Key Highlights
- Discover how Shopify Flow automates repetitive eCommerce tasks, enhancing efficiency.
- Learn about its drag-and-drop interface for creating workflows and integrating apps.
- Explore use cases like inventory management, customer segmentation, and fraud prevention.
- Understand the benefits of saving time, reducing errors, and scaling with ease.
- Review potential drawbacks such as language restrictions and app compatibility issues.
Introduction
Running a growing eCommerce store comes with its own set of challenges. As your Shopify store scales, repetitive tasks can quickly pile up, draining your team’s time and resources. Shopify Flow offers a solution by automating these manual processes, freeing up your team to focus on driving business growth. In this article, we’ll explore how Shopify Flow can enhance efficiency and support your store’s success.
What is Shopify Flow?
Shopify Flow allows merchants to automate tasks, processes, and campaigns, helping them achieve more in less time. Using a drag-and-drop interface, workflows can be created for orders, customers, or products directly from the Shopify Admin. It integrates with installed apps to trigger actions, transfer data, and can even run workflows retroactively. As for pricing, Shopify Flow is completely free! Initially exclusive to Shopify Plus users, it can now be integrated into any store on Shopify, Advanced, or Shopify Plus plans. Currently, Shopify Flow is only available in English.
How does Shopify Flow work?
Workflows are developed through a visual drag-and-drop interface. They are made up of three elements:
- Triggers: This is the event that starts the workflow.
- Condition: the principle that determines whether an action takes place or not.
- Action: The outcome that occurs when the condition is fulfilled.
Shopify Flow enables users to create tailored automation solutions with various triggers, such as when an order is placed, a collection is added, or a customer account is activated. Users can set one or more conditions and choose from a wide range of actions. Recent enhancements include access to any field in the API, the addition of OR logic in conditions, and the introduction of Wait actions, which allow merchants to delay actions in workflows for a predetermined period. Flexibility remains one of its key benefits.
Shopify Flow offers ready-made workflow templates for merchants unsure where to start, based on common issues faced by e-merchants. These templates can be customized to suit individual needs. To enable app integration, Shopify Flow uses Connectors, which allow triggers based on app data or actions within the app. Apps with built-in connectors can be seamlessly integrated into Shopify Flow.
What can Shopify Flow be used for?
Let’s examine the situations and examples where this platform is most effective, especially if your main objectives are to save time and enhance efficiency.
Inventory Management
Shopify Flow prevents stock-related disappointments by automatically hiding, pausing, or reactivating products based on inventory levels. It can also alert the fulfillment team when stock needs replenishing.Here’s an example of how this workflow might function:
- Trigger: stock quantity changes
- Condition 1: verify whether the quantity is 10 or fewer
- Condition 2: check if quantity is 0
- Step for condition 1: email the fulfillment team.
- Action for condition 2: hide product
Shopify Flow works with applications like Slack to automate tasks related to inventory management.
Merchandising
The platform offers valuable assistance in enhancing your store’s merchandising process. When you introduce new products, Shopify Flow can assign tags according to their title, SKU, variants, or category, and place them into the relevant collections.
Customer Segmentation
Shopify Flow helps form customer segments by tagging visitors based on total orders, spending, cancellations, order history, email, location, and sales channels. These tags enable targeted marketing campaigns and assist customer service teams, saving time and improving communication.
Loyalty and retention activities
Shopify Flow automates loyalty campaigns by tagging customers based on order amount, frequency, or lifetime spending. You can send personalized emails to express gratitude, offer discounts, or invite participation in loyalty programs like Loyalty Lion. If you utilize a loyalty program like Loyalty Lion, integrate it with Flow to automate actions through the application. Additionally, you can automate upselling campaigns to encourage customers to return to your store. Create a workflow that incorporates a Wait after a designated time following the purchase, communication is initiated with special offers aimed at re-engaging the customer.
Push notifications and text messages can be used to automatically reconnect with customers.
Product Reviews
Shopify Flow simplifies managing product reviews by integrating with apps like Yotpo.
- Reward customers with points for submitting reviews.
- Generate support tickets for negative reviews to resolve concerns quickly.
- Delay review requests for international customers until orders arrive.
Fraud Prevention
Shopify Flow can help prevent recognized fraudsters from making purchases, cancel orders with dubious addresses, and pinpoint orders that appear to be high-risk. Automation is configured to cancel orders from recognized malicious sources and notify your team when this occurs.You can create workflows that activate once orders have been assessed for risk. These workflows will evaluate the risk levels and cancel orders if they are deemed high, along with considering other indicators that might suggest the order is suspicious.
Benefits and Drawbacks of Shopify Flow
Every coin has two sides, so let’s explore both the advantages and disadvantages of Shopify Flow.
Benefits
- Saves Time: Shopify Flow automates time-consuming tasks, allowing teams to focus on critical responsibilities, especially during busy sales periods. It enhances efficiency, improves store performance, and boosts employee satisfaction.
- Customizable: Shopify Flow offers extensive flexibility, enabling users to create workflows for almost any task using available Shopify data. There are no limits on conditions and actions, making automation highly versatile.
- Eliminates Human Error: Automation reduces the risk of mistakes inherent in manual, repetitive tasks, ensuring consistent and accurate results.
- Ideal for Expanding Companies: As businesses grow, tasks become more complex. Shopify Flow handles increasing volumes of routine work, scales seamlessly, and helps manage the pressures of expansion.
Drawbacks
- Admin Customer Limit: Store owners can only select up to 50 customers at a time from the Admin panel, making segmentation tedious for businesses with large customer bases.
- Instability: Some users report occasional outages or loading issues, though Shopify is actively working to improve reliability.
- Language Restriction: Shopify Flow is available only in English, posing challenges for non-English-speaking businesses.
- Limited App Compatibility: Not all apps integrate with Flow (e.g., Judge.me reviews app). However, compatibility is expected to improve as Flow expands to more merchants.
Conclusion
Shopify Flow clearly has the potential to be an extremely useful tool. Recent upgrades to the app, including access to any field in the API, Wait actions, and OR logic in conditions, have significantly enhanced the flexibility for merchants to create workflows. Now accessible to nearly all Shopify merchants, we can expect Shopify Flow to evolve even more to completely address user needs. How do you plan to utilize Shopify Flow?
