Overview
An Insight is the one automation you don’t configure. You don’t pick an event, write a condition, or guess a threshold. You choose what kind of problem to watch for, and Alius compares every product against its own history, staying quiet unless something is genuinely wrong. That last part is the point. A trigger fires whenever its event happens. An Insight is designed to say nothing on most days.Insights compare each product to its own past performance — not to a store average
or to your other products. A product selling 3 units a day that drops to zero matters
just as much as one selling 300, if it earns a meaningful share of your revenue.
What you can watch
Sales Drop
A product that reliably sold quietly stops — and Alius confirms it isn’t just
out of stock or unpublished before telling you.
Sales Surge
A product starts selling far faster than usual, with Restock and
Alert supplier buttons so you can act before it sells out.
Return Rate Spike
A product starts getting returned far more often than its own history — a
quality, sizing, or listing-accuracy problem surfacing early.
Why Sales Drop is the one to start with
When a single product stops selling, your store-level revenue barely moves. Nothing looks wrong on any dashboard, so the loss goes unnoticed for weeks — and revenue lost to a dead listing is revenue you can’t recover later. The hard part isn’t spotting a decline; it’s spotting a decline that means something. Alius rules out the boring explanations before it alerts you:- The product is out of stock → no alert (that’s a supply problem you already know about)
- The product is unpublished or archived → no alert (you took it down on purpose)
- The product’s stock data looks stale → no alert (Alius would rather stay quiet than guess)
Sensitivity
Sensitivity is the only setting. It controls how large a change must be before you hear about it.
Balanced is recommended. High surfaces more, including some ordinary fluctuation. Low only speaks up when something is unmistakable.
Everything else — the comparison windows, the minimum sales volume, the revenue threshold — is fixed deliberately. The promise of an Insight is that Alius finds the pattern, so there is nothing else for you to tune.
How Alius keeps Insights quiet
Noise is what kills alerting tools. Four rules keep Insights worth reading:Three alerts a day, maximum
At most 3 velocity alerts per store per day, ranked by revenue impact. The
products that matter most reach you first.
Revenue matters
A product must account for at least 1% of your store’s revenue to qualify.
A $3 accessory dropping from 20 units to 2 is dramatic and irrelevant.
Store-wide events stay silent
If many products move at once — a sale ending, a season turning, an ad budget
cut — Alius says nothing. That’s one story, not twenty problems.
No repeat nagging
An ongoing problem alerts once. You’ll only hear about it again if it gets
materially worse, or if it resolves and comes back.
Where the sales history comes from
When you create a Sales Drop or Sales Surge insight, Alius imports roughly the last 5 weeks of your per-product sales history from Shopify’s own analytics, so detection starts right away rather than after a month of waiting.A product still needs enough selling history of its own to establish a reliable
baseline. Products you only recently started selling stay quiet until they do —
that’s deliberate, since judging a product on a few days of data would flag
ordinary fluctuation as an anomaly.
- Imported history is measured net of returns and discounts, while data Alius records from then on is measured gross. The difference is small, and it fades out entirely within about five weeks as live data replaces the imported rows.
- Importing affects Sales Drop and Sales Surge only. Return Rate Spike builds its baseline from live order and return data, so it needs a few weeks of your store’s activity before it can fire.
Action buttons on Sales Surge
A surge is only useful if you can act on it before the product sells out. On Slack, Telegram, and Discord (Bot), Sales Surge alerts carry two buttons:
Both are on by default and can be turned off individually. Enabling Alert supplier requires a supplier email address.
On hubs that don’t support buttons (Email, Discord via incoming webhook, HTTP webhook), the alert still arrives in full with no broken controls.
Restock here works on the whole product, adding stock to each tracked variant.
The similar button on the Predictive Stockout report targets one
specific variant instead — Insights work at the product level.
Creating an Insight
- Click Create Automation → choose the Insights tab.
- Pick an anomaly type: Sales Drop, Sales Surge, or Return Rate Spike. There’s no “Blank” option — the anomaly type is the template.
- Set the Title.
- Choose a Sensitivity (High / Balanced / Low — Balanced recommended).
- For Sales Surge, review the action buttons and add a supplier email if Alert supplier is enabled.
- Select a Hub and its channels/recipients.
- Save.
Where Insights show up
Insights have no separate findings page. Everything Alius detects arrives as a notification on your hub and is recorded in Notification History like every other automation.Limits
All three anomaly types draw from the same allowance, so a Pro store can run one of each. Only active Insights count toward the limit. See Pricing.