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Welcome to the Litestore Operator Guide. It explains how to run your store day to day, and it starts with the page you see first when you sign in to the admin.

The home page has two halves. The top half shows four figures that tell you how the store did over a date range you pick. The other half is a worklist headed Needs attention, which tells you what is waiting for you right now.

The figures report on the past. The worklist tells you what to do next. Litestore builds the worklist from your store's own data, so you never have to keep it up to date yourself.

On a phone, the worklist appears above the figures, because it is usually what you came for.

Start

The Start panel shows four figures for the date range you choose:

Customers
Cash collected
Orders placed
Avg order

Each figure shows how much it changed over that range and a small trend line, so you never see a number without context.

You can click a figure to open the customer or order list behind it. See more opens Analytics.

Needs attention

Litestore checks 41 kinds of open work and lists only the ones that apply to your store right now. It looks for work such as these:

• Orders to ship
• Returns awaiting a decision
• Refunds and payouts pending
• Disputes open
• Stock low or about to run out
• Payments that have not reconciled
• Shipments with no tracking number
• Discounts and sales about to end
• Failed webhooks and cron jobs
• Products with no category or no description
• Revenue or fulfilment falling behind goal

Each row tells you how many items are waiting and how long they have waited. It also links to the list where you can deal with them.

When you have set up an AI provider, each row also has an Ask AI button that hands the work to the assistant.

Every row is a live query against your store's data. There is nothing to tick off. When you ship the orders or restock the product, the row disappears by itself.

Trends

The Trends panel draws a chart of revenue by default. You can lay other metrics over it to compare them.

Litestore hides this panel until your store has orders, so a new store doesn't show you an empty chart.

Activity

The Activity panel lists recent changes made in the admin and in the store. It links to the full activity log.

When nothing has happened recently, Litestore doesn't show the panel at all.

What the store works out for itself

Litestore calculates three things for you instead of asking you to update them by hand. Knowing which ones these are tells you when there is nothing for you to do.

Storefront badges

Litestore decides which badges each product gets:

New
On Sale
Sale ends soon
Limited Stock
Best Seller

You can turn each badge on or off and set its threshold under Settings. On Sale is the exception. It appears whenever the product has a sale price, so it has no threshold to tune.

A product page shows no more than three badges.

Sale prices

A sale price applies whenever the current time falls between the start and end dates you set. Litestore checks the dates each time it reads the price.

Nothing has to run for a sale to begin or end. Once you set the dates, the sale starts and stops on time.

Scheduled collections

Scheduled collections are the one thing here that does depend on a job.

Every five minutes, a task publishes the collections whose scheduled time has passed. A collection is only published if it passes the same check that applies when you publish it by hand.

Where to start a session

Open Needs attention first. It is the only panel on the page that shows work still waiting. The other panels show work that is already done.

Use Start and Trends when you want to know how a date range went.

Use Activity when you want to know what changed and who changed it.

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