If you've ever opened your Shopify admin, stared at the dashboard, and thought "great, but what does any of this actually mean for me this week?" — congratulations, you have correctly identified the problem with dashboards.
Most merchants don't have a problem getting data out of Shopify. They have a problem getting answers out of it. Reports require clicks. Comparisons require math. Trends require the kind of week-over-week memory most of us reserve for grudges. By the time you've assembled the picture, the moment to act on it has politely moved on.
Shopify Sidekick is built to close that gap. The catch is that Sidekick is only as useful as the questions you give it, and most merchants haven't been taught how to ask. This series — three articles, thirty prompts — fixes that.
This is Part 1. We're starting with the fundamentals: the prompts that tell you whether the patient is healthy, or just well-dressed.
What Shopify Sidekick Actually Is
Shopify Sidekick is the AI assistant built directly into your Shopify admin — that small chat icon in the top bar that most merchants click once, ask something vague, get a vague answer, and never open again. That is the wrong instinct, and we'd like a word with whoever told you AI was supposed to read your mind.
Sidekick has direct, read-and-write access to your store's data. It can pull sales reports, summarize order trends, look up specific products, check inventory levels, draft product descriptions, build customer segments, set up discounts, and explain why a number on your dashboard looks weird. It is, in effect, a junior analyst who already has your credentials, never sleeps, never takes PTO, and has not yet figured out it could be asking for a raise.
A few things to know before you start prompting:
- Sidekick lives in your admin. You'll find it as a chat icon in the top-right of the Shopify admin on desktop, and in the mobile app. It's included with your Shopify plan — there's no separate subscription, no upsell page, no surprise.
- It uses your actual store data, not the internet. When Sidekick says "your top product last month was X," that comes from your orders, not a Google search and a hopeful guess. This is the entire reason it's more useful than a generic chatbot.
- It can take action, not just answer. Sidekick can draft a discount code, build a customer segment, or write a product description and then save it — with your approval. If you'd rather it only answer questions and not touch anything, just ask questions and don't say "go ahead."
- It works best when you're specific. "How are sales?" gets you a number. "How did sales the last 7 days compare to the previous 7, broken down by channel?" gets you something you can do your job with.
- It is not infallible. Sidekick can misread an ambiguous prompt or pull a slightly different time window than you expected. For any decision that involves spending actual money, double-check the underlying report. Trust, but verify, and ideally do the verifying before the wire transfer.
- Treat Sidekick as a faster way to ask Shopify the questions you'd otherwise have to click through five dashboards to answer. The prompts below are written to give it the specificity it needs.
How to Use This Article
Each prompt below has four parts: the prompt itself (copy and paste it), why the question matters, how to use the answer, and when to actually run it. That last part is the one most merchants get wrong — running the right prompt at the wrong cadence is how you end up either drowning in data or surprised by a problem that has, in retrospect, been waving at you for six weeks.
You don't need to run all ten of these every day. A suggested rhythm appears at the end.
Looking for the quick-reference version? Jump to our Complete Sidekick Prompt Cheat Sheet, which has all 30 prompts in one place and zero pep talks.
The 10 Business Health Prompts
1. Get a Quick Sales Snapshot
Prompt: How did my store perform this week compared to last week? Show me total sales, number of orders, and average order value.
Why it matters: This is your vital-signs check. A number in isolation tells you nothing — "$12,400 in sales this week" is just a number until you know what last week was, at which point it becomes either good news or a small crisis. Comparing week-over-week gives you context fast, and surfaces the three numbers that move together: revenue, volume, and AOV.
How to use it: Read the three numbers as a system, not separately. If sales are up but orders are down, your AOV is doing the work and you should figure out why before it stops. If orders are up but sales are flat, you're getting busier without getting richer — which is the e-commerce version of being on a treadmill while holding a salad.
When to run it: Monday morning, every week. Pair it with coffee. High-volume stores can run it daily, but be honest with yourself about whether you'll actually act on daily noise or just develop a new anxiety.
