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Getting started with Shopify Flow

Shopify Flow is a free app that can help you create and run automated workflows in your Shopify admin. With automated workflows, you can eliminate toilsome and repetitive tasks, reduce the risk of human error, and dedicate more time to the strategic work of running your business.

Shopify Flow uses a drag-and-drop canvas to let you place 3 different kinds of steps, known as triggers, conditions, and actions into a sequence called a workflow, and customize how they relate to each other:

  1. Triggers are events that start a workflow.
  2. Conditions define what data is evaluated when determining how a workflow should proceed.
  3. Actions are the things that you want the workflow to do, such as make changes to your store or send a notification, depending on whether or not the previous conditions were met.

For example, you want to keep track of any customers that spend over $500 in a single order by tagging them as VIPs. Rather than manually checking each order to determine if the order meets your VIP criteria, you can have Shopify Flow analyze each order when they're placed and tag the customer for you. You can set up this task in the following way:

  1. Trigger: Start the workflow with the Order created trigger. This means that whenever a new order is created, the workflow starts by checking the order information.
  2. Conditions: Determine whether the order meets or exceeds the minimum spend criteria of $500.
  3. Actions: If the condition is met, then the Add customer tags action can apply your custom VIP tag. If the condition isn't met, then the workflow does nothing.

Every step in a workflow connects to other steps that determine which actions are taken, and in what order. All workflows start with a trigger step, and then connect to condition or action steps based on how you want your workflow to function.

Building workflows can seem intimidating and technical at first, but you can use these guides to help you understand how workflows operate and get inspiration for which tasks you might want to automate to help you run your business.

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