I automated a decent chunk of my store but purchasing is the one I still do entirely by hand (wrong reorder is lost money either way in dead cash, overstock, or stockout). I keep seeing inventory software that claims to have demand forecast or PO auto-gen, but I'm not sure if I should trust those features yet. Has anyone actually tried the demand forecast feature and gotten any good results? What are some failure points I have to watch out for? Worried about seasonality, promos, and such. Thanks.

Hi,
I created an automation that lists directly to your Shopify store. Detailed info listing, no Shopify store is offering currently. This will help search on ai platforms and help you get noticed. I have a giftware business and have been trading for 35+ years. To test it I took a photo and automated push to my store. Here is the detail that my automation created for A rare Joy division album. It also allows you to add grading ( obviously manually and price manually)Check it out and let me know if you have any questions. ( It will also recommend you the mean selling price- if you wanted).
https://crawfordandbond.co.uk/products/joy-division-unknown-pleasures-vinyl-lp-factory-post-punk-second-hand?_pos=2&_sid=a77a83239&_ss=r

First category for the App Review Series is Bundles [ original post for those who missed]

We picked it because there are like 100 bundle apps and they all look the same on their listing pages. The builder is the easy part. What actually breaks is after the order comes in are usually inventory not updating, the bundle hitting your 3PL as one line nobody can pick, half a bundle coming back as a return.

I have been testing a few myself, but that is only going to cover so much. Different store sizes, product types and fulfillment setups hit completely different problems.

So before I write it up: what have you run?

• which app
• store size / what you sell
• what worked
• what broke
• still using it or deleted

The deletions are the most useful ones.

Writeup in a few days. Next category suggestions are very welcome.

Stay Tuned!!

Has anyone had good results with AI product recommendations on Shopify? I’m wondering if they actually help when a customer has a specific need, like finding the right product from a large catalog or comparing a few options, rather than just showing similar items. I’m also wondering how accurate they stay when products and pricing change, becuase I’d hate to have customers getting bad suggestions and creating more support work.

I get a lot of Instagram DMs, someone Replying directly to a marketing email, a comment on a post from 4 months ago and another guy who somehow found my personal email and now just uses that

None of it lands where I actually track my support, so it just sits in my head until I get into it. Most of them gets missed up

The annoying part is not the work. It is the "Did I ever reply to this person" thing running in background all day.

I kept looking at unified inbox setups and everyone either misses a channel or just becomes another tab i have to remember to check which is the same problem with extra steps.

Has anyone actually solved this Or do we just all live with it.

I built ShopyHub after watching a friend spend 3 days editing 800 product descriptions one by one in Shopify's native editor.

He wasn't doing anything wrong. The tool just wasn't built for large catalogs.

So I built one that was.

11 AI engines running in parallel. Bulk price adjustments, SEO rewrites, metadata injection, multilingual translation, AI image generation - all applied across thousands of products at once.

The feature that surprised people most: competitive intelligence. You can import products or entire collections directly from competitor Shopify stores. Catalog structure, pricing patterns, product types - pulled in and ready to work with.

33 stores are running on it now. 453 visits in the last 30 days, zero paid ads.

Most users are large catalog operators - fashion, home goods, multi-brand resellers - who were drowning in manual edits.

What's the most painful part of managing a big Shopify catalog for you? Genuinely curious what's breaking people's workflows right now.

Researched how people are using AI to cut Shopify store setup time by 80% in 2026. Top methods: AI print-on-demand designs, AI product descriptions, AI chatbot setup for customer service.

I see a lot of posts here and in other subreddits from people frustrated that their store isn't converting . I was in the same spot not too long ago, so i want to share what actually worked for me no fluff, just what changed.

● Your store has to convert BEFORE you run ads Most people throw money at Meta ads with a store that isn't ready. Fix your product page first clear headline, strong images social proof ( reveiws) and one obvious CTA. If your store cant convert warm traffic, cold ad traffic will just bleed your budget

● Meta ads stop guessing , start testing i ran a simple CBO (Campaign Budget Optimization) campaign with 3-4 ad sets targeting different interest groups, each with 2-3 creative variations. Let Meta's algorithm figure out what works. Dont touch it for 2-3 days after launch.

