10 Ways to Automate Back Office Tasks with Shopify Flow
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 8:55 am
When you're running your business, tasks like managing orders or reconciling payments take priority. Here's how to automate these processes.
Top view of packages and envelopes
On this page
1. Prepare drafts of Shopify shipping labels
2. Notify your fulfillment team of urgent shipments
3. Manage inventory and replenishment of low stock items
4. Label and organize products
5. Hide, pause and republish products
6. Review high-risk orders
7. Cancel, refund and replenish orders from known bots and scammers
8. Check compliance status after a specified number of days
9. Track special orders based on specific conditions
10. Get information about your returns
Start your online business today.
For free.
Free trial
As you begin to scale your business, inventory canada whatsapp group management and fulfillment processes can become inefficient and cumbersome. Repetitive back office tasks that were once manageable now take time away from the most important part of your day: growing your business.
Tasks like managing orders, reconciling payments , or managing inventory make it increasingly difficult to manage your time. Good time management is crucial to growing your business without impacting daily operations, but how can you get more time in your day?
This is where Shopify Flow , our powerful ecommerce automation tool , can help you perform administrative back-office tasks with less effort and save valuable time.
Click here to start selling online right now with Shopify
Flow lets you create workflows that automate repetitive tasks, without writing a single line of code. You can use ready-made templates or quickly create your own custom workflows that meet the unique needs of your business.
Get Shopify Flow
Note: This app is only available for Advanced and Shopify customers. Flow is only available in English.
Here are 10 automated Shopify Flow processes to streamline your inventory and order management:
1. Prepare drafts of Shopify shipping labels
According to data collected in Shopify’s commerce trends report , 37% of online shoppers are frustrated by shipping that takes too long. It’s more important than ever to ensure your fulfillment process is as efficient as possible.
A great way to speed up order fulfillment is to identify orders you typically process in the same way and automatically prepare their shipping labels.
For example, you could use the same label attributes for orders with certain products, shipping methods, or destination countries. Use these templates to automatically prepare draft shipping labels for specific orders, so you just have to review and purchase them.
Prepare drafts of Shopify shipping labels
2. Notify your fulfillment team of urgent shipments
To meet your customers' shipping expectations, it's a good idea to flag expedited shipping orders to your fulfillment team so they can prioritize them and ship them faster.
This template sends an email notification to your team for customers who have paid for express shipping and adds a label for easy organization.
Notify the logistics team of urgent orders
3. Manage inventory and replenishment of low stock items
Inventory automation is crucial for growing brands. Not only does it help your team operate more efficiently, but it also improves the customer experience.
You can use this process to automatically replenish any products that reach low stock volumes.
Your team will automatically receive a notification, and Flow will send a replenishment email to your supplier. Additionally, Flow will add a label to show that there is little stock and create urgency for the customer.
Get notified when inventory is low and hide products when they are out of stock
4. Label and organize products
When importing new products into your store, it’s important that they are properly tagged and organized into the right collections. Taking the time to do this is critical to improving searches for both your team and your customers. However, as your business grows, this task can become cumbersome.
This process helps you automatically tag products to ensure they are well organized and appear in the right places, speeding up inventory management and ensuring your customers can find what they are looking for.
Standardizes the labeling of new products
5. Hide, pause and republish products
When products are out of stock, it's important to let customers know. There's nothing more frustrating than landing on a product page and finding out it's unpurchasable. To avoid this experience and increase your chances of making other sales, consider this process that hides and republishes products at the right time.
When an item is out of stock, this process automatically hides the product from your online store and notifies your marketing team to pause any marketing efforts featuring that item. When the item is back in stock, it will relist it to your online store and notify your marketing team to reactivate listings.
Hide and republish products based on inventory level
6. Review high-risk orders
Dealing with high-risk orders is complicated, often requiring you to manually verify orders, contact other services, and pay product fees and chargebacks. Custom clothing retailer Shelfies found an efficient way to address this problem.
Using Shopify Flow, they set up a process that immediately identifies orders flagged as high risk and automatically sends an email to the relevant print manufacturer requesting that production be stopped and the order cancelled.
To help you flag high-risk orders, use this template to trigger an action that sends an email or Slack notification to your customer support team to review high-risk orders before executing payment.
