Shopify Flow, What It Is and What You Can Use It For

Shopify Flow, What It Is and What You Can Use It For

Shopify Flow is Shopify's built-in automation tool. It lets you set up workflows that respond automatically to events in your store, without writing a single line of code.

The three building blocks

Every workflow in Flow is built around three elements.

A trigger is the event that starts the workflow, for example an order being created, a customer account being created, or a product's inventory level changing. Every workflow has exactly one trigger, and without it, nothing happens, no matter how well the rest is configured.

A condition determines whether the workflow should actually continue, for example "is the order value over $150" or "is the inventory level equal to zero."

An action is the actual change that gets executed once the condition is met, for example sending an email notification, adding a tag to a customer, or hiding a product from sales channels.

Who can use it?

Shopify Flow is no longer limited to the Plus plan. It's included on Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus, which makes it available to essentially every store, regardless of size.

Concrete examples

• Automatically hiding out-of-stock products:
  • Trigger: Inventory changes.
  • Condition: Stock equals zero.
  • Action: The product is hidden from sales channels so it doesn't get shown or advertised while it's out of stock.
    
    
• Low-stock alerts:
  • Trigger: A product variant's inventory quantity changes.
  • Condition: Stock drops below a set threshold.
  • Action: A notification is sent to the relevant team so restocking can happen in time.
    
    
• Automatic VIP customer tagging:
  • Trigger: An order is paid.
  • Condition: The customer's total order value exceeds a set amount.
  • Action: The customer is tagged as VIP, which can later be used for segmented marketing or special handling.
    
    
• Fraud flagging:
  • Trigger: An order is risk-analyzed.
  • Condition: The risk level is high.
  • Action: The order is tagged for manual review before it's processed further.

Limitations worth knowing

Flow has no scheduled triggers beyond the built-in ones, can't connect to external apps outside the connectors already available inside Flow, and can't query historical data beyond what triggers in real time. For more advanced workflows that combine multiple systems or require scheduled timing, third-party automation apps are often needed as a supplement.

How to get started

The easiest way in is through the pre-built templates. Under Apps > Flow in the Shopify admin, you can browse a library of ready-made workflows, adjust the relevant values (threshold, recipient, channel), and turn them on directly. It's generally recommended to start with one workflow at a time, confirm it's working as intended, and only then add more, rather than setting up several complex automations at once.