Getting started with Hawkeyed

Hawkeyed is in early access, so new stores are set up with our team rather than from the App Marketplace. Join early access and we'll install it with you. Once Hawkeyed is listed, you'll find it under Apps › Marketplace in your BigCommerce control panel.

To install, you need to be the store owner, or a user the owner has allowed to install apps. When you install, BigCommerce shows the permissions Hawkeyed asks for. Every one of them is read-only:

• It reads orders, products, customers, your store's settings and the rest of your catalog.
• It can't change anything: no product, order, customer, price or theme is ever edited.
• It doesn't ask to log customers in, or to see stored payment instruments or payment methods.

Approve, and Hawkeyed opens inside your control panel. From then on you'll find it under Apps › My Apps.

The first screen, Bring your store into Hawkeyed, reads your store's size from BigCommerce, read-only, before anything is copied:

• Orders, with how far back your history goes and how many are archived;
• Customers with accounts, and products in the catalog;
• Time to copy, estimated from the store's size;
• the currencies you sell in, and on how many channels.

Beside it, a pre-flight check runs four checks, each marked Ready, Worth a look or Needs fixing:

• Permissions: Hawkeyed can read your orders, customers, products and settings.
• Your store's API: BigCommerce is answering.
• Room for your other apps: Hawkeyed never takes more than half of your store's API allowance, so your other apps keep working.
• Store size: the counts above could all be read.

If a permission is missing, the button says what it would start without, with a link to reinstall and approve it. Nothing is copied until someone presses Start import.

Hawkeyed copies your store's whole history once, then keeps it current on its own. It copies:

• orders with their items, shipping and refunds;
• customers and customer groups;
• products, variants and stock;
• categories, brands, coupons and promotions;
• your store's settings, such as its currency and time zone.

How long it takes depends on how many orders you have and how busy your store's API is; Start shows the estimate for your store. Orders copy newest first, and the progress line shows how far back it has reached. It never takes more than half of your API allowance, so on a busy day it runs slower rather than crowding out your other apps.

You don't need to watch it. Close the tab and an email goes out when it's ready, or ask your browser to tell you. If BigCommerce stops answering for a while, the import pauses, says why, and tries again on its own; everything copied so far is kept.

Hawkeyed opens once every part of your store is in, so the first figure you see is already exact. From then on each change in your store (a new order, a refund, a stock change) shows up within seconds.

While the store copies, the screen offers two short steps. Both can be skipped and changed later.

A few questions

• What's your part in the business: owner or founder, marketing, operations and fulfilment, finance or customer service.
• What you want from Hawkeyed first, up to three: grow sales, keep customers coming back, stock and purchasing, profit and costs, faster fulfilment, wholesale accounts, selling abroad.
• What you check first thing each morning: sales so far today, orders to ship, what's running low, reviews and messages.
• For admins, whether the store has a monthly sales target.

Your answers shape your dashboard, your Home and what Kestrel talks to you about. Questions about the store itself (how you sell, costs and margins, busy months, how your calendar runs) are in Settings › Business whenever you want to answer them.

Your dashboards

A dashboard built from your answers is ticked by default, and the six templates are there to tick as well. They're all made when the data is in. Tick none, and Hawkeyed opens on Home with dashboards a click away.

The last panel says what happens next. An admin can switch on the weekly sales summary (every Monday at 8:00 am) and the A best seller sells out alert there.

When the last part is in, Hawkeyed shows what it copied and what it found:

• your orders, customers and products, with the orders that count as sales set apart (archived, cancelled, declined and unfinished ones are left out);
• what Kestrel already noticed in your data;
• what was set up: your dashboards, and any alert or report you switched on.

If you asked Kestrel a question in the setup, it's answered on your store's own numbers: Read it on Home takes you to the answer. Open Hawkeyed opens Home.

