Opportunities Found | ShipWave Help Center

What the engine does

Every night, ShipWave scans your last 30-90 days of profitability data and surfaces opportunities—specific, actionable findings where you're leaving money on the table. The findings live at /admin/reports/opportunities and a weekly email digest summarizes new ones. The engine is conservative on purpose: it caps findings to 10 per brand per day so you actually have time to review and act, not drown in 200 alerts.

The 8 heuristics

losing_money — SKU shipped at a net loss across the window (revenue < COGS + fees + shipping + overhead).
margin_declining — SKU's 30-day margin dropped >5pp vs. its 90-day baseline. Usually cost creep or new fees.
cheaper_supplier_available — Cross-references vendor catalog data to find a comparable SKU at a lower landed cost.
high_fee_pct — Marketplace fees >20% of revenue. Common on Amazon for low-priced items; suggests raising price or pulling from that channel.
slow_velocity_high_storage — SKU sells <1/week but takes >X cuft of warehouse space. Suggests liquidation or LTL outbound to a 3PL.
oversold_backfill — SKU went negative on-hand and ShipWave created a stub layer at estimated cost. Action: receive the backfill PO and reconcile.
shipping_cost_outlier — Average shipping cost per unit is >1.5x the median for comparable SKUs by weight. Usually a dimension issue.
negative_post_overhead — SKU is profitable on direct margin but negative after overhead allocation. Suggests dropping or repricing.

Per-brand cap

Each opportunity is tagged with a brand (derived from the SKU's product brand field). The 10/day cap is applied per brand, so a busy week for Brand A doesn't crowd out findings for Brand B. The most-impactful findings (highest dollar impact) win the slots; the rest queue for the next day.

Snooze, dismiss, action

Each finding card has three buttons: Snooze (suppress for 30 days—use when the finding is real but you can't address it right now), Dismiss (suppress permanently for this SKU+rule combination—use when the rule doesn't apply, e.g. a loss-leader you're intentionally running), and Action (opens the relevant admin page—product editor, vendor catalog, dispute queue, etc—to take the next step).

Weekly digest

Every Monday at 8am ET, ShipWave emails the account owner a digest of new opportunities from the past 7 days, grouped by rule with dollar impact. The email is sent via the same SMTP path as other ShipWave notifications and includes deep links to each finding. You can disable the digest under Admin -> Notifications -> Reports.

FAQs

Can I add my own heuristics?

Not yet via UI—the 8 rules are the v1 set. If you have a specific rule you'd like added, write us with the SQL you'd like to see and we'll evaluate it.

What if a finding is a false positive?

Use Dismiss. The dismissal is recorded with timestamp and user so you can audit later. The engine won't re-surface the same SKU+rule combo.

How accurate are the cheaper_supplier suggestions?

They're based on vendor catalogs you've uploaded plus public price feeds. Always verify before switching—the engine doesn't know about quality differences, MOQ requirements, or lead times.

Does this consider returns?

Yes. The underlying profitability data already nets out refunds and return shipping costs. See <a href="/help/profitability-dashboard">Profitability dashboard</a>.

Opportunities Found: 8 ways ShipWave spots money on the table