Shopify Automation: Build Your Marketing Automations & Workflows

Rudi Eihenbaums

Feb 18, 2025

Leaders in automation reduced the cost of business processes by a whopping 22% in 2023. 

Not only that, but they saw the benefits of service quality and accuracy go up as task completion times plummeted. 

If you’re not looking to keep pace with these front runners, be prepared to fall to the back of the pack with the thousands of Shopify brand owners competing for consumer attention. 

Thankfully, e-commerce pioneers have the power to create Shopify automations and workflows that boost shopper experiences without breaking the bank. They just have to find the right tooling to make it a reality.  

To give you the best advice on that front, we spoke to two e-commerce experts on the OpenStore team who handle dozens of Shopify brands, automating different aspects of day-to-day management through apps and services.

With their advice, this article will explore how you can automate your e-commerce shop via native Shopify apps and powerful third-party tools. 

Understanding Shopify automation

Let’s start where all good stories start, at the beginning! 

Shopify automation is about the broad range of tools, apps, services, and strategies founders can deploy to handle specific tasks and processes in their e-commerce businesses built on Shopify. 

The main goals of automating elements of your Shopify brand include reducing manual effort, increasing operational efficiency, decreasing costs, boosting scalability, and improving that all-important customer experience.

Areas to implement Shopify automation tools

Today, modern tooling (more on that shortly) allows you to use automation all across an e-commerce business. Here are some examples where it may make the most sense for Shopify owners: 

• Marketing: With the right apps in place, automation can help with personalization, segmentation, and reporting while streamlining tasks such as email marketing, content creation, social media posting, advertising, and more.‍

• Customer notifications: Shoppers want to know what’s going on. Luckily, it’s easy to keep them informed with automated email and SMS platforms that alert them to changes in order status, items left in their carts, and product restocks.‍

• Order processing: You really shouldn’t be spending your precious time doing things like sending confirmation emails, updating inventory, and forwarding orders to suppliers or fulfillment centers when there’s Shopify automation on the shelf that can take over those simple, repetitive tasks for you.‍

• Inventory management: Use smart Shopify automation to quickly update product listings, prices, or inventory levels based on certain triggers. For example, product prices can be set to adjust instantly based on inventory levels or competitors’ prices.‍

• Customer experience: The customer experience you create on your Shopify site is critical to keeping consumers engaged, encouraging them to make purchases, and keeping them coming back for more. Automation tools can help you build and scale memorable experiences by supporting your customer service team across channels, offering personalized product recommendations, enhancing the checkout experience, and requesting product reviews or feedback at critical moments in the customer journey.
  

OK, so there are plenty of places where I can implement automation to boost my e-commerce business — great! 

But how do I go about it strategically? 

Here’s what we learned from OpenStore Storefronts Lead Dov Quint and Supply Chain Analyst Carlos Galdamez about the best tools for tackling the biggest Shopify automation opportunities. 

Strategy 1: Hone in on e-commerce customer experience

As mentioned, customer experience is pivotal to the success of most online businesses today. 

On average, shoppers spend as much as 16% more at brands with good customer experiences. After one such interaction, most share it with their network in some way — creating free and high-value referral traffic for you. 

Depending on what part of the experience you want to focus on, there are tons of different Shopify apps available. First, we’ll focus on the ones that help you deliver awesome customer support. 

Channel Sales Chat Bot CRM

Channel Talk is a broad tool helping Shopify merchants enhance customer relationships. Its features aim to facilitate real-time communication, automate key elements of support, and overall help agents — or single-handed owners! — manage customer interactions effectively.

Some key features include:

• Live chat for customer support and internal team communication, enabling prompt responses to customer inquiries.

• Chatbot messages and customization options to automate marketing campaigns and enhance customer engagement.

• A built-in AI agent that handles repetitive inquiries, improving efficiency and allowing human agents to focus on more complex tasks.

• Customer relationship management (CRM) to organize customer information, helping merchants identify and engage key customers to foster loyalty and increase lifetime value.

OpenDesk 

Human-centered automation is at the core of providing a great experience for your e-commerce customers. 

What we mean by “human-centered automation” is that it works harmoniously with people — respecting their roles, understanding their needs, enhancing their abilities, and finding ways to empower rather than replace them throughout the consumer journey. 

This was one of our guiding principles when building OpenDesk: automated yet human-centric customer support with a focus on retention. 

With OpenDesk, you can enjoy:

• Powerfully personalized messaging: Real-time customer data from Shopify works alongside our AI, which you can train with your brand’s own documentation. This empowers agents to offer quick and tailored assistance that enhances satisfaction and builds trust.‍

• Faster, smarter responses: Automate your common inquiries — again, in your own brand voice — to provide instant support around things like return policies and tracking updates.

• ‍A streamlined inbox: Manage all customer messages from various channels in a single dashboard, prioritized by factors like sentiment, wait time, and customer value. 

• ‍Money-saving operational insights: Gain valuable insights into the issues that generate the most customer support tickets with our unique "tickets per order" metric. This allows you to address specific problems more effectively to minimize complaints, save support time, and lose less of your profit to returns.

