Shopify Flow Monitoring and Workflow Updates: New Ways to Automate

Good to Great isn’t just a best-selling book. It’s also a perfect way to describe how Shopify is constantly improving upon products already helping brands like yours grow faster. If you’re using Shopify Flow to put aspects of your business on autopilot you've already positioned yourself to save hundreds of hours a year, accelerate sales, and to do more with less. Today, we’re proud to announce several key innovations that will allow you to do even more with Flow and scale faster …

by Anthony Kentris

Half of you already have a unique competitive advantage.

You’re saving hundreds of hours a year, preventing thousands of dollars of fraud, and notching million-dollar sales days by using an innovative new ecommerce automation tool …

That is now capable of doing even more.

Click here to talk with sales about Shopify plans for enterprises

It’s a reality for hundreds of ecommerce brands using Shopify Flow — an automation platform that allows merchants to make room for creativity and experimentation by offloading time-consuming tasks.

With just a few clicks and without any coding, brands are doing more with less by putting aspects of their business operations on autopilot.

Today, we’re proud to announce key innovations that will allow you to do even more with Shopify Flow …

What’s New?

The new monitoring and workflow editor updates allow brands to:

Better track how your automated workflows are performing and gain insights into behavior
More effectively troubleshoot and edit workflows to improve performance
Automate new processes with enhanced workflow editor functionality like new triggers and actions

We’re constantly working to evolve Shopify Flow so it can do more for your business. These improvements will help you better use and understand automation to get more done with fewer resources.

Innovation 1: Detailed Workflow Monitoring

You measure employee performance, right?

Then you ought to be able to monitor and check the performance of the automated workflows doing the work you or your employees once did.

The new monitoring features embedded in Flow provide added visibility into workflow performance and behavior. With enhanced workflow monitoring capabilities, it's easy to keep a pulse on how Shopify Flow is working for your business:

1. Track how workflows are performing at a glance

Easily track recent workflow results and see what actions Flow has taken on objects within your store from the workflow detail page.

2. View a list of all workflow runs for easy troubleshooting

View workflows in a list format so you can filter those that are in progress, completed, or failed so you may take corrective measures if necessary:

3. Gain visibility into individual workflow behavior to dial in on issues

Click into an individual workflow run to see the logic behind specific actions it has taken (or not taken) see where and why a workflow isn’t performing as expected:

“Since launch, Flow has already automated millions of actions for our merchants,” says Katie Cerar, Shopify Flow’s product manager.

And now with detailed monitoring, we’ve added transparency into your automation strategy so you can trust Flow is working as you expected.

Innovation 2: New Ways to Automate

Shopify Flow is already positioning merchants to operate more efficiently and effectively while simultaneously offering a better customer experience. We've seen thousands of creative workflows and compiled a list of the [best workflow templates you can download] and start using today.

It’s a fantastic way to put portions of your business on autopilot and double down on growth, but it’s only the beginning. The improvements we’ve made to Shopify Flow open brand new possibilities to creatively add advanced automated workflows, which you can download directly here.

We’ve added new triggers, actions, and workflow editor functionality so you can automate even more processes.

1. Draft order created trigger and draft order actions

One of our most requested triggers is now available — Flow can now start a workflow when a draft order is created with the draft order trigger.

For example, when a draft order is entered manually or by a customer via the wholesale channel, you can notify your customer service team to add shipping fees, review, and collect payment on the order.

We’ve also added the ability to add or remove draft order tags and update draft order notes. In this example, the workflow also adds tags to the draft order for organization and reporting purposes as well as updating the draft order note so those viewing the order are aware of where it’s at in the order process.

Want to use this workflow in your store?

Download workflow

Need a reminder on how to import workflows? Read the Help Center documentation.

2. Update customer note action

Flow’s enhanced editor functionality now also positions merchants to end a particular workflow with an action that replaces the current customer note with your specified note. As always, you can include liquid variables — or dynamic information from your store — for added workflow customization.

This workflow only runs when an order has been paid and the customer has placed two or more orders with you. With each order, the customer note is updated with valuable buyer data such as their amount of orders placed, average order value, and lifetime spend.

A “repeat purchaser” tag is also added for segmentation and reporting for targeted communications or promotions (like a Facebook custom audience or email newsletter list).

Want to use this workflow in your store?

Download workflow

3. Any, all, or none condition functionality

For conditions that have a list of items to run through like fulfillments or line items — products in an order — this new feature allows you to specify that a condition must be true on “any”, “all”, or “none” of the items in the list for your workflow to run.

For instance, using this new feature you could automate the segmentation of customers by their purchasing behavior, allowing you to offer different pricing or marketing campaigns based on their customer group.

If none of the line items of an order are discounted the customer is tagged as a “full price customer”
If any of the line items on the order are discounted, the customer is tagged as a “discount customer”
If a “full price” customer uses a discount or a “discount customer” pays full price, the third part of the workflow removes the prior customer tag and adds a “mixed customer” tag

Want to use this workflow in your store?

Download workflow

The Automated Edge

If you’ve already installed Flow and want to begin using the next generation workflows we’ve outlined, you can get started right away by downloading the templates above and importing them into your store.

And starting today, monitoring and insights can be viewed individually on the workflow detail page. Explore Flow in your store.

But if you haven’t yet installed Flow here’s something crucial to consider about your peers and competitors. More than half of all merchants are using Flow’s do-it-yourself visual workflow builder and have …

Offloaded 130 million decisions and 20 million tasks.

Here’s how real people are using the tool to be significantly more productive:

Don’t get bogged down with tedious, manual backend chores while your peers and competitors are narrowly focused on scaling rapidly, gaining market share, and building their businesses for the long term.

Free your time for what matters most.

Install Shopify Flow