capture shortcode output for use in admin?

I need to capture the output of a shortcode that is basically all the informatoin for a product from a shopping cart plugin im using. I want to do this in the backend area though as i want to gather the information for other uses.

I have tried adding the following code to my themes function.php:
echo do_shortcode("[product id='1']");

but that simply just prints [product id='1']. Though when i add that shortcode to a post, it works perfectly. Am i missing something? Is shortcode access somehow disabled from the admin interface?

Any help would be sincerely appreciated.