Your First Week on Atlas: A Complete Setup Checklist

Atlas doesn't show you anything until it's reading your own shop. There's no sample data, no placeholder dashboard, no “here's what this might look like” — before your shop is connected, most of the app is deliberately empty. So the first week is mostly about getting real data in, then learning to read it.

Here's the order that works, and roughly how long each part actually takes.

Day 1: Connect your shop

When you first sign in, your dashboard carries a setup checklist at the top. It has six steps, and it disappears on its own once they're all done (or if you dismiss it):

1. Create your Atlas account — already done by the time you can see the checklist.
2. Choose a plan — decides which modules are open to you. You can change it later without losing anything already synced.
3. Connect your Etsy shop — the one that matters.
4. Bring your listings across — copies your titles, tags, prices and photos into Atlas.
5. Bring your orders across — your receipts, which the profit and repeat-customer figures are built from.
6. Try one of the AI tools — optional, and Growth-tier (see the note at the end).

Connecting happens on Etsy's own sign-in page, not a form inside Atlas — you approve access on etsy.com and land back in your dashboard. Atlas never sees your Etsy password. If you'd rather read that part in detail first, the Help Center covers it in Creating your account and connecting your first shop.

Each checklist step links straight to the exact control it means — the “Bring your listings across” and “Bring your orders across” steps both land on Settings → Shop Connection, where Refresh and Refresh Orders sit next to each other, and each step highlights its own button so you don't have to guess which is which.

Day 1–2: Let the first sync finish

After connecting, syncing starts on its own within a few hours. You don't have to wait for it — Settings → Shop Connection has Refresh (listings) and Refresh Orders (receipts) if you'd rather start now. That panel also shows when your shop was connected and when orders last synced, which is the fastest way to tell whether something is actually stuck or just still running.

One thing worth knowing up front, because it sets expectations for everything that follows: the order sync pulls the last 90 days of receipts from Etsy. That's your starting history. It grows from there as Atlas keeps syncing, so some parts of the app get more useful in month three than they can possibly be in week one.

Until that first sync finishes, modules will look empty rather than showing rounded-off or placeholder numbers. That's intentional — an empty panel is honest, an invented one isn't.

Day 3: Read your dashboard

Once listings and orders are across, the dashboard is the first thing worth actually reading. It gives you Atlas Score and a “needs attention” count over the listings it checked, plus orders, revenue and total listings read straight from your own Etsy data, with a performance chart across the period you pick.

You'll notice the chart's Views and Visits series stay empty. That isn't a sync problem — Etsy's API publishes no traffic history, so there's nothing to read them from, and Atlas says so on the chart rather than filling the gap with an estimate. Understanding your dashboard goes through the rest of the panels.

The one figure that will be blank at first is real average profit margin, and it tells you why: it needs your product costs, which only you know. Entering them is what turns Etsy's revenue into your actual profit. If you want the background on what Etsy takes before you get there, our blog post on how much Etsy really costs breaks down every fee on a sale.

Day 4–5: Shop DNA (Growth)

Shop DNA is where your own history starts saying something back. It profiles what you actually sell and who actually buys it: average price as both mean and median, your strongest category and material, how much of your business is gifts, how much is personalized, and your repeat purchase rate.

What makes it worth reading carefully is that every figure carries how much data it's based on and a confidence level — “based on 128 orders · high confidence” next to one number and “medium confidence” next to another. It also breaks your buyers into RFM segments (Champions, Loyal, New, At Risk) scored against each other, not against other shops, because Atlas has no access to other shops' private data.

Shop DNA reads all the history Atlas has accumulated, so in week one it's working from roughly your first 90 days. Its seasonal section will tell you outright when that isn't enough — it won't call any month your strongest until there are 24+ months of real history behind the claim.

Day 6–7: Intelligence Hub (Growth)

Once you know what your shop is, Intelligence Hub tells you what to do about it today. It's the one page that pulls the others together: a daily summary in plain language, then a priority feed ranked P1, P2, P3 — each item naming the module it came from and linking straight to it.

Two sources feed it. Root Cause Radar surfaces listings whose views dropped sharply. Shop Health Radar surfaces listings that keep auto-renewing without ever selling, with the money that's cost you. There's a second tab, Renewal Costs, for that spend over time, and a Top Opportunities section at the bottom that hands off to Opportunity Center.

If you only build one habit in your first week, make it this one: open Intelligence Hub, read the priority feed, action the top item. That's the loop the rest of Atlas exists to feed.

A note on plans

Being straight about this, because it changes what your first week looks like: Shop DNA and Intelligence Hub are both Growth-tier, as is Atlas Studio (the AI tool the checklist's last step points at). On Starter you'll finish the setup steps and the dashboard exactly as described, but those two sections won't open.

Starter still includes eleven modules, and the ones worth your first week are Listings and Margin Radar — same real data, at the individual-listing level rather than the whole-shop pattern level. The setup work above is identical either way, and nothing you sync is lost if you change plans later.