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A 6,034-card catalogue is too much for any merchant to scan. Nobody opens a wall of equally-weighted tiles and finds the answer. The Nerve Centre solves this with a deliberate three-tier classification: hero, cross-channel, standard. The classification drives dashboard prominence, default visibility, the executive summary view, and how the catalogue is indexed for SEO. This page documents the three classes, why hero density is capped, and what makes a cross-channel card different from a single-connector card that happens to mention another tool.

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The three classes

ClassWhat it answersVisual treatment
HeroThe top three to five questions a merchant asks of a connector on a typical day.Larger tile (2 or 3 column wide), top of the category group, sentiment border.
Cross-channelA question no single connector can answer alone. Joins data across two or more sources.Larger tile, special icon, click-through into a Vortex Mind cross-channel report.
StandardThe long-tail metric set per connector. Less universally relevant, more domain-specific.Smaller tile, secondary grid below the hero row.
A card always sits in exactly one tier. The tier is set in the card’s frontmatter (tier: hero or tier: standard; cross-channel is denoted by cross_channel: true and is layered over the hero / standard distinction). The full catalogue of cross-channel cards, indexed by connector with the join keys and merchant value spelled out for every card, lives at Cross-Channel Kill-Shots. That page is the answer to “show me what Vortex IQ does that single-tool analytics cannot”.

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Hero cards, the daily-three

A hero card answers a question the merchant asks of a connector on a daily basis. Not weekly, not monthly. Daily. Examples per connector:
  • Shopify, Hero (5). Total Revenue, Order Count, Refund Rate, Average Order Value, Conversion Rate.
  • Stripe, Hero (5). Authorisation Rate, Successful Charges, Decline Rate by Reason, Total Volume, Refunds Issued.
  • Google Ads, Hero (5). Spend, ROAS, Cost per Acquisition, Click-Through Rate, Impression Share.
  • Klaviyo, Hero (4). Active Subscribers, Open Rate, Click Rate, Revenue Per Recipient.
  • Datadog, Hero (4). Checkout Latency p95, Error Rate, Open Incidents, Active Monitors.
The list is curated, not algorithmic. Vortex IQ’s product team shortlists the heroes in collaboration with the merchant base; they do not float to the top of the dashboard by traffic alone. A metric becomes hero by editorial decision after two checks:
  1. Universality. Does every merchant on this connector ask this question, or only some? A hero metric is one that 80 percent or more of merchants ask about regularly.
  2. Decision impact. Does the answer to this question change what the merchant does today? A hero metric is one whose movement triggers an action.
A metric that is universal but does not change behaviour (e.g. Total Lifetime Customers) is interesting context, not a hero. A metric that changes behaviour but only for a small subset (e.g. POS Cash Drawer Variance on Shopify, only for stores running retail) is standard, not hero.

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Cross-channel cards, the kill-shots

