Sam can keep an eye on your store and tell you when something changes, so you find out a product is selling out or has gone quiet without checking a dashboard every day.
A morning briefing tells you about everything on a schedule. This is the opposite: nothing arrives until something is worth telling you about. You describe the condition, Sam watches for it.
- →Your store or payment platform connected, so Sam can see orders and revenue as they happen. Connect a tool to Sam.
- →A rough idea of what normal looks like for you. "Busy" for one shop is a quiet morning for another.
Step 1 - Describe what you want to know about
Open Sam AI and say what would matter enough to interrupt you:
“Tell me when a product sells more than twice its usual daily volume, or when something that normally sells stops for two days.”
Vague works too — "let me know if anything unusual happens with sales" — and Sam will ask what unusual means to you. Answering that properly is what stops the alert being noise.
Step 2 - Set the threshold
Sam needs a line to compare against. Give it one of these:
- A multiple — twice the usual daily orders, half the usual revenue.
- A number — more than 40 units in a day, fewer than five.
- A silence — no orders for 48 hours on something that normally sells daily.
Set it too tight and you will hear from Sam constantly. Start looser than feels right and tighten it after a week; you will know quickly which alerts you actually opened.
Sam confirms the check is running and tells you how often it looks.
Step 3 - Read the alert
When the condition is met, the alert lands in the chat with whoever owns the automation, and is saved to the Workbench.
It says what changed, by how much, and against what — the product, the movement, and the normal it is being measured against. Where Sam can see a likely cause in your connected tools, such as a campaign that started the same day, it says so.
Step 4 - Tune it
Alerts are worth adjusting more than any other automation, because a noisy one gets ignored and a silent one is worthless. Say so in the chat: "only tell me about spikes not stalls", "raise the threshold", "ignore the sample packs".
To check it is working, open the Settings tab, expand Automations under Specialist Settings, and select the history icon for Run History. A quiet week of Success runs with no alerts means the check is running and nothing crossed the line — which is different from the check being broken. Partial and Failed runs carry a message explaining what went wrong.
Stalls are the ones worth setting up. A spike gets noticed anyway because the money shows up. A product quietly stopping selling can go a fortnight without anyone spotting it.
- ✓On its schedule, Sam checks your store data against the condition you described.
- ✓When nothing has changed, Sam stays quiet and logs the run.
- ✓When the line is crossed, Sam tells you what moved, by how much, and against what normal.
- ✓Every alert, is saved to the Workbench so you can look back at what happened when.
Frequently Asked Questions
How quickly will I hear about it?
Sam checks on the schedule the automation runs on, so the alert follows the next check rather than the sale itself. Ask for more frequent checks if you need to react faster, bearing in mind each run uses credits.
Can I watch more than one thing?
Yes. Either describe several conditions in one automation, or set up separate ones so you can turn a noisy alert off without losing the others.
Can it watch ad performance instead of products?
Yes, and the Ads Specialist is the better owner for that. The setup is identical; you are just describing an ads condition instead of a sales one.
I am getting too many alerts.
Tell Sam to raise the threshold in the chat. If a particular product is responsible, name it and ask for it to be excluded.
I have not had any alerts. Is it broken?
Check Run History. Success runs with no alert mean the check ran and nothing crossed your threshold. If your threshold is high, that is expected.
Does it use credits?
Yes, on every check, not only when it alerts you. A check that runs frequently costs more than one that runs daily. See how much usage you have left shows the daily total.