In Part 1, we covered Sidekick prompts for monitoring overall business health — sales, conversions, retention. The numbers that tell you whether the store is alive.
This article is about the numbers that tell you whether it's running well. Operations is not glamorous. Nobody starts an e-commerce business excited to optimize fulfillment time or audit dead stock — those things appear on the to-do list around month nine, usually right after the first really embarrassing 1-star review. But a stockout costs you sales, slow shipping costs you reviews, dead stock ties up cash you could be deploying elsewhere, and a 2% return rate that quietly creeps to 6% will eat your margins faster than any ad platform ever could.
Sidekick can keep you on top of all of it, if you ask the right questions.
A Quick Refresher on Sidekick
If you skipped Part 1: Shopify Sidekick is the AI assistant inside your Shopify admin, with direct access to your store's data. It's that chat icon in the top-right corner of admin (and in the mobile app) that you've probably been ignoring since onboarding. It can pull reports, summarize trends, look up specific orders, check inventory across locations, and take limited actions like drafting discount codes or building customer segments — all using your actual store data, not the open internet's best guess.
For operations specifically, Sidekick is unusually good. Operational data in Shopify is plentiful, structured, and exactly the kind of thing an AI is well-suited to summarize. The prompts below are designed to get past Sidekick's default tendency to give you a vague overview and force it to surface specifics you can actually do something with.
How to Use This Article
Each prompt has four parts: the prompt to copy and paste, why the question matters, how to use the answer, and when to actually run it. Operations prompts in particular reward consistency — running them once is a fun exercise; running them on a schedule is what catches problems before customers do, which is genuinely the entire game.
Looking for the quick-reference version? Check out our Complete Sidekick Prompt Cheat Sheet.
The 10 Operations & Inventory Prompts
1. Full Inventory Overview
Prompt: Give me a summary of my current inventory. How many total SKUs do I have, how many are in stock, and how many are out of stock?
Why it matters: This is the wide-angle shot of your warehouse, virtual or otherwise. It tells you in one number whether you have a supply problem (too much out of stock), a capital problem (too much in stock), or — most commonly — both at the same time on different products. The dual nature of inventory pain is one of the more underrated experiences in e-commerce.
How to use it: Look at the ratio, not the absolute numbers. A store with 5% of SKUs out of stock is healthy; 25% out is a supplier or planning issue you should not be solving alone at 11pm. Also flag any SKU that's been out of stock for more than 60 days — at that point it's not really a SKU, it's a 404 wearing a product page.
When to run it: Weekly during normal operations, daily in the run-up to a launch or seasonal peak.
2. Identify Dead Stock
Prompt: Which products have had zero sales in the last 90 days but still have inventory in stock?
Why it matters: Dead stock ties up cash and warehouse space. Products that haven't sold in three months almost never start selling on their own, no matter how much you personally believe in them. Sentimentality is one of the most expensive inventory strategies in e-commerce, and you cannot deduct it.
How to use it: Sort each product into one of three buckets: clearance (discount aggressively to recover cash), bundle (pair with a bestseller and let momentum drag it out the door), or discontinue (write it off and reclaim the shelf). Indecision is the fourth bucket, costs the most, and is the easiest to default into.
When to run it: Monthly. Also run it before any inventory order, because there's something humbling about ordering more of one thing while already sitting on too much of another.
3. Predict Reorder Timing
Prompt: Based on the last 30 days of sales, which products will likely run out of stock in the next 2 weeks?
Why it matters: Stockouts on popular products mean lost sales today and a damaged customer relationship tomorrow. This prompt converts current sales velocity into a forward-looking warning, which is roughly what "inventory management" is supposed to mean but rarely does in practice.
How to use it: Cross-reference each flagged product against your supplier lead time. If a product takes three weeks to arrive and Sidekick says you'll be out in two, you're already late — order today and apologize to the supplier tomorrow. Build the 2-week window out to match your slowest supplier, not your most reliable one.
When to run it: Weekly. Velocity changes constantly — a product safe last week may not be safe this week, and the world will not warn you.
4. Analyze Product Variants
Prompt: For my best-selling products, which size or color variants sell the most and which sell the least?
Why it matters: "This product sells well" is rarely the whole truth. Usually two of the eight variants are doing 80% of the work, and you've been ordering the other six in equal quantities because that's how the original PO was written and nobody ever revisited it.
How to use it: Adjust future POs to match the actual demand curve, not the curve you remember from launch. Consider discontinuing variants that consistently underperform — fewer SKUs means cleaner pages, less dead stock, and a marginally less stressful warehouse for the people who actually have to walk it.
When to run it: Once a quarter, and before placing any large reorder. The 5-minute review pays for itself the first time it stops you from ordering 200 units of XS.
5. Check Fulfillment Status
Prompt: How many orders are currently unfulfilled, and how long have they been waiting?
