Litestore · Operator guide

Home

Learn about the admin home page, its four figures, and the Needs attention worklist your store derives from 41 kinds of open work.

Welcome to the Litestore Operator Guide. This section walks you through running your store day to day, starting where every session begins: the admin home page.

Home has two halves. Four figures say how the store has done over a date range you pick. A worklist headed Needs attention says what is waiting for you right now.

The split is deliberate. The figures are a report on the past. The worklist is the part of the page that decides what you do next, and your store derives it from its own data rather than from anything you keep up to date.

On a phone the worklist sits above the figures, because it is 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 carries its change and its trend for that range, so a number is never shown on its own.

The figures lead into the customer and order lists behind them. See more opens Analytics.

Needs attention

Litestore checks 41 kinds of open work and lists only the ones that currently apply.

The kinds it checks are:

  • 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 names the count, shows how long the work has been waiting, and links to the list behind it.

When an AI provider is configured, each row also offers an Ask AI hand-off.

The worklist is derived, not maintained. Every row is a live query against your store's data, so there is nothing to tick off. Handle the underlying orders or stock and the row stops appearing on its own.

Trends charts revenue by default, and other metrics can be overlaid on it.

The panel stays hidden until you have orders, so a store with no sales yet is not given an empty chart to read.

Activity

Activity lists recent admin and store activity and leads to the full activity log.

When there is nothing recent it renders nothing at all, rather than an empty panel.

What the store works out for itself

Three things around the store are computed rather than kept up to date by hand. Knowing which is which tells you whether there is anything for you to do.

Storefront badges

Badges are worked out per product:

New
On Sale
Sale ends soon
Limited Stock
Best Seller

Each has an on/off switch and a threshold under Settings. On Sale is the exception — it follows the sale price, so it has nothing to tune.

A product page shows at most three.

Sale prices

A sale price applies whenever the current time falls inside the start and end dates you set, and that is decided each time the price is read.

Nothing has to run for a sale to begin or end. Set the dates and the sale takes care of itself.

Scheduled collections

Scheduled collections are the exception: they do run on a job.

A task every five minutes publishes collections whose scheduled time has passed, provided they pass the same publish check as the manual switch.

Where to start a session

Open Needs attention first. It is the only panel on the page that reports work that is still waiting rather than work already done.

Use Start and Trends when the question is how a range went, not what to do next.

Use Activity when the question is what changed, and who changed it.

The useful thing to remember about this page is that none of it is a to-do list you keep:

A row leaves the worklist when the work behind it is finished, so the only way to clear the page is to fix the thing, never the list.

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