98% faster reporting: How SNOCKS scaled data self-service with Shopify Sidekick

SNOCKS is one of Germany's best-known direct-to-consumer brands, selling across multiple labels including OCEANSAPART and femtis. On Shopify since 2018, the business has grown steadily on the platform, expanding its portfolio along the way, most recently through the acquisition of Les Lunes.

Kevin Foitzik leads ecommerce at the Snocks Group, working closely with co-founder and CEO Johannes Kliesch. For years, that meant being the person every team turned to when they needed data. Finance, Sales, Logistics, Creative — any question that touched Shopify came through Kevin. He answered quickly. But it cost him every afternoon.

Shopify Sidekick changed that. Kevin was an early adopter, and as Sidekick's capabilities grew, so did adoption across the business. Today, four departments pull their own data, build their own reports, and get answers without waiting for anyone.

Since rolling out Shopify Sidekick company-wide, SNOCKS has:

• Cut report-building time by up to 98%, from 30 minutes to seconds per query

• Given four departments direct, independent access to Shopify data: Finance, Sales, Logistics and Creative

• Removed the ecommerce team as a bottleneck for data requests across the business

• Cut the time to build Shopify Flows from hours of research to a single conversation

The challenge

Everyone's questions, one person's inbox

Data questions come up constantly in a DTC business. Which payment providers are performing in which markets? What are conversion rates by country? How do order volumes shift seasonally? These aren't occasional requests. At SNOCKS, they came in daily, from every corner of the business.

And they all landed on Kevin.

Not because there was no other way, but because Kevin had spent years building expertise with the platform that most colleagues hadn't had reason to develop. He knew what to look for and how to find it. So the path of least resistance was always the same: ask Kevin.

Kevin processed the requests quickly. He knew the system. But the throughput was still limited to what one person could handle, and every hour spent answering data questions was an hour not spent on anything else.

Thirty minutes, no guarantee

Shopify's reporting capabilities are powerful. But without knowing which data points can sit together in a single report, building one becomes trial and error. Can conversion rate and average order value be combined at a country level? Can shipping method and payment method appear in the same view? Kevin describes regularly being "at his wit's end" trying to figure out the right approach, not always knowing upfront which combination of data points would yield the answer he was after.

Up to 30 minutes on a single report. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. No clear signal either way until the time was already gone.

Building Flows in the dark

Shopify Flows can automate a lot. But understanding which triggers exist, what actions they support, and how to configure them for a specific use case meant digging through documentation and testing combinations manually. Online resources rarely gave a complete answer.

Kevin built Flows by hand: find the trigger, test the action, adjust the configuration, repeat. For simple automations it was manageable. For anything more complex, it ate time.

The solution

In from the start

SNOCKS follows new Shopify features closely. Kevin and co-founder Johannes watch release announcements together and test anything that looks worth testing. When Sidekick launched, they were on it immediately.

Kevin started using it for his own work, then Johannes. Queries that had previously required manual report-building, or hours spent testing Flow configurations, started getting answered in seconds. The more they worked with it, the more they wanted the rest of the business using it too.

Reports in plain language

Before Sidekick, building a report meant knowing which fields to combine and hoping they were compatible. Now, Kevin, or anyone on the Finance, Sales, Logistics or Creative teams, asks the question in plain language and gets an answer.

If the report is possible, Sidekick builds it. If it isn't, Sidekick says so immediately and suggests an alternative. No dead ends. As Kevin puts it, "instead of spending half an hour trying things, you have your answer in seconds," with room to fine-tune if something's missing.

That second part matters as much as the first. Knowing when something can't be done, and getting a working alternative in the same conversation, changes how teams approach data questions entirely.

Flows built by description

Creating a Shopify Flow used to start with a documentation search. Now Kevin describes what he wants, and Sidekick builds it, with the right triggers, actions, and configuration already in place.

Simple Flows that previously took manual effort now take seconds. More complex automations, where the combination of triggers and follow-on actions isn't obvious upfront, get built in a single exchange. Kevin trusts the output enough to put it straight into production.

Growing adoption through real moments

Rather than making a formal internal announcement, Kevin and Johannes drove adoption through real moments. When a request came in that Sidekick could handle, they'd point to it directly and encourage colleagues to try it themselves.

The moment that made it click for the wider business came during the acquisition of Les Lunes. Johannes joined a live call with his entrepreneur community straight after the deal closed. As Kevin describes it, Johannes "asked Sidekick everything first, rather than diving deep into reports everywhere," and got results he could show the group in real time.

What Kevin hadn't planned for was the organic spread that followed. A colleague shared a Sidekick discovery in Slack completely unprompted, showing the group what they'd found and encouraging others to try it. That kind of word-of-mouth does more for adoption than any top-down rollout.

The results

Self-service data across four teams

Finance, Sales, Logistics and Creative all pull their own Shopify data now. Seasonal sales patterns, conversion metrics by country, payment provider performance, shipping volumes. Questions that used to queue up in Kevin's inbox get answered directly by the people asking them. The value, as Kevin puts it, is that "people can find information on their own, so not everything has to land on me or my team."

Four teams working independently is a different kind of business than one team doing everything. Kevin's time went back to ecommerce.

Reports without the wait

Reports that took up to 30 minutes, sometimes without a useful result at the end, now take seconds. That's a reduction of up to 98% per query.

When something can't be done, that answer is instant too, along with a suggestion for what can. The back-and-forth that used to define data work at SNOCKS has been replaced by direct answers.

Automation without the research

Kevin's Flow-building process has moved from research-heavy to conversation-based. He describes what he needs, reviews the output, and ships it. For complex automations that previously required hours of documentation review, that's a real change in how the work gets done.

More capability ahead

Kevin sees where this is going. Reports and Flows are what Sidekick does well today. But Shopify keeps expanding what it can do, and Kevin follows closely enough to know the current use cases are just the start.