The back-office work you can stop doing by hand.

What Flow is, and what it costs

Flow is Shopify's own automation app. You pick a trigger from the events your store already emits, add conditions, and choose actions from what Shopify and your installed apps expose. It runs on Shopify's side, so nothing loads on your storefront and nothing needs a server.

It is free on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans. Two things are gated: the Send HTTP Request action, which lets a workflow call an external API, needs Grow or above, and tasks created by custom partner apps need Plus. Usage limits scale with your plan's API limits, which only matters if you build something that fires on every cart update.

If you are on Basic and need to reach an outside system, a connector app in Flow (many apps expose their own triggers and actions) or a MESA or Zapier workflow does the job.

The twelve workflows to build first

Ordered roughly by money saved per hour spent building.

• Hold high-risk orders. Trigger on order risk analysed; if the risk level is high, hold fulfilment, tag review, and notify whoever checks. Fraudulent orders get fulfilled because nobody looked in time.
• Tag COD orders for confirmation. Trigger on order created; if the gateway is cash on delivery, tag cod-confirm and, through your WhatsApp or SMS app's connector, send the confirmation message. This is the automation behind the RTO reductions that actually stick.
• Cancel unpaid orders after a window. Pending payment orders older than a set number of hours get cancelled and their inventory released, so a stuck UPI attempt does not hold a size-M for a day.
• Flag serial returners. Trigger on return request; count returns against orders for that customer; past a threshold, tag the customer for manual review and switch them to store credit only. The returns guide explains why this beats a stricter policy for everyone.
• Low stock alerts. Trigger on inventory quantity changed; below a threshold per product, email or Slack the person who reorders. Set the threshold from lead time, not from a round number.
• Unpublish sold-out products from collections. Or add a sold-out tag the theme uses to push them to the end, and reverse it when stock returns. Cheap, and it keeps collection pages from starting with three greyed-out cards.
• Tag customers by value. On order paid, if lifetime spend crosses a tier, tag vip or tier-2. Every other tool, from Klaviyo segments to support priority, can read a tag.
• Tag first orders and repeat orders. A first-order tag drives the welcome series and the post-purchase survey; the repeat tag drives reviews requests and referral asks. Tags are the cheapest segmentation you will ever build.
• Attribute orders by discount code. Tag orders with the code used, or with the campaign the code belongs to, so the finance export shows which promotion the discount came from without a lookup.
• Notify on refund or chargeback. A message to the owner the moment a refund over a threshold is issued or a chargeback opens. Silence here is how a bad support week goes unnoticed.
• Delay review requests until delivery. Trigger on fulfilment delivered, wait the number of days your product needs, then hand off to the reviews app. Review requests sent on dispatch collect reviews of the courier.
• Approve B2B company requests by rule. If you run native B2B, auto-approve requests that meet criteria, tag the rest for a human.

Building them so they stay correct

• One workflow, one job. A workflow named "Order created: everything" grows until nobody dares edit it. Small workflows with descriptive names are the whole maintenance strategy.
• Tags are state, so name them like it. A prefix per domain (risk:, cod:, tier:) and a document that lists what each one means and which workflow sets it.
• Make actions safe to repeat. Triggers can fire more than once for the same object. Adding a tag twice is harmless; sending a WhatsApp message twice is not. Check for the tag before sending.
• Test with the run log, not with a real customer. Flow records every run with the data it saw. Create a test order, watch it flow, then enable for real.
• Add the workflow to the store's runbook the same day you turn it on. Flow logic is invisible from the theme, the apps and the code, which means the next developer will not find it until something they change breaks it.
• Review the list quarterly. Disable what no longer applies. A workflow for a 2025 campaign still tagging orders is noise in every report.

Where Flow stops and something else starts

• Anything that needs to change the storefront or the cart. Flow acts after events happen. Cart and checkout logic is Functions.
• Systems with no connector. If the app or your ERP does not expose Flow actions, you need Send HTTP Request (Grow and above) or an integration tool in the middle.
• Heavy data work. Flow can loop over lists and fetch data, but a workflow that walks every product nightly is a script, and it should be one.
• Multi-step human approval. Flow can tag and notify; it does not model "manager, then finance". That is an app or a build.

Common mistakes

• Never opening it. Most stores we audit have Flow installed and zero workflows, while paying for two apps that do what three workflows would.
• Automating a process that was never defined. If nobody can say what happens to a high-risk order today, write that down first and automate second.
• Letting agencies leave undocumented workflows behind. Ask for the list at handover. It belongs in the same place as the theme's changelog.
• Using tags without a naming scheme. After a year the customer tag list is a museum.

FAQ