Shopify Flow: a Game Changer for Any Shopify Business Owner

As your Shopify store grows and your ambitions, team, and product expand, you may find yourself and your team overwhelmed by a flood of repetitive tasks. These tasks not only feel monotonous but can also drain the time and talents of your team. How can your business thrive if valuable time is consumed by mundane activities?

This is where Shopify Flow steps in. This tool takes over the repetitive, manual tasks, freeing you and your team to focus on activities that drive growth and innovation. In this article, you’ll discover everything you need to know about Shopify Flow and how it can benefit your business.

What is Shopify Flow?

Shopify Flow is an app that empowers merchants to automate a wide range of tasks, processes, and campaigns, allowing them to accomplish more in less time. Workflows are created using a simple drag-and-drop system and can be applied to various activities within your Shopify store. Shopify Flow integrates with installed apps, enabling them to perform actions and exchange data as part of the process.

You can also create workflows directly from your Shopify Admin. This allows for automation on individual or multiple orders, draft orders, customers, or products. Additionally, this feature allows users to run workflows retroactively.

And the best part? Shopify Flow is completely free! Once exclusive to Shopify Plus merchants, Shopify Flow is now available to stores on the Shopify, Advanced, or Shopify Plus plans. Currently, Shopify Flow is only available in English.

How Does Shopify Flow Work?

Workflows in Shopify Flow are built using a visual drag-and-drop builder, consisting of three components:

  • Trigger: The event that initiates the workflow.
  • Condition: The rule that determines whether an action will occur.
  • Action: The result that happens when the condition is met.

Shopify Flow offers users the flexibility to create custom automations, with a variety of triggers to choose from, such as an order being placed, a collection being added, or a customer account being enabled. You can then set one or multiple conditions and select from a range of associated actions.

Recent updates have expanded the platform’s capabilities, including access to any field in the API and the introduction of OR logic in conditions, enhancing its flexibility. Furthermore, the introduction of Wait actions allows merchants to delay actions for a set period, offering even greater control over workflow timing.

What Can Shopify Flow Be Used For?

Inventory Management

Nothing frustrates customers more than discovering that a product they love is out of stock. Shopify Flow can help prevent this by automatically hiding, pausing, and republishing items based on their stock levels. It can also send instant notifications to your fulfillment team when stock needs to be reordered.

Merchandising

Shopify Flow can streamline your store’s merchandising process. When new products are added, Flow can automatically assign tags based on their title, SKU, variants, or type, and add them to the appropriate collections.

Customer Segmentation

Shopify Flow is an excellent tool for creating customer segments. Workflows can be set up to identify, track, and tag visitors to your store based on various parameters, such as total orders, total spend, order cancellations, and more.

Loyalty and Retention Activities

Shopify Flow can automate campaigns aimed at driving customer loyalty and retention. For example, you can create a workflow triggered by an order, with conditions based on order value or lifetime value, and then send personalized emails to encourage repeat purchases or participation in a loyalty program.

Product Reviews

Shopify Flow can also optimize your product review process. By connecting with apps like Yotpo, you can reward customers for leaving reviews or track negative reviews to improve customer service.

Fraud Prevention

Protecting your store from fraud is crucial. Shopify Flow can automatically block known fraudsters, cancel suspicious orders, and identify potentially risky orders, saving your team from manually sifting through orders.

Success Stories with Shopify Flow

Many merchants are already reaping the benefits of Shopify Flow. For instance, Cozykids, a children’s store, migrated to Shopify Plus and used Shopify Flow to automate stock management and customer engagement for out-of-stock products. This has allowed them to reduce human error and free up time for more critical business tasks.

Benefits and Drawbacks of Shopify Flow

Benefits:

  • Time-Saving: By automating routine tasks, Shopify Flow frees up time for you and your team to focus on more important activities, particularly during busy sales periods.
  • Customizable: The high degree of customization allows you to build workflows tailored to your specific needs.
  • Error Reduction: Automation helps eliminate human error, ensuring tasks are consistently completed accurately.
  • Scalable: As your business grows, Shopify Flow can scale with you, handling increasingly complex tasks.

Drawbacks:

  • Customer Selection Limit: There’s a limit on the number of customers you can select from your Admin Customer List when running a workflow, which can be frustrating for larger stores.
  • Instability: Some users have reported occasional instability with the app, though Shopify is continuously working on improvements.
  • Language Limitation: Shopify Flow is only available in English, which might pose challenges for non-English speaking merchants.
  • App Compatibility: Not all apps are compatible with Shopify Flow, although more are expected to become integrated over time.

Sending Text Messages with Shopify Flow

Most Shopify Flow instances send notifications via email, but there is a way to leverage SMS with Shopify Flow using HookSMS. HookSMS allows you to create flexible workflows that connect seamlessly with your current Shopify Flow structure. Try it today for free!