Why it matters: Orders aging in the unfulfilled queue are unhappy customers compounding interest. The total number matters less than the age of the oldest one — 200 orders all placed this morning is fine; 20 orders placed five days ago is a fire that's already in your reviews.
How to use it: If the oldest orders are more than two business days old, identify the bottleneck before processing anything new: missing inventory, a stuck supplier shipment, a 3PL issue, or just a staffing gap nobody told you about. Fixing the cause is more valuable than catching up by force, even though catching up feels better.
When to run it: Daily. This is one of the few prompts that genuinely earns a daily slot.
6. Monitor Shipping Performance
Prompt: What was the average time between order placement and fulfillment this month? How does it compare to last month?
Why it matters: Customers calibrate expectations to your past performance, which is unfortunate if your past performance was better than your present performance. If you used to ship in 24 hours and now ship in 72, you'll see it in reviews and repeat rates well before you see it in revenue, by which point the explanation has gotten more expensive.
How to use it: Set an internal target (e.g., "ship within 1 business day") and track against it as a percentage, not just an average. "Average 36 hours" sounds reasonable; it can also hide a long tail of 5-day orders that are doing all of the actual complaining.
When to run it: Weekly. Also after any 3PL change, holiday, or sale event — those are the moments shipping performance quietly slips while you're busy congratulating yourself.
7. Track Returns and Refunds
Prompt: What was my return rate this month? Which products had the most returns?
Why it matters: A creeping return rate is usually the earliest visible signal of a product or page-quality issue. By the time the bad reviews show up, the returns have been happening for weeks, and the reviews are just the part you can no longer ignore.
How to use it: Drill into the top three returned products and read the return reasons if you collect them — if you don't, start collecting them. The fix is usually one of three things: better photos, more accurate sizing or specs, or, more uncomfortably, the product itself. Update the page or pull the product; absorbing the returns indefinitely is just paying the customers to leave.
When to run it: Monthly. Apparel and footwear businesses may want to run it more often given their higher baseline return rates and special relationship with disappointment.
8. Calculate Product Margins
Prompt: What are my top 10 products by revenue, and what is the profit margin on each?
Why it matters: Revenue is vanity, margin is sanity, and cash flow is reality. Your bestseller by revenue is sometimes your worst seller by profit — and you'd never know it from the dashboard, which is cheerfully sorted by revenue and has nothing to say about margin.
How to use it: Reorder your homepage and ad targeting to favor your highest-margin products, not just your highest-revenue ones. For low-margin bestsellers, test a small price increase — if volume holds, you've just made the business meaningfully more profitable while nothing else has changed, which is the closest thing to a free lunch e-commerce offers.
When to run it: Quarterly. Margins don't move week to week, and checking them more often mostly produces opinions you can't responsibly act on.
9. Review Discount Impact
Prompt: How much revenue came from orders with discount codes this month, and what was the average discount percentage?
Why it matters: Discounts drive orders, but they also train your customers. If 70% of your orders use a code, you don't have a pricing strategy — you have a permanent sale that your customers have correctly identified as the actual price.
How to use it: Track discount usage as a percentage of orders over time. If it's drifting up, your promotions are eroding their own effectiveness while taking your margin with them. Test alternatives: free shipping thresholds, gift-with-purchase, time-limited offers without code entry — anything that doesn't condition the customer to wait.
When to run it: Monthly. Also after any major promotional event, to see whether the promotion actually lifted total revenue or merely discounted orders that were going to happen anyway.
10. Analyze Shipping Costs
Prompt: What was my total shipping cost this month, and what percentage of revenue did shipping represent?
Why it matters: Shipping is the line item that quietly eats your margin while you're busy worrying about ad spend. If you offer free shipping, the cost didn't disappear — you just stopped looking at it. This prompt makes you look at it.
How to use it: If shipping is more than 12–15% of revenue, you have a structural pricing problem, not a logistics problem. Options: raise the free-shipping threshold, renegotiate carrier rates, build shipping cost into product pricing, or test flat-rate. Pick one and measure for a full month before declaring victory.
When to run it: Monthly. Carrier rate changes, fuel surcharges, and dim-weight rules can shift this number without sending you a memo.
Operational Health Routine
Operations rewards consistency more than ambition. A short list run weekly will catch more problems than a long list run when you remember, which historically is never.
Daily:
- #5 Fulfillment status
Weekly:
- #1 Inventory overview
- #3 Reorder predictions
- #6 Shipping performance
Monthly:
- #2 Dead stock
- #7 Returns and refunds
- #9 Discount impact
- #10 Shipping costs
Quarterly:
- #4 Variant performance
- #8 Product margins
Up Next
This article covered the operational health of the store. In Part 3, we get into Marketing & Customer Insights: prompts for understanding who your customers actually are, how they behave, and which marketing efforts actually pay for themselves rather than merely existing.
Want all 30 prompts in one place? Bookmark our Sidekick Prompt Cheat Sheet.
CTA: Need help optimizing your operations? Let's talk about streamlining your Shopify store.