Q3Per product: quantity sold, sales, units. Your bestseller list for the catalog campaign.
Q3Total sales by city, by channel, over time, product sales — plus your own: pick metrics (quantity, frequency, AOV, orders, taxes), filters, table or chart, period comparison. PDF export.
Q3Count, value and recovery tracking. Pair with Zid's recovery messages and measure the recovered share, not the sent count.
Q2Delivery time, order status mix, shipping and payment preferences. Read returned and refused orders by payment method here — the COD leakage.
Q4Revenue split (products, shipping, VAT), payment method mix, Zid Pay success rates and settlements. Finance, not marketing.
opsZid states data lands in analytics within 10 to 60 minutes. Live enough for a launch day; do not judge an ad set on the last hour.
noteSalla's "Most ordered" heatmap is an ad schedule
Salla plots orders by weekday and hour. Read it as a media buyer and it answers three questions at once: when to raise bids, when the confirmation team must be online, and when a "same-day delivery" promise is actually true.
Illustrative shape of a Saudi beauty store (Riyadh time). Roughly 60% of orders land between 6pm and 3am, peaking Thursday to Saturday nights. Example values, not a specific client.
For ads: a store with this shape wastes 20–30% of a flat daily budget on hours that never convert. Meta's ad scheduling (on lifetime budgets) and Google's bid adjustments by hour exist for exactly this grid. For COD: if orders peak at midnight and your confirmation calls start at 10am, a ten-hour gap is where refusals are born — the customer has cooled off. Staff the confirmation channel to the heatmap, not to office hours.
Delivery success by payment method is the Gulf's real conversion rate
On Shopify, a sale is a sale. On Salla and Zid in Saudi Arabia, a sale is a promise until the courier gets paid. The payment & shipping reports are where the promise is measured.
Indicative ranges from Saudi accounts we run; your report gives you the exact split. The gap between the last two rows is the value of a confirmation flow, and it is usually larger than any creative test.
Two consequences for how you read every other report. First, Salla's Sales summary and Zid's sales report count the order at placement — a COD order that is refused nine days later appears in this month's sales and disappears from next month's. Always read sales next to returned orders (Zid) or delivery success (Salla) for the same period. Second, your ad platforms' ROAS is computed on placed orders. If your COD success is 62%, the true paid ROAS is 62% of what Ads Manager shows for COD-heavy audiences — which is why we report MER and reconciled revenue, not platform ROAS.
Three platforms, three clocks
How fresh the numbers are and how far back they go decides which comparisons are legitimate. Draw the clocks side by side.
The practical rule: on Salla, never compare this month's visitors to last month's inside the platform — the older month is already gone. Connect GA4 on day one (Salla has a native integration) so the traffic history exists when you need it for Ramadan planning. On Zid, wait an hour after a launch before reading the marketing dashboard, and use the built-in period comparison instead of screenshots.
What neither platform gives you, and the twenty-minute fix
Neither Salla nor Zid groups customers by first-purchase month and shows who came back. That table is your LTV and the ceiling on your CAC.
- Export orders for the last 12 months (Salla: Orders → Export; Zid: Orders → Export). Keep customer phone/email, order date, net value.
- In a sheet, for each customer take the month of their first order = cohort.
- Pivot: rows = cohort month, columns = months since first order, value = customers (or net sales).
- Read down the "+1" column. If it is not rising cohort by cohort, retention flows are not working, whatever the WhatsApp open rate says.
For the media buyer running catalog campaigns from a Salla or Zid feed, the product ID is the whole game — and it is not consistent across tools.
- GA4's
item_idon a Salla store is the Salla product id (6–10 digits). Match it to the export directly. - Google Ads'
product_item_idmixes three forms: the bare Salla id, a 16–20 digit Merchant Center offer id, andslug_p<id>. Only the first and third map directly; bridge the long offer ids by title or their clicks vanish from your analysis. - Merchant feeds often carry Arabic and English titles for the same product. Normalise titles (strip tashkeel, unify alef/ya/ta-marbuta) before grouping, or one product becomes two.
- Rank bestsellers on 60-day revenue with entry/exit thresholds (hysteresis), never on a single week — a Gulf catalog set that churns weekly never leaves learning.
What to open every Monday, by platform
The owner
- Net sales after coupons, this week vs the same week last year.Salla: Sales → Summary. Zid: Sales report or "Sales over time". Ramadan moves ~11 days a year — compare to the same Hijri week, not the same Gregorian one.
- Most profitable products, not only best-selling.Salla: Products → Most profitable (fill product cost first). Zid: Sales report → profit margin. If the two lists disagree, your ads are pushing the wrong hero.
- Delivery success by payment method.Salla 4.0 Shipping; Zid Operations. Below 75% on COD, the fix is the confirmation flow, not more spend.
- New vs returning share.Below 15% in a replenishable category means every month starts from zero.
- Abandoned carts value vs recovered.Measure the recovered share; the sent count is vanity.
The media buyer
- Best-selling products, 7 and 28 days.Salla: Products → Best-selling. Zid: Product analytics. This is the catalog product set — automate it, never hand-pick it.
- Most ordered heatmap.Salla only. Set ad schedules and confirmation shifts to it.
- Most searched terms.Salla only. Feed into Google Search keywords and into the product team's backlog.
- Sales by city.Both platforms. Riyadh vs Jeddah vs Dammam decides geo bid adjustments and delivery-promise copy.
- GA4 sessions by campaign and landing page.The traffic layer neither platform keeps. Connect it on day one.
FAQ
Which Salla report shows my best-selling products?
Reports → Products → "Best-selling products" (المنتجات الأكثر مبيعاً). Read it next to "Most profitable products" (المنتجات الأكثر ربحاً), which needs the product cost field filled in. Both export and print.
Does Salla show my conversion rate?
The classic reports page does not; Salla 4.0's new "Store performance" dashboard adds a conversion rate report by stage and by source, plus abandoned carts and delivery success by payment method.
Which Zid plan do I need for reports?
Zid's sales reports (with cost of goods and profit margin) and custom reports are available on the Professional and Enterprise plans; the marketing, product and operations analytics dashboards are available more broadly. Check the plan note inside Analytics before upgrading.
How far back does Salla's visits report go?
Thirty days, refreshed roughly every ten hours. For anything older, or for sessions by campaign, connect Google Analytics 4 from Salla's settings — the integration is native.
How do I get a cohort or LTV report on Salla or Zid?
Neither has one natively. Export twelve months of orders, assign each customer the month of their first order, and pivot customers (or net sales) by cohort month against months since first order. It takes about twenty minutes and it is the number your CAC must sit under.
Why is my Zid dashboard different from what I see in the order list?
Zid analytics update within ten to sixty minutes of an event, and sales reports count orders at placement. Returned or refused orders reduce later periods. Always read sales next to returned orders for the same window.
Want the four reports read on your Salla or Zid store this week?
A free audit covers these reports plus your ad accounts, and comes back as a short written diagnosis in Arabic or English.