2. Identify Top-Performing Products
Prompt: What were my top 10 best-selling products this month by revenue?
Why it matters: Your top sellers carry the store. They deserve disproportionate attention — better photos, better placement, deeper inventory, tighter ad targeting. Most merchants can name their top three off the top of their head; very few can name their top ten correctly, which is interesting because the top ten are usually where 70% of the revenue lives.
How to use it: Cross-check the list against your homepage, your top collection, and your most recent email. If a top-five product isn't featured in any of those, that's revenue you have personally chosen to hide. Also check inventory on the top ten before doing anything else — see #4 for why.
When to run it: First week of each month, looking at the previous month. Also re-run after any major campaign or seasonal event to see if the mix shifted, because it usually has.
3. Find Underperforming Products
Prompt: Which products had the most views but the fewest sales this month?
Why it matters: High traffic plus low conversion is the single most actionable diagnostic in e-commerce. People are interested enough to click — something on the page is then changing their mind. That "something" is almost always fixable, and frequently embarrassing.
How to use it: Open the top three offenders and audit them like a stranger who has never heard of your brand. Is the price clearly visible? Are the photos doing the product justice or doing it dirty? Does it look in stock? Is there a review count? On mobile, is the Add to Cart button above the fold or hiding politely below seven blocks of marketing copy? Fix one variable at a time so you know what worked.
When to run it: Once a month. More often and you won't have enough data to draw conclusions; less often and broken pages quietly bleed money like a leaky tap you've gotten used to.
4. Check Inventory Health
Prompt: Which products have fewer than 10 units in stock and sold at least 5 units in the last 30 days?
Why it matters: This is the prompt that catches the slow-motion disaster — a popular product quietly running down toward zero while you're focused on something else, like a new launch or your inbox. Running out of a top seller doesn't just cost the sale; it costs the customer's belief that you're a serious operation rather than a hobby.
How to use it: Sort by units sold per month, not by current stock. The product selling 50 a month with 12 left is a five-alarm fire; the one selling 6 a month with 3 left is a Tuesday. Cross-reference against your supplier lead times and place orders before you think you need to, because you usually need to before you think you do.
When to run it: Weekly, and absolutely any time you're about to push paid traffic or send a large email campaign. Driving paid traffic to an out-of-stock product is the most expensive way to disappoint people on the internet.
5. Monitor Customer Retention
Prompt: What percentage of my orders this month came from returning customers vs. first-time customers?
Why it matters: Acquiring new customers is expensive and getting more so every quarter. Returning customers are cheaper, spend more on average, and are roughly the only moat a small store has. If 95% of your orders are first-timers, you're running on an acquisition treadmill, and the treadmill is speeding up while the platforms quietly raise prices.
How to use it: Most established stores should see returning customers in the 25–40% range, though category matters. If you're well below that, the fix isn't more ads — it's a real welcome flow, a post-purchase email, and a reason to come back that isn't just "we exist." Discounts buy a second purchase; product and service buy a fifth.
When to run it: Monthly. The number doesn't move quickly, so checking it weekly is mostly an exercise in self-flagellation.
6. Understand Traffic and Conversion Trends
Prompt: How has my online store conversion rate changed over the past 4 weeks?
Why it matters: Traffic that doesn't convert is just an expensive distraction with good vibes. Tracking conversion rate as a trend — not a single number — surfaces the quiet problems: a checkout that broke after a theme update, a page-speed regression no one noticed, a new ad source that's bringing the wrong people in.
How to use it: If conversion drops more than about 15% week-over-week, treat it as an incident, not a metric. Check recent theme changes, app installs, and traffic source mix in that order. If conversion improved, figure out what changed and write it down somewhere, because your memory will not survive next quarter intact.
When to run it: Weekly. This is one of the few metrics where the trend is genuinely more important than the value.
7. Track Average Order Value
Prompt: What is my average order value this month, and how does it compare to last month?
