Shopify Sales Alert

Yesterday's Shopify sales in your inbox every morning: revenue, orders, units, average order value, and what sold best. It runs on GitHub Actions for free, so there is no server to host and nothing running on your laptop.

What it does

• The numbers you check first: total sales, orders, units sold and average order value.
• A breakdown that adds up: gross sales, discounts, returns, net sales, shipping, taxes and total, in the same order Shopify's own sales report uses.
• Top sellers overall and within each category, with units and sales for each product.
• Categories your way: by product type, by vendor, or by keyword rules for stores whose products have no type set.
• Honest totals. Cancelled and test orders are left out and mentioned at the bottom. Refunds and removed items come off the numbers.
• The right day in your timezone, including the days clocks change.
• Sends through Resend, Brevo or any SMTP server, including Gmail with an app password.
• Uses Shopify's GraphQL Admin API, with rate limits and retries handled.

How it works

1. GitHub Actions starts the job on a schedule you pick.
2. It gets a Shopify access token and works out yesterday's start and end in your store's timezone.
3. It reads every order placed in that window, with all of its line items.
4. It adds everything up and sends one HTML email, with a plain-text version, to everyone on your list.

A run takes under a minute.

Setup

About 15 minutes, once.

1. Make your own copy

Click Use this template at the top of this page, then Create a new repository. Make it private: the workflow logs show your daily revenue.

2. Give it access to your store

Pick the row that matches you:

Your situation	What you set
You already have an Admin API access token (shpat_...) from a custom app	SHOPIFY_ACCESS_TOKEN
You create an app in the Dev Dashboard and the store is in the same Shopify organization	SHOPIFY_CLIENT_ID and SHOPIFY_CLIENT_SECRET
You create an app in the Dev Dashboard, but the store belongs to someone else (a client, a collaborator store)	Run scripts/get_access_token.py once and set SHOPIFY_ACCESS_TOKEN

To create the app:

1. In the Dev Dashboard, create an app.
2. Give its version the Admin API scopes read_orders and read_products, and release it.
3. Install the app on your store.
4. Copy the Client ID and Client secret from the app's settings.

The report reads order totals and line items only. It never asks for customer names, emails or addresses.

The second row mints a fresh token on every run, which Shopify allows for apps and stores in the same organization. If the run fails with shop_not_permitted, you are in the third row. Add http://localhost:3456/callback to the app's allowed redirect URLs, release again, then:

export SHOPIFY_STORE_DOMAIN=your-store.myshopify.com
export SHOPIFY_CLIENT_ID=...
export SHOPIFY_CLIENT_SECRET=...
python3 scripts/get_access_token.py

A browser opens, you approve the app, and the terminal prints a token that does not expire. That token goes in SHOPIFY_ACCESS_TOKEN.

3. Pick an email provider

Provider	Good for	What you need
Resend (default)	Sending from your own domain	A domain you can add DNS records to, and an API key
Brevo	No DNS access	One verified sender address, and an API key
SMTP	Gmail, Outlook, or your own mail server	Host, port, username and password (for Gmail, an app password)

All three have free tiers that cover one email a day.

4. Add your secrets

In your copy, open Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions → Secrets and add:

Secret	Example	Needed
SHOPIFY_STORE_DOMAIN	your-store.myshopify.com	Always
SHOPIFY_ACCESS_TOKEN	shpat_...	Or the two below
SHOPIFY_CLIENT_ID	from the Dev Dashboard	Or the token above
SHOPIFY_CLIENT_SECRET	from the Dev Dashboard	Or the token above
EMAIL_API_KEY	re_... or xkeysib-...	Resend or Brevo
EMAIL_FROM	Sales Report <reports@yourdomain.com>	Always
EMAIL_TO	founder@yourdomain.com, team@yourdomain.com	Always
SMTP_USERNAME, SMTP_PASSWORD		SMTP only

5. Optional: tune it

Everything else has a sensible default. To change one, add it under Variables on the same page:

