Shopify Flow reference

Refer to these reference pages if you need more information on the components that make up a workflow.

Steps

Triggers

Triggers are events that start workflows. A trigger can an internal event in Shopify, a specific time and date, or an external event within a third-party application. For each trigger, there is a list of related actions that you can use in your workflow.

Conditions

Conditions start actions only when certain conditions are met. Conditions are like the start of an if-then statement. They can check against the properties of the trigger event as well as properties of objects that are involved in the event, such as orders, products, and customers.

Actions

Actions are tasks that can make changes in your Shopify store or in apps, or affect the data in a workflow. Actions can also retrieve data from your store, send emails and Slack messages, and make HTTP webhook calls to external services.

Actions can only affect data that has been imported into the workflow. A trigger or a Get action imports certain data from your store into a workflow, which is then used in the actions that follow it. The action used in a workflow must share context with the data in the workflow, which means that the data that the action requires to work is present in the workflow. If you select an action that doesn't share context with your selected trigger or the data from a Get action, then the workflow doesn't run and an error message is displayed.

For example, you create a workflow that starts with the Customer created trigger. This trigger imports customer data into the workflow. You follow that trigger with the Add order tags action. The Add order tags action works with order data, not customer data, resulting in a context mismatch error.

Connectors

Connectors let you use specific apps to create triggers based on information from the app, or to create an action that uses an app. When you use a trigger, the app sends data to Flow. When you use an action, Flow sends information to the app.

HTTP requests

Any workflow can include an action that sends an HTTP request to connect your workflow to a web server or URL.

Review the triggers and actions if you're not sure which triggers and actions you can use together in a workflow.

Important concepts and features

Metafields

Metafields are custom fields that you can use to add extra information to your products, customers, orders, and other objects in your store. Metafields can be used to store information that isn't included in the default fields of an object. For example, you can use metafields to store information about a product's manufacturer, a customer's birthday, or an order's delivery date.

Liquid Variables

Variables are placeholders that refer to information that's added when a workflow runs. They can describe the attributes of the customers, orders, and products that are involved in your workflows. For example, there are variables for the order number, order price, and customer name.

Liquid variables are advanced variables that allow for iteration or conditional content. For example, you can use liquid variables to create messages that contain details, such as the product title, SKU, price, and quantity for each line item in an order, and save your recipients from having to look up this information.

Messages

Any workflow can include an action that sends an email from the address flow@shopify.com to the recipients that you specify. Variables can be used to personalize emails or to add detail.

Data

Learn more about how to view your store data, so that you can build workflows in Shopify Flow that make use of it.

Protected data

Learn about personally identifiable information (PII) and how to handle it securely.

In this section

Examples

Review some examples of workflows that you can use in Shopify Flow.

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