How Data Import Works

Overview

Once you connect your TikTok Shop, Dashboardly automatically begins importing your data. This process pulls in your products, orders, financial statements, refunds, and more so that your dashboard, profit and loss reports, and all other analytics pages are populated with accurate numbers.

You do not need to do anything manually -- imports happen in the background.

How the Import Process Works

Dashboardly imports your data in a specific sequence. Each stage must finish before the next one begins, because later stages depend on earlier data.

Import Stages (in order)

  1. Products -- Your product catalog: names, images, SKUs, and variants.
  2. Product Details -- Extended information like descriptions, categories, and pricing.
  3. Inventory -- Current stock levels and warehouse information (including FBT/Fulfilled by TikTok warehouses).
  4. Orders -- The order history available to your authorized shop, with line items, quantities, and statuses.
  5. Financial Statements -- TikTok settlement data, including available revenue, fees, adjustments, shipping amounts, and payment status. A statement marked processing or failed is not proof of a bank deposit.
  6. Refunds -- Return and refund records tied back to the original orders.
  7. Analytics Calculation -- After all raw data is imported, Dashboardly calculates your metrics: revenue, profit, margins, COGS, and everything else shown on your dashboards.

If TikTok later corrects an order's product or SKU, Dashboardly refreshes that order's product-level results. A sale and its costs can move between product rows without changing the shop-wide total. When Seller SKU names are reused, compare products by their TikTok Product ID and SKU ID.

Product category reports use the category that TikTok last returned for each product. A product with no confirmed category appears under Uncategorized; Dashboardly does not substitute a suggested category. For a shop connected before category reporting was introduced, support may need to refresh product details before its full category hierarchy is available in exports.

Placeholder Products for Catalog-Unlinked Orders

When an imported order line has no TikTok catalog product ID, Dashboardly creates a placeholder product so the sale is not dropped from product-level analytics. This recovery condition does not, by itself, identify the sale as LIVE, auction, or an official Temporary Listing. No action is needed on your part.

Why This Order Matters