Variable	Default	What it does
EMAIL_PROVIDER	resend	resend, brevo or smtp
SMTP_HOST, SMTP_PORT	587	SMTP server. Port 465 uses SSL, anything else uses STARTTLS
STORE_NAME	Your Shopify store name	Name in the subject and header
REPORT_TIMEZONE	Your store's timezone	Which "yesterday" to report, e.g. Asia/Kolkata
BRAND_COLOR	#1f2937	Header, heading and table colour
GROUP_BY	product_type	product_type, vendor, rules or none
CATEGORY_RULES_FILE	categories.yaml	Keyword rules, used when GROUP_BY is rules
TOP_N	10	Rows in each top-sellers table
INCLUDE_TEST_ORDERS	false	Count orders placed with Shopify's test gateway
SEND_WHEN_NO_ORDERS	true	Set false to skip the email on days with no orders
SHOPIFY_API_VERSION	2026-07	Shopify API version

6. Choose the time

Edit the cron line in .github/workflows/sales-alert.yml. It is in UTC: 30 3 * * * is 09:00 in India, and 0 13 * * * is 09:00 in New York during summer time. crontab.guru helps. Whatever time it runs, the report always covers the previous full day in your store's timezone.

7. Test it

Open the Actions tab, pick Daily sales report, click Run workflow and tick dry run. The run page then has an email-preview download with the email it would have sent. You can also type a date to report a day other than yesterday. When it looks right, run it again without the tick to send a real one.

Categories without product types

If your products have no product type in Shopify, set GROUP_BY to rules, copy categories.example.yaml to categories.yaml, and commit it:

Kits:
  - kit
  - combo
Seeds:
  - seed

Each product goes into the first category with a keyword in its title. Anything that matches nothing lands in "Other". Put the most specific categories first.

How the numbers are worked out

Line	Meaning
Gross sales	Unit price times quantity ordered, before any discount
Discounts	Every discount on the order, including order-level codes, spread across the items
Returns and removals	Items refunded or removed with an order edit since the order was placed
Net sales	Gross sales minus discounts and returns
Shipping, Taxes	Current amounts on the orders, after refunds
Other	Tips, duties and fees, when there are any
Total sales	What customers paid, after refunds. The lines above always add up to it

Figures cover orders placed during the day. A refund made today on last week's order changes last week's numbers, not today's. That matches how most stores read a daily report, but it can differ slightly from Shopify's own analytics, which puts refunds on the day they happen.

If your prices include tax (common in India, the UK and the EU), taxes are shown as "already in prices" and not added again.

Run it on your computer

python3 -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env        # fill it in; DRY_RUN=true writes a preview instead of emailing
python -m sales_alert

python scripts/demo.py renders a sample email from made-up orders, no Shopify account needed.

Good to know

• Days more than 60 days back need the read_all_orders scope. Yesterday never does.
• If Shopify says the app cannot access orders, open the app in the Dev Dashboard and turn on protected customer data access for orders. Custom apps get it without a review. No customer fields are needed.
• Scheduled runs can start a few minutes late when GitHub is busy.
• In a public repository, GitHub pauses scheduled workflows after 60 days without any activity. Private copies are not affected.
• Cost: each run uses about one minute of GitHub Actions time. Private repositories on the free plan get 2,000 minutes a month.

Project layout

sales_alert/
  __main__.py         entry point: python -m sales_alert
  config.py           reads settings and category rules
  shopify.py          GraphQL client: tokens, pagination, retries
  orders.py           the day's time window and the orders query
  report.py           adds everything up (no network)
  email_template.py   HTML and plain-text email
  mailer.py           Resend, Brevo and SMTP
scripts/
  get_access_token.py one-time offline token for stores in another organization
  demo.py             sample email from test data
tests/                pytest suite, runs without a store

Development

pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
python -m pytest

Related

Shopify Stock-Out Alert emails the products and sizes that are out of stock every morning, set up the same way.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md. For security problems, see SECURITY.md.

License

MIT. Built by Hussain Trawadi, vibe coded with Claude. It started as a private automation for a D2C brand's founder and was rebuilt here so any Shopify store can use it.