Questions to ask Claude about your Shopify reports
Once a report is in your conversation, the quality of the answer depends on the question. This page is a library of questions that work, organised by the kind of report you already have.
Find your report family below, copy a question, and change the details to match your store. Everything here assumes Report Pundit is connected. If it is not, see How to connect Report Pundit to Claude.
How to phrase a question that works
Three things make the difference between a vague answer and a useful one.
Name the report. "Run my Sales by Product report and..." beats "look at my sales." Claude then knows exactly which rows it is working from.
Name the period. Reports run on their own saved date range unless you say otherwise. If the period matters, say it. See How to run a report for a different date range in Claude.
Name the level of detail. By product, by variant, by day, by order, by country. Without this, Claude picks a level, and it may not be yours.
You do not need to write a perfect prompt. Ask, look at the answer, then refine. Follow-up questions are answered from the data already in the conversation, so they are instant.
Sales and orders
Assumes a Sales or Order report with revenue, quantity and dates.
Which products drove the revenue change between this month and last month?
What share of my revenue comes from my top 10 products, and how concentrated is that?
Which days of the week and times of day produce the most orders?
Which discount codes were used most, and what did each one cost me in discount value against the revenue it brought in?
Is my average order value rising or falling, and is that driven by price or by items per order?
Break revenue down by sales channel and tell me which is growing fastest.
Products and variants
Assumes a Product Variant or Total Products Sold report.
Which variants sell best within each product, and are there variants I should stop carrying?
Which products have I never sold, and how many are there?
Which products sell well in units but poorly in revenue, and the other way around?
Group my products by vendor and tell me which vendors earn their shelf space.
Which product tags are attached to my best sellers?
Inventory
Assumes an Inventory on Hand or inventory snapshot report. For inventory over time, use a snapshot report.
Based on my current stock and my sales rate over the last 30 days, which products will run out first?
Which SKUs have not sold in 90 days, and how much stock value is sitting in them?
Which of my top 20 sellers are currently low or out of stock?
Compare stock levels by location and tell me where stock is sitting away from where it sells.
Which variants keep going out of stock, based on my snapshot report over the last three months?
Customers
Assumes a Customer report with order counts and spend.
What proportion of my customers have ordered more than once?
How long is the typical gap between a customer's first and second order?
Which customers spent the most in the last 12 months and have not ordered in the last three?
Split revenue by new versus returning customers, by month.
Which products do my repeat customers buy first, compared to one-time buyers?
Fulfilment and shipping
Assumes a Fulfillment report, or an unfulfilled or partially shipped orders report.
Which orders are paid but not yet fulfilled, and how old is the oldest?
What is my average time from order to fulfilment, and is it getting longer?
Are fulfilment delays concentrated in a particular location, shipping method or product?
List partially shipped orders and tell me what is holding each one up.
Which shipping methods are customers actually choosing, and how does that split by country?
Refunds and returns
Assumes a Refund report, ideally alongside a Sales report.
Which products have the highest return rate relative to units sold?
What do returns do to my margin per product once I account for refunded value?
Are returns concentrated in particular variants, sizes or colours?
How has my return rate changed over the last six months?
Which refund reasons come up most often?
Payouts and transactions
Assumes a Payout, Payout Line Item or Transaction report.
Does this payout reconcile to the orders inside it, and what explains any difference?
What am I paying in payment processing fees as a percentage of revenue, broken down by gateway?
Summarise my payouts by month, with gross, fees, refunds and net.
Which transactions failed, and is there a pattern in them?
Show me the order line item detail behind the largest payout in this period.
Tax
Assumes a tax report, such as tax by country or a regional tax report.
Summarise tax collected by country for this quarter.
Break tax down by state or province and flag anything that looks unusual against the rest.
Compare tax collected this quarter against last quarter and explain any large movement.
Which orders have no tax recorded, and is that expected?
Always reconcile tax figures against a Report Pundit export before you file or pay. See Getting accurate results from large reports in Claude.
Abandoned checkouts and draft orders
Assumes an Abandoned Checkout or Draft Order report.
How much value is sitting in abandoned checkouts this month, and which products appear most?
At what point are customers abandoning, and does it differ by device or country?
Which abandoned checkouts have the highest value and a contactable email?
Which draft orders are still pending, and how old are they?
Marketing and attribution
Assumes a UTM campaign report, or an ads or analytics report.
Which UTM campaigns produce the highest revenue per order, not just the most orders?
Which channels bring customers who go on to order again?
Compare ad spend against attributed revenue by campaign and tell me which are underwater.
Which sources send traffic that converts on first visit versus later?
Combine two reports for questions one cannot answer
Some of the most useful questions need two reports. Ask for both in one message and Claude will run each in turn.
Sales plus inventory, for reorder decisions:
Run my Sales by Product report for the last 60 days and my Inventory on Hand report, then tell me which products I should reorder this week and roughly how many.
Sales plus refunds, for true profitability:
Run my Sales by Product and Refund reports for last quarter and rank products by net revenue after refunds.
Sales plus fulfilment, for operational strain:
Run my Sales and Fulfillment reports for the last 30 days and tell me whether fulfilment times get worse on my highest volume days.
Four question patterns that beat "summarise this"
These work on any report, and they are where the connector earns its keep.
Explain the change. Do not ask what happened, ask what caused it.
Revenue fell 12% in August. Break that down into how much came from fewer orders, lower average order value, and product mix.
Find the anomaly. Let Claude look first, before you tell it what you suspect.
Look at this report and tell me the three things you think are worth investigating, before I tell you what I think.
Decide something. The analysis exists to produce a decision, so ask for the decision.
Based on this, which five SKUs should I discount out and which should I reorder? Give me a reason for each.
Stress-test the read. This is the question most people never ask, and it is the one that protects you.
What would make that conclusion wrong, and which other report would confirm or contradict it?
Ask for the output you actually need
Claude does not have to answer in prose.
Chart revenue by month for the last 12 months.
Put the top 50 products into a spreadsheet with revenue, units and return rate, and give me a download.
Write me a five-line summary of this I can paste into Slack for my team.
Make a good question repeatable
When a question works, keep it. Paste the same prompt next month and change the dates. Merchants who get the most from this end up with a handful of prompts they run on a schedule, in the same way they used to run a handful of reports.
If you find yourself running the same report and question every week, it may be worth building the report in Report Pundit and putting it on a schedule as well, so the numbers arrive whether or not you ask.
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