Shopify Flow is a great free app from Shopify that's now included on all plans. Its designed to help you run your business more efficiently with 'if this then that' type scenarios so you can focus your time on other things rather than lots of manual work!
You might want to automate inventory tasks like reordering, hiding products and restocking, or automatiucally tag customers or orders or even manage fraud concerns. You can even connect your apps together to complete even more jobs. It works with tags, metafields, fulfillment, B2B, Slack, Google Sheets, and more.
What is Flow and what does it actually do?
Shopify Flow allows you to create custom automations for unique workflows for your store. This means that Flow monitors your store for events, and lets you create an automated sequence of actions that are taken in response.
To create these automations, you build a workflow using components called triggers, conditions, and actions.
| Workflow component | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | A trigger is an event that starts a workflow, and can be something that happens in your store or in an app. | A new order is created in your store. |
| Condition | A condition determines whether an action is taken, based on the conditions that you set. | A condition is set to check whether the total amount paid for the order is over £200. |
| Action | An action is a change that's made to your store or in an app if the condition is met. | If the total amount paid for the order is over £200, then a tag is added to the account of the customer who placed the order. |
The best place to start is to look at the Shopify Flow template library which provides over 150 templates that help demonstrate how to use Flow. This includes Flows for these areas of your business:
- Buyer experience
- Customers
- Fulfillment
- Inventory and merch
- Loyalty
- Orders
- Promotions
- Risk
- B2B
- Payment reminders
Just install the app from the Shopify app store, browse the template library before installing an existing template. You can then make specific amends, add additions and tailor this exactly to meet your needs before making this 'active' (and testing it works as required). You can even start from scratch and build your own.
Watch the video below to learn more and get in touch if you need help in setting up or tailoring a Flow to meet your requirements.