A cross-channel card is one whose query joins data from more than one connector to compute a value neither connector could produce alone. The card’s cross_channel field is true and its derive_from field lists the source connectors. The framing is “kill-shot” because these are the cards that justify the AI OS over a stack of point tools. Examples:
  • Active Ads on Out-of-Stock SKUs (derive_from: [google_ads, bigcommerce | shopify | adobe_commerce], card id <commerce>_xc_ads_on_oos). For each SKU advertised in Google Ads or Meta in the last 24 hours, what is the current commerce-platform inventory level? When spend > 0 and inventory = 0, the merchant is paying for clicks on out-of-stock product. Neither the ad platform nor the commerce platform alone can compute this. Ships today on every Phase 0 commerce connector.
  • Decline Spike vs Checkout Funnel Drop (derive_from: [stripe | paypal | cybersource, bigcommerce | shopify | adobe_commerce], card id <payment>_xc_decline_vs_funnel). When the payment connector’s decline-rate spikes, did the commerce platform’s checkout funnel completion drop in the same window? Both move together is a payment-vendor incident (page the vendor). Only declines move is a BIN-specific issuer issue (watch, do not page). Only the funnel moves needs two siblings to disambiguate the on-site cause: the Pagespeed card below names a perf regression (deploy slowed the site), and the RollbackPro price-change history names a pricing regression (a CSV import or manual edit raised a price on a top SKU). When the funnel drops, perf is stable, and RollbackPro recorded no price change on the affected SKUs, what is left is an on-site UX or merchandising change in the recent deploy log. The four-way split tells the merchant which alarm to pull, instead of paging everyone at once.
  • Revenue at Risk from Open Incidents (derive_from: [bigcommerce | shopify | adobe_commerce, datadog | newrelic], card id <commerce>_xc_revenue_at_risk_from_incident). Live $/min of revenue at risk while a Datadog or New Relic incident affecting checkout is open, computed as incident_open_minutes × revenue_per_minute × estimated_traffic_loss_pct. Updates every minute. Turns engineering MTTR into a CFO number.
  • Email Share of Total Store Revenue (derive_from: [klaviyo | dotdigital | mailchimp, bigcommerce | shopify | adobe_commerce], card id <email>_xc_email_revenue_share). email_attributed_revenue / commerce_total_revenue joined on the same window. The CFO “is email pulling its weight” gauge. Healthy band varies by platform pairing; both under-leverage and over-reliance fire alerts.
  • Pagespeed-Caused Cart-Abandonment Loss (derive_from: [woocommerce, website_performance], card id wc_xc_pagespeed_cart_loss). When LCP or CLS degrade in a measurable window, what is the cart-abandonment rate inside that window compared to baseline? Names the most common silent revenue leak: a deploy slows the site and conversion drops without anyone realising. The diagnostic that lets a merchant tie a conversion dip to a specific deploy and roll back. Lives on WooCommerce today; BigCommerce, Shopify, and Adobe Commerce equivalents are scheduled in the parity backlog.
Cross-channel cards are deliberately rare in the catalogue (roughly 4 to 7 percent depending on the connector mix in the workspace) because each one requires careful join logic and per-graph evidence handling. They are also the cards Vortex Mind reaches for first when walking the connector graph during a diagnostic, because the cross-channel join is what makes a finding cross-functionally credible. When a merchant clicks a cross-channel card, the Nerve Centre routes them into the relevant Vortex Mind cross-channel report with the card as the entry point. The card surfaces the headline; the report surfaces the diagnosis.

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Standard cards, the long tail

The remaining 80 to 85 percent of the catalogue is standard cards. They cover the long-tail metrics specific to each connector: niche reports (Subscription Cohort Retention by Cohort Month on Shopify Subscriptions), domain-specific signals (Memcached Hit Rate on New Relic), or compliance-grade detail (Decline Reason Code Distribution by Card Brand on Stripe). Standard does not mean unimportant. A merchant deeply in a Datadog incident wants the Memcached Hit Rate card. A merchant analysing a churn pattern wants Subscription Cohort Retention. The standard tier is where the catalogue’s depth lives. The treatment in the UI is what changes:
  • Standard cards render in the secondary grid below the hero row in each category.
  • They do not carry the sentiment-coloured border (the value still uses sentiment colour).
  • They do not surface in the executive summary view by default.
  • They can be hidden per-profile under Dashboard Settings without affecting hero coverage.

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The 15-percent hero cap

Hero density is capped at roughly 15 percent of the per-connector card set. The cap is editorial, not enforced by code, but it is enforced in catalogue review. The reasoning: A wall of 30 hero cards on Shopify is a wall of 30 things demanding attention. The merchant skims and stops. Five hero cards, with the rest one click away, is a wall the merchant actually reads. Hero is a scarce resource; it has to stay scarce to do its job. The cap is per-connector, not workspace-wide. A merchant with 12 connectors connected sees 60 to 100 hero cards across the workspace, which is still a lot. The Nerve Centre dashboard has a Hero only filter (top-right of the connector tab) that collapses the view to hero cards across all connectors for the at-a-glance scan. When a candidate metric arrives from product or from a merchant feature request, it lands as standard. Promotion to hero happens in the next quarterly catalogue review, with a corresponding demotion if the cap would be exceeded. The hero list is curated, not auto-promoted.