Home is where you land every time you open Hawkeyed. Every figure on it is the same number the dashboards and explorers show, counted the same way. Top to bottom:

• A greeting with the date in your store's time, and what changed since your last visit.
• Today: sales so far against the same weekday last week at the same time, orders and the average order, hour by hour.
• Your monthly target, if you set one: the pace and where the month is heading.
• This week, this month, this year, each against the same days before.
• Needs attention, beside Kestrel: orders waiting on you, best sellers sold out or running out, and Kestrel's read of the day with questions to ask.
• Selling now: the five products with the most sales over the last 7 days.
• For you: three cards, one picked from your answers.
• Next steps, Coming up (your next reports and checks) and your dashboards.

Six templates each look at the whole store from one side, cut into numbered sections, each with its own map:

• Command Center, Growth Studio, The Long View, Profit Lab, Operations Deck and Market Explorer.

Add any of them from Templates, or start your own dashboard and add cards from the card library. Every dashboard has one bar of controls:

• dates and a comparison;
• filters you can add: channel, country, state, order status, payment method, order source and currency.

Every card on the page follows them. Dashboards belong to the whole team: rearrange and resize cards in the layout editor, rename, duplicate or delete a dashboard from its row in the sidebar.

Kestrel is Hawkeyed's analyst. Ask it anything about your store in plain language, from Home, from Chats, or in the panel beside any dashboard.

• Every answer comes from a query on your store's own data, and says where its figures come from and when.
• Ask for a chart and Kestrel builds a card you can keep and add to any dashboard. Ask it to change the card later.
• Beside a dashboard, it reads the cards on it, so you can ask about what you're looking at.
• It can make CSV, Excel and PDF files from your data, and read images, PDFs and CSV files you attach.
• Tell it how your business works once and it remembers. You'll find what it remembers in Memory, and you can edit or remove any of it.

Alerts watch the store and tell you once, when something moves that you'd want to know. Pick from more than twenty ready-made ones in Alerts, set your own threshold, or ask Kestrel to set one up. A few of them:

• A best seller sells out, checked every hour.
• Behind the monthly target: every morning from the 4th, the month so far against an even pace to your target.
• Sales are off today, Orders waiting too long, Refunds spike, Running low and A big order comes in.

What an alert finds lands in your Inbox, and by email too if you turn that on in Settings › Notifications.

A report is a written summary of your store on a schedule you pick. The weekly sales summary arrives every Monday at 8:00 am with the week's figures against the week before. Make your own from Reports, or ask Kestrel.

Each report is worked out from exact figures, delivered to your Inbox and by email, and reads as a document you can keep as a PDF.

Under Store, three explorers list every order, customer and product Hawkeyed copied, with search, filters, views with live counts and sorting. Open a record to see everything about it, step through records with the arrow keys, and export what you see as a CSV.

Access follows BigCommerce. To add someone, add them as a user in your control panel (Settings, then Users) with access to Hawkeyed. They appear in Hawkeyed the first time they open it. Remove them there and they lose access here too.

In Settings › Team, an admin can make anyone an admin or a member:

• Member: dashboards, chats, reports, alerts and workflows. Everything else is open to the whole team.
• Admin: everything a member can do, and changing who is an admin. The store owner is always one.

Hawkeyed opens inside your control panel. For a full window, open the account menu at the foot of the sidebar and choose Open in a new tab.

The browser then remembers you for 30 days, so hawkeyed.io/app opens directly in Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers. Safari and Firefox keep stricter cookie rules: there, use Open in a new tab from the control panel each time. Sign out in the same menu forgets the browser.

Uninstall Hawkeyed from Apps › My Apps in your BigCommerce control panel (Settings › Store in Hawkeyed has a link straight there). Nothing in your store changes.

When the store uninstalls, Hawkeyed deletes everything it kept about it:

• the copy of your store's data, and the raw records it was built from;
• dashboards, cards, chats, reports, alerts and workflows;
• what Kestrel remembered, files it made and files you attached;
• your answers, settings and Inbox;
• any app or mailbox you connected, which is disconnected and its access revoked.

Every person's access ends at once, alerts, reports and workflows stop, and the deletion runs on its own.