A weekly report from your Shopify store

You run a Shopify store, and every week you want the same picture of it — how much sold, how many orders, which ones were largest — as something you can read on Monday morning or send to a partner. In this recipe the agent builds that report once from your store’s own admin, and XataWorks makes it again on a schedule.

What you need

• XataWorks, open, with the agent answering. If it is not yet, Getting started covers the one decision to make first.
• A Shopify account that can see your store’s orders in the admin.

1. Open your admin beside the chat

Shopify is one of the sites XataWorks already understands. Ask the agent to open admin.shopify.com in the chat’s browser panel, and sign in there as you normally would. XataWorks never signs in for you.

Once the admin is open, the page-tools control in the browser toolbar lists what the agent can do there: list and look up orders, products and customers, among others. You do not need to choose from that list; it is there so you can see what is on offer.

2. Ask for the report

Say what it is for and what should be in it, for example:

Make a report of my store’s recent orders: total sales and the number of orders as key figures, a bar chart of sales by day, and a table of the ten largest orders.

The agent fetches your orders through the store’s List orders action. It only looks things up, and the first time it is called XataWorks asks you, naming the action and what it is about to be called with. The report opens in a window of its own and is kept on the chat’s links bar, under Reports.

Change it by asking: a different chart, a commentary paragraph, a callout when sales fall. Each request rebuilds the report.

3. Export it

The report window’s File menu exports it as a PDF, a spreadsheet, a Word document, slides, a small website or a short video. The PDF is the one to send; the spreadsheet carries every row, with real numbers and dates.

4. Make it weekly

In the report window choose File ▸ Save as Template… and give it a name. Then open File ▸ Report Templates…, select it and choose Schedule…:

• Runs: Weekly.
• On: the day you want it, and At (HH:MM): the time.
• Approvals while unattended: what to do if a question comes up while nobody is there. Ask (refused after 5 minutes) waits for you; Skip anything needing approval does not.

Each run makes a new chat, fetches the orders again and makes the report and its formats there. When it finishes you get a notice that the report is ready, or that it could not run and why.

Where this recipe stops

• The most recent fifty orders. The List orders action returns at most fifty orders at a time, newest first, so the report shows the fifty most recent orders when it runs. It suits a store whose week fits in that; a busier store needs its numbers from somewhere else, such as Shopify’s own reports.
• XataWorks has to be running. A run that falls due while the application is closed is skipped, and the template runs again at its next time.
• The admin has to be reachable. If the store is not open and signed in when a run needs it, the run cannot fetch the orders, and its notice says so.
• Nothing in the store changes. Every step here only reads. Actions that change your store, such as tagging an order, ask separately, and this recipe does not use them.

Read more

• Reports — what a report holds, the six export formats, templates and schedules.
• Page tools — what a site’s actions are, and how to see them.
• Approvals and permissions — what each answer to a question commits you to.