Pulse will tell you when something's on fire. It won't tell you what's quietly true about your store every week. The slow margin leak. The channel that's drifting. The repeat customer who's gone cold. That's not a knock on Pulse, it only surfaces what it decides is worth flagging. The rest, you have to go and ask for.

And most operators don't. Sidekick sits in the corner of the admin getting used like a glorified search bar, when it'll actually run an analyst's weekly routine for you, if you feed it the right prompts.

So here's the routine I run on every store I work with. A fixed weekly cadence, the exact prompts, copy-paste, and how to read what comes back. The whole thing takes under half an hour a week.

Two things before you start

First, anchor your prompts. Type @ and a product, order, customer, collection, or discount to point Sidekick at exactly what you mean. Vague question, vague answer.

Second, save the ones that fit. Anything you'll run weekly, save as a Skill and fire it with "/" plus the name, up to 25 of them. You're building a routine, not retyping it every Monday. Shopify keeps the current capabilities listed in its Sidekick docs.

One honest caveat woven through all of this: Sidekick reads your Shopify data well. The more unusual your catalog, the more it leans on assumptions, so read the output before you act on it. It's pulling numbers, not making your decisions.

MONDAY · THE MONEY READ

1. Read the shape of the week

Ask Sidekick:  Show me sales, units, refunds, and discounts for the last 7 days versus the 7 days before, broken down by day.

Thirty seconds and you know whether the week moved, and where. Refunds and discounts sit right next to revenue, so a "good" sales week that was really a discount week shows up straight away.

2. Separate revenue from profit

Ask Sidekick:  For my top 25 products by revenue in the last 30 days, show revenue, units sold, and profit based on cost per item, sorted by profit.

This only works if you've filled in cost per item on your products. If you have, it's the single most useful pull on the list. The products topping your revenue chart and the ones topping your profit chart are rarely the same, and that gap is where a lot of brands quietly lose money.

MIDWEEK · WHERE TRAFFIC COMES FROM, AND WHERE IT LEAKS

3. Spot the drifting channel

Ask Sidekick:  Show me sessions, conversion rate, and revenue by traffic source for the last 30 days versus the prior 30 days.

Acquisition first, because everything downstream depends on it. You're looking for the channel that's softening before it shows up in the top-line number. A source losing conversion while sessions hold is usually a signal something broke, tracking, a landing page, an offer that's gone stale.

4. Find the conversion leak

Ask Sidekick:  List my landing pages with the most sessions but a below-average conversion rate over the last 30 days.

High traffic, low conversion is where money pools and drains. These are the pages worth your attention this week, not the ones already converting fine.

MIDWEEK · BASKET SIZE

5. Find your real upsell anchors

Ask Sidekick:  Show me average order value by month for the last 6 months, then list the products that appear most often in orders above that average.

This is the one that earns its keep. The products showing up in your biggest orders are your natural bundle and upsell anchors, not the ones you assume they are. Worth saying plainly: affinity questions are where Sidekick gets approximate, so treat the list as a starting point and sanity-check it against what you know.

THURSDAY · RETENTION

6. Build the winback list

Ask Sidekick:  Build a segment of customers who've ordered two or more times but haven't bought in the last 90 days.

Sidekick builds the segment inside Shopify in seconds. It can't see inside Klaviyo for most stores yet, so build the list here, then push it into your winback flow. That's your retention infrastructure doing the actual work, Sidekick just hands it the right people.

7. Check retention is actually growing

Ask Sidekick:  Show me returning versus new customer revenue by month for the last 6 months.

New-customer revenue can mask a retention problem for months. Watching the split is how you catch a brand that's growing sales while quietly leaking the customers it already paid to acquire.

FRIDAY · OPS AND INVENTORY

8. Catch stockouts before they cost you

Ask Sidekick:  Which products will run out in the next 30 days at their current 30-day sales rate?

A bestseller going out of stock is a margin event you can see coming. This gives you the runway to reorder before it bites.

9. Clear the fulfilment backlog

Ask Sidekick:  Show me orders from the last 14 days that are still unfulfilled, grouped by how many days since the order.

Slow fulfilment compounds into support tickets and refunds. Catch the oldest unfulfilled orders on a Friday and you head off the Monday pileup.

MONTHLY · THE DEEPER PULL

10. Audit the quiet margin leak

Ask Sidekick:  List every active discount and automatic discount with redemptions and total discount value over the last 90 days.

Run this once a month. Almost every store has an automatic discount or a code that was meant to be temporary and is still quietly running, eating margin on every order. This is how you find it.

Make it stick

And look, a prompt list is worthless if you don't run it. The point isn't the prompts, it's the rhythm. Three things make it hold:

• Save the keepers as Skills. If you're retyping a prompt every week, you'll stop running it. Save it, name it, fire it with "/".

• Anchor each block to a day. Money on Monday, traffic midweek, retention Thursday, ops Friday. A few minutes each, not one dreaded analytics afternoon.

• Read before you act. Sidekick gives you the numbers. The decision is still yours.

Crawl, walk, run. Don't try to bolt on all ten this week. Start with the Monday money read, get that habit down, then layer the rest in as it sticks. Inside a month you've got an analyst's weekly routine running for free, and you'll wonder how you flew blind for so long.

We build these systems on real stores every week.

The prompts that work, the ones that don't, what the platform ships next, we put it all to the test and send the useful version to our mailing list before it goes anywhere else.

If you want the operator's playbook in your inbox first, get on the list. No fluff. Just what's working right now, while it still matters.