Start a free trial of OpenDesk and get in on the ground floor with affordable Shopify customer support automation that won’t break the bank. 

Strategy 2: Focus on marketing automation tools 

We won’t delve too deep here thanks to the robust guide we already created all about Shopify marketing automation.

But, in short, we’ll say that Shopify marketing automation tools don’t entirely replace human judgment and creativity — but do help with things like segmenting your customer lists, pulling data from CRM platforms to improve the targeting of your marketing and advertising activities, and instilling workflow automation based on triggers like cart abandonment.

The tools you choose depend on the complexity of your marketing mix, but marketing automation apps that generally pair well with Shopify include:

Klaviyo 

Klaviyo is an OpenStore staff favorite for enhancing customer engagement and driving sales thanks to features like: 

• Automated personalized communications: Set up automated messages such as price drop alerts, cart reminders, and product recommendations to engage customers. 

• Comprehensive data integration: Sync Shopify data like website activity, customer tags, product catalog, and coupon codes to inform targeted marketing strategies.

• Advanced segmentation: Use predictive analytics to create detailed customer segments, enabling more precise and effective marketing efforts.

• Pre-built Shopify automations: Access helpful built-in workflows, like Back in Stock, Browse Abandon, and Price Drop.

Learn more about using this platform with our guide to 3 Ways to Automate Shopify Email & SMS Marketing with Klaviyo. 

Mailchimp

Mailchimp supports entrepreneurs in building their brands and growing their businesses through automated email and SMS marketing. Seamlessly integrating with Shopify online shops and POS systems, it offers a range of features to enhance customer engagement, such as: 

• Automated campaigns: Launch email automations such as abandoned cart reminders, welcome series, and re-engagement campaigns to maintain consistent communication.

• AI-powered enhancements: Utilize tools like the content optimizer to receive AI-driven suggestions for improving your email copy and imagery. 

• Data-driven insights: Access insights derived from millions of campaigns within your industry to inform and optimize your marketing strategies.

Other great options that we won’t explore now but you can certainly consider are Omnisend, AdRoll, HubSpot, Easy Accounts, and Drip. 

Whichever platform you end up with, you likely can’t go wrong. Just be sure to review analytics and reports on customer behavior, as well as campaign successes. Iterate based on your learnings to maximize your customer acquisition automation efforts.

Strategy 3: Automate it all with comprehensive Shopify apps

When you’re ready to branch out, Shopify apps can combine tasks like marketing automation with operational undertakings like inventory management, fraud detection, and checkout customization.

Here are some tools that will help you unlock more of Shopify’s capabilities using just one ecosystem. 

Shopify Flow

A free app available on all Shopify plans, Shopify Flow lets you build custom, automated workflows that interact with other Shopify apps, all without ever needing to write any code. 

With Shopify Flow, you can turn manual tasks like reordering and restocking into automated workflows.

Pre-built templates allow you to set up automation in a few clicks, without programming skills. Some are ‘set and forget,’ but we suggest checking on them occasionally.

Shopify Flow workflows Galdamez has used across almost 50 Shopify Plus companies for automating customer support and fraud prevention include:

• Tagging repeat customers and high spenders.

• Flagging orders above a certain amount to review against fraud.

• Automatically canceling orders flagged as high risk.

• Tagging orders based on certain criteria.

• Tagging customers that are repeat offenders for frequent refund requests or returns.

• Automatically capturing payments based on criteria.

Shopify Scripts

While they’ll eventually be replaced with Shopify Functions, Shopify Scripts (a Shopify Plus exclusive) has been a major help in automating OpenStore’s Shopify Plus brands.

“Scripts have played a big part in how we manage our stores, especially in customizing checkout, where small improvements can lead to an increase in conversions and profit,” Quint says.

With dozens of ready-made templates in Shopify’s help center, Scripts enables automations around:

• Customizing checkout, such as “free gift with purchase” criteria.

• Offering tiered discounts by spend and quantity.

• Offering bundle discounts.

• Providing product discounts based on customer tags (from Shopify Flow automations) or newsletter signups.

• Product quantity or discount codes based on set limits.

• Controlling what shipping rates are shown based on address.

• Hiding payment gateways for specific customers, products, countries, and spend.

“Modifying code using Scripts is powerful, but unless you really know what you are doing, I recommend hiring a freelancer to help out,” Quint adds. “In the long run, it’s the right investment versus the risk of creating an issue in an important place like checkout.”

It's also worth reiterating that checkout customization with Shopify Scripts is only available for Shopify Plus subscribers. If you don’t want to pay several thousand per month to upgrade to Shopify Plus to use this tooling, you may consider the creative, fully automated solution OpenStore provides: OpenStore Drive.

Strategy 4: Broaden your horizons with third-party Shopify apps

Outside the Shopify universe are other apps that can help you automate various elements and angles of your Shopify business.

We’ll dish on our third-party favorites now. 

Rebuy

To enable its cross-selling and upselling efforts, Rebuy uses an AI recommendation engine that gives product suggestions to your customers. It offers personalized shopping experiences using historical shopping data like shopping patterns, browsing behavior, and purchase history.

