GA4 Ecommerce Reporting: The Field Combinations That Work

Ecommerce fields are some of the most heavily pulled on the GA4 connector, and they’re also where field-compatibility errors concentrate most. This is the working set: which fields combine cleanly, which need their own request, and the funnel from cart to checkout to purchase.

Pull date, purchase_revenue, sessions, and transactions for the last
30 days. Which days had the best conversion-to-revenue ratio?

Purchases: two metrics, two different counts

transactions counts every transaction event with purchase revenue, including in-app purchases and subscription renewals. ecommerce_purchases counts only the purchase event itself, and explicitly excludes in-app purchases and subscriptions. On a pure ecommerce site the two numbers are usually close; anywhere with subscriptions or an app, transactions runs higher, and mixing the two in the same report produces numbers that don’t reconcile.

The funnel: cart to checkout to purchase

add_to_carts, checkouts (the begin_checkout event), and ecommerce_purchases chart the funnel in order. Pulling all three together with sessions shows where the drop-off is largest, before cart, at checkout, or after checkout starts but before payment completes.

Pull date, sessions, add_to_carts, checkouts, and ecommerce_purchases
for the last 30 days. Where is the biggest drop-off in the funnel?

Item-level reporting

item_name, item_revenue, and items_purchased is the combination that reliably works together for product-level detail. item_revenue is price times quantity, minus refunds, and excludes tax and shipping; it’s an item-level figure, not the same as purchase_revenue at the transaction level.

Pull item_name, item_revenue, and items_purchased for the last 30
days. Which products drive the most revenue per unit sold?

What fails when combined

Ecommerce fields are also where GA4’s field-compatibility errors show up most, request transactions, event-count fields, or ecommerce fields alongside the wrong combination and the pull fails outright rather than returning partial data. The exact error messages and fixes are in the GA4 “fields cannot be queried together” guide. The safest approach is the three groupings above, pulled as separate requests and joined on date afterward, rather than one combined query across all of them.

Joining with Shopify

A small but consistent share of GA4 teams also pull Shopify in the same week, joining GA4’s on-site behavior (cart, checkout, engagement) with Shopify’s own order and fulfillment data for the full picture from click to shipped order.

Related reading

• GA4 Reporting: A Complete Guide
• Full GA4 field list
• GA4 Data API Guide
• GA4 “fields cannot be queried together” error guide