Shopify Magic Projections: A guide for ambitious stores

Stevia Putri

Katelin Teen
Last edited October 16, 2025
Expert Verified

For a long time, "AI in e-commerce" mostly meant getting help with a product description or a snappy email subject line. Handy, sure, but not exactly groundbreaking. The real potential of AI lies in tackling the tougher stuff, forecasting sales, planning budgets, and making those big strategic calls. That's the work that helps a business really grow instead of just guessing its way forward.
Shopify has thrown its hat in the ring with a feature called Shopify Magic Projections. It sounds impressive, but as businesses get more serious about growth, you have to ask: is a built-in tool really powerful enough? Can it give you the kind of insight you need to get ahead of the competition?
Let's cut to the chase. In this guide, we'll break down what Shopify Magic Projections is, where you'll bump into its limits, and what a smarter, more robust AI strategy looks like for a modern store.
What exactly is Shopify Magic Projections?
First things first, let's get clear on what this tool actually is. Shopify Magic Projections isn't some big, separate dashboard for all your forecasting needs. It’s a feature hidden inside the Customer cohort analysis report in your Shopify admin.
Its goal is pretty specific: it tries to predict how much money groups of your customers might spend in the future. It does this by lumping customers together based on when they first bought from you (that's a "cohort") and then forecasting their future spending habits.
So, how does it come up with these numbers? According to Shopify, the feature looks at the last 24 months of your store’s own sales data. It analyzes how your past customer groups behaved to make an educated guess about their future loyalty. The main idea is to help you get a handle on potential customer lifetime value (LTV) and see which groups have historically been your best customers. It's a tool designed for looking backward to guess what's coming next.
The practical limits of Shopify Magic Projections
Having a built-in LTV projection is a nice touch, but it feels a bit like being handed a single wrench when you really need a full toolbox. The moment you try to use it for serious, day-to-day business planning, you start to see the gaps. It's a decent starting point, but for any business trying to scale, it comes with some real limitations.
A passive tool: You have to find the insights
The first big issue is that Shopify Magic Projections is completely passive. It’s just a dataset sitting inside a report. You have to remember to navigate to it, find the toggle to turn it on, and then figure out what it all means by yourself. The burden of finding and acting on the insight is all on you.
This might not seem like a huge deal, but it’s the difference between having raw data and having actual intelligence. The report won't ping you if a valuable group of customers suddenly goes quiet. It won't tell your marketing team that their latest campaign just brought in a fresh batch of high-potential buyers. And it definitely won’t trigger any automated tasks. You have to do all the work of checking, connecting the dots, and then deciding what to do. In a fast-moving business, that’s a manual process that just doesn't work long-term.
Historical data only: A rearview mirror approach
This is probably its biggest blind spot. Shopify is very open about the fact that its projections are based only on your store’s history. Their documentation says the data "isn't based on information from any other stores or averages for your industry."
Let that sink in for a moment. Your sales don't happen in a vacuum. They're affected by all sorts of external things. A competitor running a huge sale, a new trend that just blew up on TikTok, a long holiday weekend, or even a change in the economy can all rock your sales numbers.
Shopify Magic Projections is blind to all of it. It operates in its own little bubble, which means it can't warn you about what's happening in the wider market. It can tell you what your customers did, but it has no idea what the market is doing right now.
A narrow focus on LTV
Finally, the tool is hyper-focused on one thing: how much money customer groups might spend. LTV is definitely an important metric, but it’s just one piece of a much bigger operational puzzle.
Most store owners and operators are trying to answer bigger, more immediate questions that this tool wasn't built for. It can’t help you with:
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Overall sales forecasting: It won't give you a projection for your total revenue next month or next quarter. You're left to piece that together yourself.
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Inventory demand: It has no way of predicting which specific products are about to take off or which ones you need to reorder before you run out.
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Marketing performance: It doesn't link spending projections back to the marketing channels that brought those customers in, making it tough to figure out where to put your ad budget.
It’s a specialized tool for looking at LTV, but it's often mistaken for a complete business forecasting solution, which it just isn't.
What a truly predictive AI can do for your Shopify store
The shortcomings of a tool like Shopify Magic Projections actually do us a favor: they perfectly highlight what a more advanced, dedicated AI system should be doing for your business. Real predictive AI isn't about generating another report for you to read. It's about being an active partner that helps you run your business better.
Getting ahead of your inventory
Anyone who's run an e-commerce store knows the inventory nightmare. You order too much of a product, and suddenly your cash is tied up in boxes collecting dust. Order too little, and you sell out right as a product starts trending on social media. It's a constant balancing act.