What does it take to get set up? No coding or technical expertise is required. Rebuy has allowed OpenStore to unlock AI-based product recommendations out of the box. 

According to Quint, this app has made for a great return on investment: “The costs are nominal for us. Rebuy helps boost average order value, drive conversion rate, and lift lifetime value. It powers the widgets at key decision points — bundling on our product landing pages, cross-selling on our carts, upselling post-purchase, and so on.”

Zapier

As far as Shopify automation tools go, Zapier is among the most popular.

Allowing Shopify to connect with thousands of apps like Google Sheets, Facebook, and Slack, Zapier can automate tasks across all areas of running your business. Create automations from scratch or use existing templates without coding. 

Example workflows:

• Track new orders in a spreadsheet.

• Add customers to your ads platform.

• Schedule automations to run at specific times. For example, send customer satisfaction surveys after a certain number of days have passed following an order.
  

Galdamez is impressed with Zapier’s customer support capabilities: “Zapier unlocks the power of interactive AI to resolve customer concerns and questions without needing an agent.”

Zapier can integrate with tools or apps that handle customer support, logistics, order processing, inventory management, and marketing, helping to automate these processes.

Auto Fulfill

Designed to automate the order fulfillment process, Auto Fulfill performs a host of functions:

• Sending order data to suppliers and tracking money owed.

• Printing packing slips, fulfillment reports, and live chat support.

• Fulfilling only authorized, paid, and low-risk orders.

• Managing dropshipping suppliers.

• Fulfilling orders based on product location.
  

Galdamez explains that the perfect use case for Auto Fulfill is if you struggle with sending orders manually to a bootstrapped vendor or fulfillment partner:

“Set up a portal for your partner to export orders and self-manage all the way up to fulfillment. This is less so an automation, but a great way to save time and money on manual processes.” 

Alloy Automation

An automation tool built specifically for Shopify companies, Alloy Automation allows you to integrate automated workflows across hundreds of apps with webhooks and APIs.

Example workflows:

• Requesting reviews after a product is delivered.

• Sending confirmation emails post-purchase.

• Pausing advertising or notifying customers when inventory is low.

• Notifying you of fraud or automatic cancellations for high-risk orders.

• Upselling with complementary product suggestions or sending SMS offers.
  

This automation platform is designed to save time by allowing you to build workflows without writing any code.

Matrixify

Focused on bulk data management, Matrixify lets you export all of your company data. This is useful for migrating your brands or backing them up, including exporting or importing orders and products. 

It can save you hours of manual work.

Galdamez has used Matrixify to automate many tasks when managing Shopify brands:

• Creating multiple products from scratch.

• Editing several existing products at once.

• Exporting every single part of a business.

• Scheduling updates, such as setting a product to active at a certain time, or setting inventory on a schedule.

• Updating several products/variants at once (think uploading photos on 20 products at once, updating barcodes, adding metadata, and changing titles and descriptions) from a CSV/Excel import.

• Copying business data to other brands, backing up a brand, or migrating to Shopify.

“Matrixify unlocks the power to manage almost every aspect of your Shopify store with data-driven approaches,” Galdamez says. “Update a thousand products at once from information you already have on file, instead of clicking manually in Shopify’s admin panel.”

Wonderment Post‑Purchase

Specializing in proactive customer experience management, Wonderment Post‑Purchase is a Shopify automation app for post-purchase processes, particularly around managing shipments and proactively notifying customers of shipping updates.

The tool can help automate your marketing and upsell efforts, as it integrates with Klaviyo and Shopify Flow.

Wonderment has been a relief to Quint’s team, helping them manage around 50 Shopify storefronts, boosting business and delighting customers. Quint has observed that Wonderment:

• Drives traffic back to the shop (instead of shipping carriers’ websites).

• Increases revenue and repeat business.

• Reduces customer service inquiries (such as fewer “Where is my order?” tickets).

• Boosts customer engagement and pre-arrival excitement.

• Improves customer retention and brand affinity.
  

Plans may feel a little pricey starting at $99 per month, but Quint adds, “I factor in the many hours saved for our internal CX team, who would otherwise be responding to tickets. And more revenue delivered from the branded tracking pages, as well as retention over time.”

Alternatively, Tracktor offers similar features and has a free option. AfterShip is also comparable.

Best e-commerce automation apps and strategies not cutting it? Consider OpenStore

We love that OpenStore Drive enables OpenStore’s own experts to take over and run your Shopify brand for 12 months, giving you time (and ongoing income!) to see what’s out there and what’s next. 

Often, once an owner has taken that time to work through their “sell vs. grow” debate, they come out on the other side looking to sell their Shopify businesses and move on to the next interesting thing. 

The trouble?

It takes a lot of effort to figure out how to sell your Shopify brand — when, to whom, how much it should be sold for, and how long your time and money will be tangled up in the process. 

Which is exactly why OpenStore exists. 

OpenStore is here to provide fast, free, and fair valuations for qualifying Shopify businesses.

Our experts combined with our proprietary tech can quickly evaluate your business, make a competitive offer, and streamline the exit process.

Just sign up to request an offer, connect your Shopify account, and share a few performance metrics. It only takes a few minutes to set your future in motion.

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