Quick question: which product in your Shopify store makes you the most money?
If your gut answer is "my bestseller," you might be right. You might also be shipping your thinnest margin out the door 300 times a month and calling it a win. Sales tell you what's popular. Profit tells you what's paying the bills. Those are not always the same product.
The good news is you don't need a spreadsheet wizard or an analytics team to find out. Shopify already has an AI assistant sitting in your admin that can answer the question in plain English. You just need to ask it the right way, and fill in one field first.
This post gives you six copy-and-paste Sidekick prompts for checking product profit, explains what each one tells you, and shows how the same approach can take a lot of busywork off your plate.
What Is Shopify Sidekick?
Shopify Sidekick is the AI assistant built into your Shopify admin. You type (or say) what you want in everyday language, and it works with your actual store data to answer questions, analyze sales, edit products, and build automations.
A few things worth knowing up front:
- It knows your store. Sidekick isn't a generic chatbot guessing about "ecommerce." It reads your products, orders, and reports.
- It asks before it changes anything. When Sidekick wants to edit something, it shows you the change for review first. Nothing goes live behind your back.
- It works anywhere in the admin. Desktop or mobile, from any page, by text or voice.
- It remembers. Sidekick learns from past conversations, and you can save prompts you use often as reusable Skills.
So what's a "prompt"?
A prompt is just the question or instruction you give Sidekick. "How were sales last week?" is a prompt. So is "Compare my two best-selling candles by profit margin over the last 90 days."
The second one gets you a far more useful answer. Same tool, same data. The difference is how specific you were. That's the whole game with AI assistants, and it's why we're handing you ready-made prompts below instead of just saying "go try Sidekick."
Before You Ask: Fill In "Cost per Item"
Sidekick can only calculate profit if Shopify knows what each product costs you. That number lives in a field called Cost per item, and a lot of stores leave it blank.
Without it, Sidekick can tell you revenue all day long. It can't tell you profit, because profit is revenue minus cost, and the cost is missing. It's like asking someone to balance your checkbook when half the receipts are still in your car.
How to add it
- In your Shopify admin, go to Products and open a product.
- Scroll to the Pricing section.
- Enter what you pay for one unit in Cost per item, then save.
Got a big catalog? Select products from the Products list, choose Bulk edit, and add the Cost per item column so you can fill in dozens at once. A product CSV import works too.
The catch nobody tells you about
Shopify only counts profit on sales that happened after the cost was entered. It does not go back and fill in your history. So if you add costs today, last month's profit report stays blank for those products.
That's not a reason to wait. It's the opposite. Every week the field sits empty is a week of profit data you never get back.
One more thing: cost per item is a snapshot. If your supplier raises prices, update the field, or your margins will look better on paper than they are in real life.
Source: Shopify Help Center: Profit reports
6 Shopify Sidekick Prompts to Find Your Most Profitable Products
Open Sidekick from your admin, then copy and paste. Swap anything in [brackets] for your own product names.
1. Find the gaps
"Which of my active products and variants are missing a cost per item?"
What it tells you: Your to-do list. Start here, because every prompt after this one depends on those costs being filled in. This is the only prompt on the list that's useful on day one.
2. Rank everything by profit
"Show my gross profit and profit margin by product for the last 90 days, ranked from highest to lowest profit."
What it tells you: Who's actually carrying the business. Don't be surprised if the top of this list looks different from your bestseller list.
3. Settle a head-to-head
"Compare [Product A] and [Product B]. Which one made more total profit, and which has the better margin per unit over the last 6 months?"
What it tells you: Whether to push the product with the bigger total or the better margin. One sells volume, the other earns more each time. Knowing which is which changes where you spend ad dollars.
4. Spot the busy-but-broke products
"Which of my top 10 best-selling products have the lowest profit margin?"
What it tells you: Products that keep you busy packing boxes without paying you much for it. These are your best candidates for a price bump, a cheaper supplier, or a bundle.
5. See what discounts really cost
"How much did discounts reduce my gross profit over the last 30 days, and which products were hit the hardest?"
What it tells you: Whether that sitewide 20% off actually paid off. Discounts come straight out of margin, and on a thin-margin product they can wipe it out entirely.
6. Test a price increase before you make it
"If I raised the price of [Product] by $5, what would my new margin per unit be? Assuming I sold the same number of units, how much more gross profit would I have made over the last 30 days?"
What it tells you: The upside of a price change, without touching your live store. Treat the number as a best case. A higher price can mean fewer sales, so watch your numbers for a few weeks after any real change.
How to Write Better Sidekick Prompts
The six prompts above all follow the same pattern. Once you see it, you can write your own for just about anything.
