Shopify Flow is Shopify's own automation tool. It was a Plus-only feature until July 2023 and is now free on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. A meaningful number of stores pay a third-party automation app for workflows Flow handles natively.
Flow works on triggers, conditions and actions. It will not pause your advertising and it will not reorder your stock. What it will do is put information in front of a person before a problem becomes expensive rather than a fortnight afterwards, and that is most of the value at this size.
Install it from the App Store, then build these six in order of return.
1. Variant-level low stock alert
The single highest-return workflow in this document. Shopify's built-in low stock notification is useful; this gives you control over the threshold and, critically, tells you which variant.
- Trigger — Inventory quantity changed
- Condition — Product tag equals
a-tierand inventory quantity is less than or equal to your threshold - Action — Send internal email, or send Slack message
Tag your top twenty products a-tier first. Without the tag condition the workflow fires constantly on your long tail and you will stop reading the alerts within a week, which is worse than having no alert.
Set the threshold to the variant's reorder point from Guide 03 if you have calculated one. A single global threshold is a reasonable starting position if you have not.
2. Out-of-stock notification with advertising context
Trigger — Inventory quantity changed Condition — Inventory quantity is less than or equal to 0 and product tag equals paid-ads Action — Send internal email
Tag every product currently featuring in paid advertising with paid-ads. When one goes to zero, you find out immediately rather than at the end of the week.
This does not stop the spend. It tells a person that spend is now running against something unavailable, which is the necessary first step and the one most stores skip. Guide 04 covers what each channel does and does not handle on its own.
3. Flag products with no SKU
Trigger — Product created Condition — Variant SKU is empty Action — Add product tag missing-sku, then send internal email
Blank SKUs are the most expensive product data error and the easiest to prevent. This catches them at the moment of creation rather than during an audit eighteen months later. Guide 05 explains why it matters.
4. Flag high-value or high-risk orders
Trigger — Order created Condition — Order total is greater than your threshold, or risk level is high Action — Add order tag, send internal email
Two different jobs sharing one shape. High-value orders may warrant a personal note or upgraded shipping. High-risk orders warrant a look before fulfilment. Both are cheaper to catch before dispatch.
5. Tag customers by order count
Trigger — Order paid Condition — Customer order count is greater than or equal to 2 Action — Add customer tag repeat
Trivial to build and immediately useful, because it gives your email platform a segment to work with that does not depend on that platform's own calculation. Add a second workflow at five orders tagging vip.
6. Flag slow-moving stock on receipt
Trigger — Inventory quantity changed Condition — Inventory quantity is greater than your overstock threshold and product tag equals slow Action — Send internal email
Pair this with the sell-through review in Guide 03. When you identify slow movers, tag them slow. This then tells you if you are about to receive more of something already not selling — a mistake that is easy to make when a purchase order was placed three months ago against a forecast that has since changed.
What will Shopify Flow not do?
Worth being clear, because the limits are as useful to know as the capabilities.
Flow is event-driven, not scheduled. It reacts to something happening in your store. It cannot run a daily sweep asking "what is running low today" — it only knows when a quantity changes.
Flow cannot read outside Shopify. It has no visibility of your ad spend, your supplier lead times, or what your creatives depict. Every workflow above ends in a notification to a human because a human is the only thing that can bridge those gaps.
Flow cannot act on aggregates. It sees one event at a time. It cannot tell you that eleven variants across four products went to zero this week.
Those three limits are, in miniature, the argument in every guide in this series. Flow is genuinely excellent within its boundary, and its boundary is Shopify.