Shopify Flow Automation: 10 Workflows Every Store Should Run

Every Shopify store has jobs that someone does by hand: tagging wholesale customers, holding risky orders, emailing the warehouse when stock runs low, hiding sold-out products, chasing failed subscription payments. Each one takes a few minutes. Together they eat hours every week, and they get skipped when the team is busy.

Shopify Flow is Shopify's own automation app, and it handles most of these jobs for free. This guide explains how Flow works, what each plan can do, 10 workflows we recommend to most stores, and how to build and test them safely. Everything here is based on Shopify's Help Center and product updates, checked on October 27, 2026. Shopify changes Flow often, so confirm details in the Shopify Flow documentation before you build.

What is Shopify Flow?

Shopify Flow is a free app that automates tasks and processes inside your store and across your apps. You build a workflow once, and Flow runs it every time the event you picked happens. According to the Shopify Help Center, Flow is available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans. Staff need Flow permissions to view or edit workflows.

Flow is not a marketing email tool and it is not a replacement for custom development. It is the glue between events in your store (an order is paid, stock runs out, a customer joins a segment) and the actions your team would otherwise do manually.

How a Flow workflow works

Every workflow has three parts:

• Trigger: the event that starts the workflow. Shopify's trigger reference includes Order created, Order paid, Order fulfilled, Order risk analyzed, Customer created, Customer joined segment, Customer abandons checkout, Product variant out of stock, Product variant back in stock, Inventory quantity changed, Refund created, Return requested, Subscription billing attempt failure, Workflow error occurred and Scheduled time (hourly, daily, weekly or monthly).
• Condition: an optional check that decides whether to continue, such as "order total is over $500" or "customer has the tag wholesale".
• Action: what Flow does. The action reference lists more than 100, including add or remove tags, hold a fulfillment order, publish or unpublish a product, update a metafield, send an internal email, wait, run code, send an Admin API request and send an HTTP request to another service.

What Shopify Flow can do on each plan

Flow itself is free, but a few capabilities depend on your plan. This is what the Flow Help Center page lists:

The Send HTTP request action matters if you want Flow to talk to an ERP, a warehouse system or any service that has no Flow connector. If you are weighing an upgrade for this or other reasons, our Shopify vs Shopify Plus guide covers the full plan comparison.

10 Shopify Flow workflows worth setting up

These use triggers and actions that exist in Flow today. Many are also available as ready-made templates in the Flow app, so you can start from a template and adjust the conditions.

1. Hold and review high-risk orders

Order risk analyzed → risk level is high → Hold fulfillment order, Add order tags and Send internal email to whoever reviews fraud. This stops risky orders from shipping before a person has looked at them.

2. Tag VIP customers automatically

Order paid → customer's total spent is above your VIP threshold → Add customer tags (for example "VIP"). Use the tag for segments, discounts, priority support or a different shipping rule.

3. Low stock alerts

Inventory quantity changed → quantity drops below your reorder point → Send internal email to purchasing with the product and variant. Add a tag or metafield so you do not send the same alert twice.

4. Hide sold-out products and bring them back

Product variant out of stock → all variants are out → Unpublish product or change its status. Pair it with a Product variant back in stock workflow that runs Publish product so items return without anyone remembering.

5. Mark first orders and repeat buyers

Order created → customer's number of orders equals 1 → Add order tags "first-order". Your team can add an insert or a thank-you note at packing, and you can report on new versus returning revenue.

6. Route wholesale and B2B customers

Customer created → the customer's tags or note show a trade signup → Add customer tags and Send internal email to sales. On Shopify's B2B features, Flow also has company and catalog actions such as Add catalog to company location.

7. Flag high-value abandoned checkouts for sales

Customer abandons checkout → cart value is above a threshold → Send internal email to a sales rep. Leave the standard recovery emails to Shopify Messaging or your email platform, and use Flow for the cases where a person should follow up.

8. Alert customer service on returns and refunds

Return requested or Refund created → Add order tags and notify the support inbox. Tags make it easy to spot products with a high return rate.

9. Chase failed subscription payments

Subscription billing attempt failure → Add customer tags "payment-failed" and Send internal email, so the team can reach out before the subscriber churns.

10. Watch your workflows

Workflow error occurred → Send internal email to the store owner or developer. When a workflow breaks silently, the jobs above stop without anyone noticing. This one is cheap insurance.

A Scheduled time trigger can also run daily or weekly jobs, such as pulling orders with Get order data, totalling them with Sum or Count, and emailing a summary.

Building workflows with Sidekick

You no longer have to build every workflow by hand. According to Shopify's guide to creating workflows, Sidekick, Shopify's AI assistant, can generate a workflow from a plain-language description on desktop. Generated workflows are saved as inactive and tagged "sidekick", so you review and test them before turning them on. In its December 2025 Flow update, Shopify said Sidekick can also use actions from third-party apps such as Klaviyo and ShipStation, and described the speed-up as "what took 30 minutes now takes three".

A good prompt names the trigger, the condition and the action: "When an order is paid and the customer has spent more than $1,000 in total, add the tag VIP to the customer." Then open the workflow and check every condition before you activate it.

How to test workflows and avoid common mistakes

• Use test runs. Shopify's 2025 update added a test run preview that shows how a workflow would behave with sample data and stops before changing anything in your store.
• Pick the right trigger. Orders and draft orders are separate in Flow, and some order fields are filled in after the order is created. Shopify recommends Order risk analyzed rather than Order created for risk checks.
• Do not expect instant results. Shopify says workflows run as soon as possible, with no defined completion time. Do not build anything that depends on a workflow finishing within seconds.
• Watch large tag lists. The Help Center notes that tag conditions might not work as expected when a resource has more than 250 tags.
• Know how to stop a bad workflow. You can cancel failing runs one by one or in bulk, and Shopify says cancelled runs do not count against Flow's operation limits.
• Name and document workflows. Write down what each workflow does and who owns it. Six months later, nobody remembers why a product keeps unpublishing itself.

When you need more than Flow

Flow covers most day-to-day automation. You will need more when the logic has to run inside checkout, when you sync large volumes of data with an ERP or 3PL, or when you want AI to make decisions such as triaging support tickets or writing product copy. That is where Shopify Functions, custom apps and AI agents come in. Our guide to AI marketing automation for ecommerce and AI agents for business explain those options.

Startup Slang builds Shopify stores, migrations and automations for brands in Toronto, Montreal and beyond. If you want a second pair of eyes on your workflows, or automation that goes past what Flow can do, see our Shopify agency services and AI automation work, or get in touch.

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