- Name the metric. "Gross profit" and "profit margin" are Shopify's own report terms, so Sidekick knows exactly which numbers to pull. "Money" or "how well it did" leaves it guessing.
- Give it a time frame. "Last 30 days" or "since January 1" beats "lately" every time.
- Tell it how to sort or compare. "Ranked highest to lowest," "top 10," "compare A and B." You'll get an answer you can act on instead of a data dump.
- State your assumptions. If you're asking a what-if, say what stays the same ("assuming I sold the same number of units").
- Ask one follow-up at a time. Sidekick remembers the conversation, so "Now do the same for my candles collection" works fine.
Here's the difference in practice:
|
Vague prompt |
Specific prompt |
|---|---|
|
How are my products doing? |
Show gross profit by product for the last 90 days, ranked highest to lowest. |
|
Are discounts hurting me? |
How much did discounts reduce my gross profit in the last 30 days, by product? |
|
Should I raise prices? |
If I raised [Product] by $5, what's my new margin per unit? |
Beyond Profit: Using Sidekick Prompts to Streamline Your Week
Profit questions are a great first test drive, but they're one lane on a much bigger road. The same "be specific" approach works across most of the repetitive admin work that eats a store owner's week.
Save your best prompts as Skills
If you find yourself asking the same thing every Monday, save it as a Skill. Skills are reusable prompts you can run again with a shortcut, so you're not retyping "show my gross profit by product for the last 7 days" every week. Build a small set once and your weekly check-in turns into a couple of clicks.
Let Sidekick build your automations
Shopify Flow is Shopify's built-in automation tool: when X happens, do Y. It's powerful, but the builder can feel like assembling furniture without the instructions. Sidekick can now build Flow automations from a plain-English description, show you what it made, and turn it on once you approve it.
Prompts to try outside of profit
|
Task |
Prompt to try |
|---|---|
|
Inventory |
"Which products will likely sell out in the next 30 days based on recent sales?" |
|
Slow movers |
"Which products haven't sold in the last 60 days but still have inventory?" |
|
Customers |
"Create a segment of customers who bought twice or more but haven't ordered in 90 days." |
|
"Build a Flow automation that tags any order over $250 as VIP and emails me." |
|
|
Content |
"Draft a product description for [Product] in a friendly, straightforward tone, under 120 words." |
|
Reporting |
"Give me a weekly summary of sales, top products, and returns compared to the week before." |
Each of these replaces a few minutes (or a few report tabs) of clicking around. Spread that across a month and it adds up to real hours back.
What Sidekick Can't Do (Yet)
Sidekick is genuinely useful, but it's not magic, and it's only as good as the data it's working with. Keep these in mind:
- Gross profit isn't take-home profit. Shopify's profit numbers are sales minus product cost and discounts. They don't include your ad spend, shipping, payment processing fees, apps, or your own time. Use them to compare products, not to replace your accountant.
- Bad inputs, bad answers. A missing or outdated cost per item will skew every profit answer.
- Double-check before you act. Treat a big surprise in Sidekick's answer as a reason to open the actual report and confirm it, not as gospel.
- What-ifs are estimates. A pricing scenario can't predict how your customers will react. Real-world testing still wins.
- Features vary by plan. Some Sidekick capabilities, like building custom apps, depend on your Shopify plan.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Shopify Sidekick free?
Sidekick is built into the Shopify admin at no extra charge. Some advanced features, like generating custom apps, depend on which Shopify plan you're on.
Why does my Shopify profit report show nothing?
Most often, the products don't have a cost per item entered. Shopify only reports profit for sales made after a cost was recorded, so older orders stay blank even after you fill the field in.
Can Sidekick calculate profit without cost per item?
No. Profit is revenue minus cost, and Sidekick needs the cost from Shopify to do the math. It can still help you find which products are missing a cost.
Does Shopify add cost per item to past orders?
No. Cost per item applies going forward only. That's the main reason to fill it in now rather than later.
What are Sidekick Skills?
Skills are saved prompts. If you ask Sidekick the same thing regularly, you can save it as a Skill and run it again with a shortcut instead of retyping it.
Can Sidekick change my store without asking?
No. Sidekick shows you proposed changes for review before applying them.
Final Thought
You don't need more data. You already have it. What most store owners need is a faster way to ask it the right questions, and Sidekick is exactly that, as long as you feed it real costs.
So here's your homework: open Sidekick, paste in prompt #1, and start filling in the gaps. Thirty days from now, you'll know which products are pulling their weight and which ones are just keeping you busy.
YellowWebMonkey is a veteran-owned Shopify Plus Partner helping store owners get more out of the tools they already pay for. Want help loading your product costs or setting up Sidekick Skills and Flow automations? Let's talk.