Shopify Flow Automation: Help Manage Your Shopify Store

Shopify Flow helps merchants automate tasks and processes in their stores and apps. This eCommerce automation solution helps merchants set up workflows that automate everything from marketing efforts to inventory management and customer service.

What is eCommerce automation?

Simply put, eCommerce automation solutions like Shopify Flow take care of the increased amount of repetitive tasks, complexity, and demands that come with business growth. These tasks and actions are converted to automatic processes. Even whole campaigns that can execute exactly how you want them without taking time away from what you want to do.

What is Shopify Flow?

With business growth, there will be less and less time to handle everything manually. Shopify Flow is a tool that automates mundane and repetitive tasks and helps merchants tackle any inefficiencies that arise within their systems as their business grows. Plus, Shopify Flow is easy to implement and use.  

Workflows will help merchants automate:

• Tagging and segmentation based on customer behaviour
• Personalisation for high-value customers
• Loyalty rewards and tracking
• Inventory management
• Product organisation and merchandising
• High-risk order detection and review
• Sales and promotions – easily set up your promotions for predetermined periods

There are other solutions out there, but Shopify Flow is the only one that is natively built into the platform and covers not just the store, but Shopify apps too.

Who benefits from it?

Everyone. Shopify Flow takes care of those manual and boring tasks, and gives you the ultimate resource back: time.

• Operation managers will have an easier time tracking inventory, taking care of shipping and adding new products.
• They can create workflows that automatically add items to collections based on the name, type, or other parameters.
• They won’t have to worry about the low stock, as you can employ workflows that will notify them whenever items fall below a specific value.
• Customer service teams can track and tag customers based on how much they ordered, what products they ordered, and how much they have spent.
• They can set up workflows that send messages to such customers.
• They never miss sending an invitation to a loyalty program, special discounts, or thank-you messages to customers.  
• You can flag and halt high-risk orders and notify your security team to review them.
• You can also set up reminders to your marketing teams whenever new products are added to the store, or let them know when inventory is low, so they slow down with advertising.

Instead of having to deal with ever-growing customer lists and orders, and with segmenting customers on your own, you can have all of that automated with the right solution.

How to use Shopify Flow

Currently, Shopify Flow is available for Shopify Plus merchants only. You can access it through your Shopify Admin and automate tasks in your shop and apps with triggers, conditions, and actions.

• Triggers are specific events that happen in your store on some app you’re using. For example, a customer adds items to the cart.
• Conditions are parameters that determine when certain actions will be performed. Basically, your workflow will not run actions unless these conditions are met.
• Actions are specific tasks that execute and make changes in the store or apps.

Shopify Flow templates

With Shopify Flow, you can start using workflows in minutes, thanks to numerous workflow templates to choose from. You can use the template as it is, or you can customise it to better fit your business operations.

You will find templates under Shopify Admin > Apps > Flow > Templates.

You will notice that many of these templates use triggers and actions located within specific Shopify apps. To use these triggers and actions, you will need that app in your store. Without the app installed, these triggers won’t work.

Whenever you are adding templates to your Flow, make sure to review it and change any contact information (e.g., email, Slack account, etc.) so that the messages reach the right people. The body of the message should resonate with your style and tone.

Among these templates, you will find solutions to:

• Automate your promotion: Use a template that sends a push notification after the customer has made a second order.
• Improve customer experience: Whenever a customer leaves a bad review, you can create a support ticket to quickly resolve the issue.
• Get at-risk customers back: If customers haven’t made any purchases in a while, send them emails to win them back.
• Track inventory levels: You can set up a workflow that will automatically create a task in Asana when inventory levels are low.

Shopify apps automation

Not all apps have triggers for Shopify Flow, but an increasing number of Shopify Plus developers are working hard on making their apps compatible with Flow. The number of apps that are compatible with Flow is growing every day.

Shopify Plus developers can use Shopify Flow to bring automation options directly to their Shopify apps. To do that, they will have to build connectors. These connectors are used to set up triggers and actions within the app and enable them for Shopify Merchants who are using their app already.

How to create your workflows

If you can’t find the right template to work with and wish to create your very own workflows, be aware that’s a bit more complex, but still doable.

When you open Shopify Flow in your Shopify Admin, go to Create Workflow. This will open a visual builder where you can add triggers, conditions, and actions, and then click on Save. You can preview the workflow before you enable it to your store to be sure everything’s running well.

You can also make your workflows operate with other automation tools:

• Checkout customisation by Shopify Scripts
• Scheduling/launching major events like seasonal sales with Launchpad

This will take a bit more knowledge to set up, so find trusted Shopify Plus developers who will create highly effective workflows for your business.

When in doubt, leave it to the professionals

Building your very own custom workflows is best left to Shopify Plus developers. They are familiar with the workflow best practices and guidelines, and know the best way to add triggers, conditions, and actions to your workflow and connect them with apps and other automation tools.