If the order's risk is medium or low, the payment will be processed automatically. For this process to work properly, you must have manual payment processing set up for your store.
Top view of packages and envelopes
On this page
1. Prepare drafts of Shopify shipping labels
2. Notify your fulfillment team of urgent shipments
3. Manage inventory and replenishment of low stock items
4. Label and organize products
5. Hide, pause and republish products
6. Review high-risk orders
7. Cancel, refund and replenish orders from known bots and scammers
8. Check compliance status after a specified number of days
9. Track special orders based on specific conditions
10. Get information about your returns
Start your online business today.
For free.
Free trial
As you begin to scale your business, inventory canada whatsapp group management and fulfillment processes can become inefficient and cumbersome. Repetitive back office tasks that were once manageable now take time away from the most important part of your day: growing your business.
Tasks like managing orders, reconciling payments , or managing inventory make it increasingly difficult to manage your time. Good time management is crucial to growing your business without impacting daily operations, but how can you get more time in your day?
This is where Shopify Flow , our powerful ecommerce automation tool , can help you perform administrative back-office tasks with less effort and save valuable time.
Click here to start selling online right now with Shopify
Flow lets you create workflows that automate repetitive tasks, without writing a single line of code. You can use ready-made templates or quickly create your own custom workflows that meet the unique needs of your business.
Get Shopify Flow
Note: This app is only available for Advanced and Shopify customers. Flow is only available in English.
Here are 10 automated Shopify Flow processes to streamline your inventory and order management:
1. Prepare drafts of Shopify shipping labels
According to data collected in Shopify’s commerce trends report , 37% of online shoppers are frustrated by shipping that takes too long. It’s more important than ever to ensure your fulfillment process is as efficient as possible.
A great way to speed up order fulfillment is to identify orders you typically process in the same way and automatically prepare their shipping labels.
For example, you could use the same label attributes for orders with certain products, shipping methods, or destination countries. Use these templates to automatically prepare draft shipping labels for specific orders, so you just have to review and purchase them.
Prepare drafts of Shopify shipping labels
2. Notify your fulfillment team of urgent shipments
To meet your customers' shipping expectations, it's a good idea to flag expedited shipping orders to your fulfillment team so they can prioritize them and ship them faster.
This template sends an email notification to your team for customers who have paid for express shipping and adds a label for easy organization.
Notify the logistics team of urgent orders
3. Manage inventory and replenishment of low stock items
Inventory automation is crucial for growing brands. Not only does it help your team operate more efficiently, but it also improves the customer experience.
You can use this process to automatically replenish any products that reach low stock volumes.
Your team will automatically receive a notification, and Flow will send a replenishment email to your supplier. Additionally, Flow will add a label to show that there is little stock and create urgency for the customer.
Get notified when inventory is low and hide products when they are out of stock
4. Label and organize products
When importing new products into your store, it’s important that they are properly tagged and organized into the right collections. Taking the time to do this is critical to improving searches for both your team and your customers. However, as your business grows, this task can become cumbersome.
This process helps you automatically tag products to ensure they are well organized and appear in the right places, speeding up inventory management and ensuring your customers can find what they are looking for.
Standardizes the labeling of new products
5. Hide, pause and republish products
When products are out of stock, it's important to let customers know. There's nothing more frustrating than landing on a product page and finding out it's unpurchasable. To avoid this experience and increase your chances of making other sales, consider this process that hides and republishes products at the right time.
When an item is out of stock, this process automatically hides the product from your online store and notifies your marketing team to pause any marketing efforts featuring that item. When the item is back in stock, it will relist it to your online store and notify your marketing team to reactivate listings.
Hide and republish products based on inventory level
6. Review high-risk orders
Dealing with high-risk orders is complicated, often requiring you to manually verify orders, contact other services, and pay product fees and chargebacks. Custom clothing retailer Shelfies found an efficient way to address this problem.
Using Shopify Flow, they set up a process that immediately identifies orders flagged as high risk and automatically sends an email to the relevant print manufacturer requesting that production be stopped and the order cancelled.
To help you flag high-risk orders, use this template to trigger an action that sends an email or Slack notification to your customer support team to review high-risk orders before executing payment.
If the order's risk is medium or low, the payment will be processed automatically. For this process to work properly, you must have manual payment processing set up for your store.