The 7 you'll use weekly
API Providers (auto-sync wholesale), Service Editor (markup formulas), Payment Gateways (the lifeline), Orders dashboard (refunds + reships), Tickets (where customer love is won or lost), Mass Order (the feature your power-users will rely on), and the Admin Drip Feed scheduler. These are the panel's working surface area. Spend a week getting fluent in each.
The 4 set-and-forget
Email templates (set once, never touch), affiliate program (toggle on, pays for itself), child-panel pricing tiers (configure once per quarter), and the SEO/meta settings. These matter but reward almost no ongoing attention.
The 3 demo darlings that die in production
The built-in storefront blog (nobody reads panel blogs — ship content on a real CMS or skip), live-chat widgets (raises expectations you can't meet at scale — use the ticket system), and the in-panel news feed (no buyer scrolls a news feed; they buy, log out, leave).
The killer feature most panels miss: Mass Order
Mass Order lets a single buyer paste 50 URLs and apply a service across all of them in one transaction. Sounds boring. Is responsible for ~40% of revenue on every mature panel because agency buyers (the ones spending $500+/order) literally cannot use a panel without it. Enable it on day one.
Child panels: the feature that prints money
Once you have stable upstream and decent uptime, enable child panels. A child panel is a fully branded reseller panel under yours — your wholesale, their UI, their brand. You set the wholesale prices they buy at; they set retail. You get recurring revenue from sellers who would otherwise compete with you. Most $20k+/mo panels make half their money from 5–10 child panels. PerfectPanel's child-panel system is the most mature on the market — competitors are 18 months behind.