The Scenario
The buying director needs margin data before approving the next purchase order. Every variant — SKU, selling price, cost, and current stock — needs to be in an Excel workbook so the buying team can calculate gross margin by SKU and identify the products that are pulling down the blended margin.
The request came in yesterday. The buying meeting is tomorrow at 10 AM.
Shopify shows variant details product by product. Cost data is on each variant's edit screen, not on the product list. There is no built-in report that gives you SKU, price, cost, and inventory in a single export.
The bad version:
- Open Shopify's product list, export as CSV.
- Realize the product CSV doesn't include cost or inventory data — those are separate exports.
- Download the inventory CSV and the product CSV separately, spend an hour VLOOKUPing them together, discover the key field between the two exports is the inventory item ID, which requires a third export to resolve to a SKU.
The buying meeting is tomorrow. The VLOOKUP chain is not going to be ready.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It fetches all products and their variants from Shopify — including cost and inventory — and writes everything into the workbook in one operation, ready for margin calculation.
Pull all Shopify product variants and paste into my Buying Review Excel sheet, then add a column calculating gross margin percentage as (price minus cost) divided by price
What You Get
- One row per variant across all products, with product title, SKU, price, compare-at price, cost, and available inventory in labeled columns.
- A gross margin percentage column calculated automatically — no formula needed from the buying team.
- All variants pulled in one operation without a CSV join exercise.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Low-margin variants should be flagged automatically
Pull all Shopify product variants and write product title, SKU, price, cost, and available inventory into my Buying Review Excel sheet — add gross margin percentage column — flag 'review' in a separate column for any variant where margin is below 30%
Variants without a cost entered should be excluded from the margin calculation
Pull all Shopify product variants where cost is not null and write product title, SKU, price, cost, and available inventory into my Buying Review Excel sheet — add gross margin percentage column
The buying director also wants compare-at price to assess markdown depth
Pull all Shopify product variants and write product title, SKU, price, compare_at_price, cost, and available inventory into my Buying Review Excel sheet — add gross margin percentage column — add a markdown depth column as (compare_at_price minus price) divided by compare_at_price where compare_at_price is not null
Full margin review: all variants, margin calculation, below-30% flag, zero-stock flag, and markdown depth
Pull all Shopify product variants and write product title, SKU, price, compare_at_price, cost, and available inventory into my Buying Review Excel sheet — add gross margin percentage — add markdown depth where compare_at_price exists — flag 'review' for margin below 30% — flag 'out of stock' for variants with zero available inventory
Running all four columns alongside the data pull means the buying director walks into the 10 AM meeting with a complete decision-ready workbook, not a flat export to analyze first.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open the buying review workbook before tomorrow's 10 AM meeting, then ask SheetXAI to pull all variants with margin percentages and flags calculated automatically. The next quarterly buying review will use the same prompt. Also worth reading: how to export inventory snapshots for stock planning across all locations, or the hub overview for all Shopify workflows.