Shopify Flow: what it is and which automations save you time

What Shopify Flow is

Flow is an app made by Shopify and available on paid plans. You install it from the App Store and manage it from the admin. Each automation is a workflow built visually by connecting blocks.

Flow includes a template library with common use cases that you can turn on and adapt. It is a good way to get started and to understand how blocks fit together before building your own workflows.

Triggers, conditions and actions

Every workflow starts with a trigger: the event that sets it off. For example, an order being created or paid, a variant's inventory changing, a customer being created or Shopify finishing its risk analysis of an order. There are also scheduled triggers, which run the workflow at a set time or on a recurring basis.

Next come the conditions, which check order, customer or product data: amount, country, tags, shipping method, products included. They can be combined with "and" and "or". Finally, the actions: add or remove tags, send an internal email, hide a product, hold an order's fulfillment, update metafields or send an HTTP request to another system.

Many apps add their own triggers and actions to Flow. That way you can, for example, send data to your email marketing tool when a customer meets a condition, without connecting anything by hand.

Example: tagging orders

Tags are the simplest way to classify orders so the team can filter them. With Flow you can tag every order automatically based on rules someone applies by eye today.

The workflow is straightforward: an order created trigger, a condition on the data you care about and an add tags action. Then, in the admin order list, you filter by that tag and save the view so the team always has it at hand. Use consistent tag names in a fixed format, because tags are free text and a difference in capitalization or a hyphen is enough to break a filter.

• International orders, based on the shipping country.
• Orders containing a specific product that needs special preparation.
• Orders with express shipping or in-store pickup.
• A customer's first order, so you can include a small extra in the package.

Example: low stock alerts

With the inventory quantity changed trigger and a condition comparing the quantity to a threshold, Flow can send you an internal email or a message when a product drops below a certain level. That way you restock before it sells out.

It is a good idea for the condition to also check that the previous quantity was above the threshold, so the alert fires only once and not with every sale after that. If the threshold varies by product, store it in a metafield and compare against it in the condition.

Example: VIP customers

When an order is created or paid, Flow can check that customer's total spend or number of orders and, if it exceeds the criteria you define, add a VIP customer tag.

That tag can then be used to build customer segments, offer exclusive discounts, show different content in the store or alert the support team to prioritize their requests.

If the criteria can stop being met, for example purchases in the last twelve months, pair this workflow with a scheduled one that regularly reviews tagged customers and removes the tag when it no longer applies.

Example: risky orders

Shopify analyzes the fraud risk of orders. With the order risk analyzed trigger you can act based on the level: if it is high, tag the order, hold its fulfillment and send an alert to the person who reviews it.

That way no questionable order leaves the warehouse by mistake. The final decision to cancel or accept is still made by a person, but it arrives with the information at hand and at the right moment.

Best practices

Start with small workflows that each have a single job. Give them clear names, document which tags they create and check Flow's run history to confirm they trigger when they should. Before turning on one that modifies orders or products, test it with test orders.

Avoid having several workflows act on the same data with conflicting rules, for example one that adds a tag and another that removes it. The more workflows you have, the more this order matters.

When you need a custom integration

Flow is very useful for rules inside Shopify and for alerts or simple data sends to other systems. It falls short when you need two-way data sync with an ERP or a warehouse system, to transform complex data structures, to handle retries and errors reliably or to process large volumes dependably.

In those cases the right approach is a custom app or an integration built on the Shopify API, which can coexist with Flow for the simple parts. At Weblineo we build this kind of integration as part of our Shopify development and Shopify Plus projects.