Running a Shopify store means a lot of small, repeat tasks. Each one takes a few minutes. Together they eat whole days. The good news: many of them follow the same steps every time, which makes them easy to automate.
Here are five you can take off your plate this month. Some you can set up yourself with Shopify Flow, Shopify’s free automation app. Others need a small custom automation that connects Shopify with the rest of your apps.
1. Tag and route orders
If someone on your team opens each order to check for things like rush shipping, wholesale customers, gift notes, or high-value carts, that can be automatic.
Set up rules that tag orders as they come in. Then use those tags to filter your order list, send a Slack message for orders that need a human, or push special orders to a separate fulfillment queue.
Start with: one rule for the order type your team checks most often.
2. Low-stock alerts
Running out of a best seller is painful. Checking stock by hand every day is tedious.
An automation can watch inventory and send an alert when a product drops below a level you choose. It can go to email, Slack, or straight into a reorder sheet for your supplier. You can also hide or mark products as “back soon” automatically when they sell out.
Start with: your top ten products and a simple threshold for each.
3. Review and follow-up requests
Asking happy customers for a review works, but only if you remember to ask. A post-purchase flow can send a request a set number of days after delivery. You can skip customers who opened a support ticket, so you don’t ask an unhappy buyer for five stars.
The same pattern works for reorder reminders on products people run out of, like coffee, supplements, or skincare.
Start with: one review request email, timed to arrive after the product does.
4. First replies to common support questions
“Where is my order?” “Can I change my address?” “Do you ship to Canada?” If the same questions fill your inbox every day, a website chatbot can answer them straight away, using your own policies and order data.
The key is a clean handoff. When the bot isn’t sure, or the customer is upset, it should pass the chat to a person with the full context, not loop forever.
Start with: list your ten most common questions and write the answer you’d want a customer to get.
5. The weekly numbers report
If someone spends Monday morning pulling sales, ad spend, and returns into a spreadsheet, that report can build itself. An automation can pull the numbers from Shopify and your other tools and send a short summary to your inbox or team chat every week.
Start with: the three numbers you actually look at every week. Add more later only if you use them.
A few tips before you start
- Write down the steps first. If you can’t describe the task on paper, it’s not ready to automate.
- Automate one thing at a time. Test it for a week before adding the next one.
- Check your apps. You may already pay for a tool that does this. You may also pay for two tools that overlap.
- Keep it on your accounts. Whoever sets it up, make sure the automations live in accounts you own.
If you’d like a hand, our Store clean-up covers all five, built custom so you don’t add another subscription. Or book a free 20-minute quick scan and tell us which chore you’d drop first.