Why it matters: Raising AOV is the cheapest way to grow revenue. You've already paid to get the customer here; getting them to add one more thing costs nothing extra except a slightly smarter cart page. A 10% lift in AOV is almost always easier to engineer than a 10% lift in traffic, and considerably easier than a 10% lift in the ad market's mood.
How to use it: If AOV is flat or sliding, try three levers in order: a free-shipping threshold set just above your current AOV, a cross-sell on the cart page, and a bundle on your top product. Test one at a time so you know which one actually moved the number, rather than congratulating all three.
When to run it: Monthly. Also re-check after any promotion — heavy discounting can quietly drag AOV down for weeks afterward, like a hangover that bills you.
8. Review Abandoned Checkouts
Prompt: How many abandoned checkouts did I have this week, and what's the total value of those abandoned carts?
Why it matters: Abandoned checkouts are the highest-intent traffic on your site — people who actually started buying and stopped. The total cart value is roughly the value of a working recovery flow. Which is to say: more than zero, and usually more than you'd guess.
How to use it: If you don't have abandoned cart emails set up, this prompt is the alarm bell telling you to set them up today, not Friday. If you do have them, the prompt tells you what they're missing. A 10–15% recovery rate is realistic and pays for the email platform several times over.
When to run it: Weekly. A dropping total cart value can also be a useful sanity check — if it's falling, the problem may actually be earlier in the funnel and your checkout is just being blamed unfairly.
9. Compare Time Periods
Prompt: Compare my store's performance this April to last April. Show total revenue, total orders, and new customer count.
Why it matters: Year-over-year comparison is the only honest way to tell the difference between real growth and a seasonal tide lifting everybody's boat. If you only look at month-over-month, you'll panic in January and feel like a genius in November, and neither feeling will be deserved.
How to use it: Pay particular attention to the new-customer line. Revenue can be flat YoY while the underlying business is quietly hollowing out — existing customers carrying the number while new acquisition slips. If new customers are down 20% YoY, that's a problem regardless of what total revenue is currently doing for your self-esteem.
When to run it: Monthly, ideally on roughly the same day each month so the comparisons are clean. Also run it before any annual planning conversation, especially one involving a spreadsheet you'll be asked to defend.
10. Check Marketing Channel Performance
Prompt: Which marketing channels drove the most revenue this month? Break down by source.
Why it matters: Not all traffic is equal. Some channels bring buyers; some bring browsers; some bring bots wearing trench coats. Allocating budget without channel-level data is educated guessing, and the education usually came from whichever ad rep called you most recently.
How to use it: Compare revenue per channel against effort and spend per channel. A channel that drives 5% of revenue but consumes 40% of your time is a problem, even if the absolute number looks fine. Be ruthless with what doesn't pay — channels do not have feelings, despite what their account managers may suggest.
When to run it: Monthly. Quarterly for a deeper review where you compare trends across several months rather than reacting to a single one in either direction.
Build Your Weekly Routine
You don't need all ten of these every day. Here's a sane rhythm to start with — adjust based on volume and how much time you actually have, not how much time you imagine you'll have.
Daily (high-volume stores only):
- #1 Sales snapshot
- #8 Abandoned checkouts
Weekly:
- #2 Top products
- #4 Inventory health
- #6 Conversion trends
Monthly:
- #3 Underperformers
- #5 Customer retention
- #7 AOV
- #10 Channel performance
- #9 Year-over-year
Up Next
This article covered the fundamentals — your business vital signs. In Part 2, we get into Operations & Inventory Management: prompts for stock planning, fulfillment, returns, and margins. Glamorous? No. Where money is actually made or lost? Yes.
In Part 3, we tackle Marketing & Customer Insights: prompts for understanding your customers, measuring campaigns, and finding growth.
Want all 30 prompts in one place? Bookmark our Sidekick Prompt Cheat Sheet.
CTA: Need help turning Sidekick insights into action? Let's talk about optimizing your store.