This is where a smarter AI comes in. Instead of only looking at past sales, a more powerful system analyzes sales velocity, seasonality, ongoing marketing campaigns, and even wider market trends to predict which specific products are about to pop. This lets you prevent those costly stockouts on your best-sellers and stop you from over-ordering items that are losing steam. It turns inventory management from a stressful guessing game into a data-driven strategy.
Getting proactive alerts and automating work
The real magic happens when AI connects your different tools and starts taking action for you. Think of an AI agent that doesn't just look at data but acts as a bridge between your systems.
For example, imagine a smart AI agent that monitors real-time sales data from your Shopify store and cross-references it with your live inventory. If a trending product's stock drops below 20 units, it could automatically send a high-priority alert to your "#inventory" channel in Slack. If everything's fine, it just keeps monitoring in the background.
This isn't some far-off concept; these kinds of workflows are now accessible without needing a team of developers. Unlike platforms that require complex setup, tools like eesel AI give you a customizable workflow engine. You can connect your store, tell the AI how you want it to behave, define the actions it can take, and let it start working for you instead of just giving you more homework.
This workflow diagram illustrates how an AI agent can automate tasks by connecting different systems like Shopify and Slack, a key benefit over static tools like Shopify Magic Projections.
How to find Shopify Magic Projections and what it costs
If you want to poke around and see the feature for yourself, it's easy enough to find.
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From your Shopify Admin, go to "Analytics" > "Reports".
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In the list of reports, find and click on "Customer cohort analysis".
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Once the report loads, look for the Show projections toggle at the top of the page and turn it on.
Just be aware that access to these kinds of advanced reports depends on which Shopify plan you're on. Here’s a quick rundown of how the plans stack up.
Shopify Plan | Price (Billed Monthly) | Key Analytics Feature Access |
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Basic | $39 USD/mo | Basic reports only |
Shopify | $105 USD/mo | Standard reports, including cohort analysis |
Advanced | $399 USD/mo | Advanced reports and custom report builder |
Plus | Starting at $2,300 USD/mo | All reporting features, including custom reports |
Basically, you'll need to be on the "Shopify" plan or higher to get to the customer cohort analysis report where the projections feature is located.
Stop looking at reports and start using AI agents
So, what's the final verdict on Shopify Magic Projections?
It’s a neat feature, and for a quick, surface-level look at the potential value of your customer groups, it’s perfectly fine. But it's a stepping stone, not a final destination. It’s a passive, manual report with a narrow focus that can’t see what’s happening outside the walls of your own store.
For stores that are serious about scaling, the goal shouldn't be to find more reports to analyze. The real shift happens when you move from just looking at data to implementing an AI strategy that actively works for you. This means embracing AI agents that can connect your data, automate workflows, and make decisions in real time.
While Shopify's tool gives you a report, eesel AI gives you an autonomous agent. Our platform connects directly to the tools you already use, like Shopify, your help desk, and internal knowledge docs, to automate the work that comes after the analysis.
Imagine an AI that sees a product is trending and can instantly handle the flood of support tickets about it, answer pre-sale questions by pulling from your live product catalog, and alert your operations team when inventory is low. All without you having to lift a finger. That's the difference between passive data and an active AI strategy.
See for yourself how an active AI agent can change your operations. You can go live in minutes with eesel AI.
Frequently asked questions
Shopify Magic Projections is a tool found within your Shopify admin's Customer cohort analysis report. It forecasts how much money groups of your customers might spend in the future, based on their past purchasing behavior. You can access it via "Analytics" > "Reports" > "Customer cohort analysis".
The feature analyzes your store's own sales data from the past 24 months. It groups customers by their first purchase date (cohorts) and then predicts their future spending habits and potential lifetime value based on these historical patterns. It does not use external market data.
No, this feature is narrowly focused on predicting customer lifetime value (LTV) for specific cohorts. It isn't designed for broader operational tasks like forecasting your total store revenue, predicting product-specific demand, or managing inventory levels.
Unfortunately, Shopify Magic Projections operates solely on your store's historical sales data. It cannot account for external factors like market trends, economic shifts, or competitor activities, making its predictions blind to the wider market context.
Its main limitations include being passive and requiring manual interpretation, relying only on past internal sales data (ignoring external market factors), and its narrow focus on LTV projections rather than comprehensive business forecasting or actionable insights.
To utilize Shopify Magic Projections, you need to be on the "Shopify" plan or a higher-tier plan such as "Advanced" or "Plus." It is not available on the basic Shopify plan.