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How tier drives the executive view

The Nerve Centre offers an “Executive View” mode (toggle top-right) that filters to hero and cross-channel cards across every connector and stacks them in a single scrollable feed. The executive view is the morning-coffee dashboard: a CFO or founder who wants to scan the whole business in 60 seconds opens this view, scans for red and amber, and either acts or moves on. The executive view does not lose the standard cards. They are one click away when the merchant drills into a connector tab. The tier system is a curation layer over the same catalogue, not a different catalogue.

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How tier drives Vortex Mind report priority

When Vortex Mind runs a scheduled report (daily morning briefing, weekly summary, quarterly business review), the report’s evidence section pulls from card data. The selection logic prioritises in this order:
  1. Cross-channel cards with active alerts.
  2. Hero cards with active alerts.
  3. Cross-channel cards in amber.
  4. Hero cards in amber.
  5. Standard cards with active alerts.
  6. Cross-channel cards in green (for context).
  7. Hero cards in green (for context).
The result is briefings that lead with the most cross-functionally important findings rather than the most numerous. A briefing that opens with “no critical issues across the kill-shot cards, but hero card Refund Rate is amber on Shopify” is a briefing the merchant reads; one that opens with “all 200 metrics” is one they skip.

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Where tier surfaces in the UI

  • Card size and grid. Hero and cross-channel render in larger tiles; standard renders in the secondary grid.
  • Hero filter. Top-right of every connector tab; filters to hero only.
  • Executive view. Toggle on the dashboard header; filters across all connectors to hero + cross-channel.
  • Cross-channel icon. Distinctive icon (a connecting-lines glyph) top-right of the tile.

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How it relates to other modules

  • Vortex Mind consumes cross-channel cards as the anchor nodes for cross-channel reports. The card is the question; the report is the diagnosis.
  • Ask Viq prefers hero and cross-channel cards when answering open-ended questions (“how is the business doing”, “what should I look at first”) because they are the questions the merchant most likely meant.
  • Actions prioritises Kanban cards from hero and cross-channel alerts at the top of the queue by default.
  • Vortex Memory snapshots hero and cross-channel card values daily as the longitudinal baseline. Standard cards snapshot weekly. The retention cadence reflects the importance.

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FAQ

Can I promote a standard card to hero in my workspace? Today the hero list is catalogue-level and not per-workspace customisable, but the Dashboard Settings reordering lets a merchant pin any card to the top of the category. Pinning gives the card hero-equivalent prominence in the merchant’s view without changing the catalogue tier. Why are some cross-channel cards hidden in some workspaces? A cross-channel card requires its source connectors to be wired. A Stockout with Active Spend card requires both Google Ads and Shopify (or BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce) to be connected. Workspaces missing one of the source connectors do not render the card; instead, the connector tab shows a “Connect Google Ads to unlock” placeholder. How many hero cards should I expect across my workspace? With three to five hero cards per connector and a typical workspace running eight to fifteen connectors, expect 30 to 75 hero cards. The Executive View renders all of them in a single feed. Are cross-channel cards always hero too? Not necessarily. Some cross-channel cards are hero (the kill-shots), others are standard (a useful join that does not change daily behaviour). The cross-channel flag and the hero flag are independent. The visual prominence is similar (both render in the larger tile) so the distinction matters more for the indexing wave than for the merchant. What is the difference between cross-channel and reconciliation? A cross-channel card joins data across connectors to compute a value. A card with a reconciles_with field cites related cards on other connectors that should track close to it (e.g. Shopify Total Revenue reconciles with Stripe Total Revenue), but the card itself runs only on one connector. Reconciliation is documentation cross-reference; cross-channel is computational join. How does tier affect Ask Viq’s answers? For broad questions (“how is the business”, “what should I look at first”), Ask Viq biases toward hero and cross-channel. For specific questions (“what is the memcached hit rate”), Ask Viq goes directly to the standard card without preference. The tier is a relevance signal, not a gate.