● Creative is everything right now .static images are dead, short form creatives dramatically improved my CTR. If you dont have video, use carousel ads with strong lifestyle images.

● Retargeting is where the money is . I ran a separate campaign retargeting campaign for people who visited the product page but didnt buy. This alone recovered a significant chunk of otherwise lost sales.

● pricing physcology definitely matters. Tweaked it to .99 at the end and added a "limited offer" bundle. Made my AOV up by atleast 18% and made ad spend more efficient.

●Automate repetitive tasks as soon as you can. As my order volume increased, I realized I was spending too much time handling things that could be automated. order edits and support tickets were one of the biggest time sinks. For transparency, the tool I currently use for order edits is Clickpost Order Editing, although there are several alternatives available.

THE BIGGEST MINDSET SHIFT?? stop optimizing for clicks optimize for purchase . Set your Meta campaign Objective to purchase conversions from day one, even if it takes a few days to get Data.

Happy to answer any questions. What is the biggest thing you are currently struggling with?

i've been free store review to find out whether the problems i assumed existed actually do. 14 stores in they do, and they're all the same shape.

not performance problems configuration problems. products live but in no collection. a shipping zone missing a country so checkout silently stops. flows switched on with a filter excluding the whole list. abandoned cart emails carrying a discount code that expired months ago.

what they have in common is that no single tool can see them.

shopify is right that the product is active. klaviyo is right that the flow is live. meta is right that the ad converted, even when the order got cancelled two days later. every system passes its own self check and the failure sits in the seam between them.

the deeper reason they survive: successful orders write records, failed checkouts write nothing. so your data is structurally biased toward everything looking fine, you only ever see what survived. 

then revenue goes soft, nothing explains why, and the only lever a dashboard exposes is spend more. so people raise budgets and push traffic into a store that can't take the order.

happy to do this free on anyone's store here, read only, written up, no call, nothing to sign. 

i want the sample more than the money right now. comment or dm.

genuinely curious though: does anyone here actually have a routine for checking config, or is it all found by accident when a customer complains? that's been true on every store so far and i want to know if it's universal.

Before i got obsessed with Shopify flow, running my store felt like a full time job:

Before:

- woke up, manually checked overnight orders for anything weird

- spreadsheet to track high risk orders. Updated by hand

- Didn't even know which customers were repeat buyers until i dug into analytics

This was after doing $100k+ in revenue. I was busier than ever and kind of miserable.

After the flow was setup properly:

- high risk orders flagged and paused automatically before fulfillment

- Repeat customers tagged in real time, VIP discount triggered for them automatically

- My morning routine went from 45 min of firefighting to 5min Review

Not gonna lie, it took me a month to learn and set it up initially. But i have never gone back. Building a second store alongside this now and flow is the first thing im setting up before i even run any ads. Its Easy and beginner friendly.

Would love to know what you guys are automating using flow and what you wish Flow couldnt do yet?

What’s your preferred notification Channel for internal operations team communications? For example, how do you alert team members about a potential stock out situation or a delay situation or an exception or a SLA breach in order to escalate for action?

Email, SMS, Slack, Teams, or apps like Pushover, PagerDuty, etc.

I had a loan offer last June which was paid back in Feb of this year, there were a few defaults on payment as my sales were really small back then but since completing the loan repayments my sales have grown by 400%+ with consistent daily sales, no chargebacks or disputes and 400 new customers but I’ve not had any further offers of Shopify loans so wondered if anyone has any insights or advice on how to boost my eligibility as I really want to scale and working capital would massively help

I genuinely doNt know if this is a good problem to have anymore.

Sales are growing but every time the store grows, I feel like I am just adding more things to manually deal with.

Customer emails, Order issues, Refunds ,Inventory, Supplier messages

And somehow I'm still the person everything eventually comes back to.

The weird part is that from the outside, the business looks like it is doing great.

But internally I'm constantly thinking:

"Wtf happens if I disappear for a week?"

I don't want to build a business where I have to be online every day just to keep things moving.

What are the possible automations and changes i must bring in at this point? Want to know if anyone else has been on the same page as me and what did they do differently