1. Purpose
Get order data out of Shipsidekickand into a spreadsheet yourself, choosing the file format that actually carries the detail you need, and know which questions the export can answer today and which ones still have to be asked on screen.
2. Scope
Running the Orders report, choosing between CSV and Excel, and using the Orders screen to find a group of orders by tag or by order number. Building the tags themselves is out of scope. So are the other seven reports on the same page, although the CSV and Excel rule in section 4 applies to the Shipments report in the same way.
3. Roles & Responsibilities
Role | Responsibility |
|---|---|
Brand or account admin | Decides what the export is for, picks the date range, and reads the result |
Operations staff | Uses the Orders screen to answer a question on the spot when no export is needed |
Support | Only needed for the two cases in section 8 that the product cannot yet filter |
4. Key concept — CSV and Excel do not return the same data
This is the single most useful thing in this document, and it is the reason for most requests to "add a SKU column" to the report.
Format | What you get |
|---|---|
CSV | One sheet only. One row per order, twenty-six columns, ending with a Products Summary cell that lists the products as a single piece of text such as 2x Balm (BALM-01); 1x Candle (CAN-04). |
Excel (XLSX) | Two sheets. The same Orders sheet, plus a Line Items sheet with one row per SKU on every order, carrying SKU, Product Name, Variant Title, Quantity, Unit Price, Extended Price, Lot Num and Expiry. |
CSV is the default, and nothing on screen says the Excel option carries an extra sheet. If you want to pivot by SKU, or you want lot numbers and expiry dates, you must choose Excel. Asking for the CSV and then asking for SKUs to be added is asking for something the Excel file already has.
5. Procedure — run the Orders report
Go to Reports and stay on the Orders tab, which is the one it opens on.
Set Start Date and End Date. The range is inclusive of both days and is read in your organization's report timezone, not UTC, so a day here means your working day.
Leave Include Child Organizations ticked if you run child organizations and want them all in one file. Untick it for this organization alone.
In File Format choose CSV or Excel (XLSX), using section 4 to decide. Choose Excel if you are unsure, because it contains everything the CSV does and more.
Click Generate.
The report is built in the background rather than downloaded on the spot. A message confirms it has been queued and tells you it will appear in Downloads when it is ready.
Keep the range narrow. The report has a time limit and a wide range can run past it and fail, so on a high-volume organization about a week at a time is the reliable size. Pull several short ranges and stack them in one spreadsheet rather than asking for one long one. See section 8.
Finished reports stay available for seven days and then expire, so download the file rather than relying on the link later.
6. Procedure — find a group of orders by tag on screen
Tags cannot be exported yet, per section 8. To read them, use the Orders screen.
Go to Orders.
Type the tag into the search box, spelled and capitalised exactly as the tag itself. See the caution below, because this is where most people go wrong.
Click the eye icon above the table and switch on Tags. The column is hidden until you do, and the setting is remembered in that browser only, so it has to be switched on again on another computer.
Caution — tag search is case sensitive. Searching a tag matches only that exact capitalisation. If a tag has been created twice with different capitalisation, which happens easily when tags arrive from more than one place, each spelling returns only its own share and the total looks far smaller than it is. A result that comes back suspiciously small is the signal: try the other capitalisations before concluding the tagging failed.
Order number search behaves differently and more helpfully. It matches part of a name and ignores capitalisation, so typing the first few characters of an order number finds every order starting that way.
7. Verification
The file appears in Downloads with the status showing it is complete.
The Orders sheet row count is in the region you expected for that date range.
If you chose Excel, the workbook has two tabs, Orders and Line Items.
Barcode, UPC and similar product columns coming back empty means those fields are not filled in on the product catalogue, not that the export dropped them.
On screen, the Tags column is visible and populated once the eye icon toggle is switched on.
A report showing as failed, rather than complete, almost always means the date range was too wide. Halve it and run it again.
8. Constraints and caveats
The Orders report filters by date only. There is no filter for tag, order number, status, warehouse or carrier, so selecting a subset means exporting the whole date range and filtering in the spreadsheet.
The report has to finish inside a time limit, and a wide date range on a busy organization can run past it and come back failed rather than slow. Measured on one high-volume organization, a 15 day shipments range completed in about 4 minutes, 16 days and 31 days both failed, and an Excel export failed at 13 days. Excel is heavier than CSV, so it reaches the limit sooner.
That limit is what makes the missing filters bite. Because the date range is the only filter, the only way to reach more data is the same action that fails, and a multi-month slice is not reachable by waiting longer.
This is a property of the report size, not of your account, so a range that fails once will keep failing until it is narrowed.
Tags are not a column in any export, in either format.
The Orders screen can answer both of those questions on screen but has no download button, so what you can see there cannot be exported from there.
The Shipments report has the same date-only limitation, so shipping cost for a named group of orders cannot be filtered either.
Column visibility on the Orders screen is stored per browser, not per user, so it does not follow you to another device.
Reports expire after seven days.
Filtering the report by order number and by tag is being tracked with the engineering team. Until it lands, those two exports have to be requested from support.
9. Worked example
A brand wants yesterday's orders carrying one promotional tag, and separately wants the shipping cost on every order whose number begins with a two-letter prefix.
Observation | Reading |
|---|---|
Searching the tag in lower case returned a single order | The tag exists twice with different capitalisation. Nearly every order sat on the other spelling. The count was not evidence of a tagging failure, it was evidence of a case-sensitive search. |
The tag could be seen on screen but not exported | Correct and expected. Tags are not a column in either export format. |
The order number prefix found the right orders on the Orders screen | Order number search matches part of a name and ignores capitalisation. There is still no way to export just that group. |
A multi-month export was requested to get at those same orders | Not reachable. A range that wide fails rather than finishing slowly, so the answer is short ranges stacked together, or a request to support. |
The CSV was missing a SKU column | The Excel file has one, on its Line Items sheet. The CSV never carries that sheet. |
Resolution: the SKU question was answered by re-running the same report as Excel, which needed nobody's help. The tag export and the order-number export were requested from support, because the report cannot filter on either yet.