How To Automate Shopify Stores? (10 Ways & Tips)

In this guide, we'll explore 10 ways to automate your Shopify store and unlock its full potential. From inventory management to marketing automation, we'll provide actionable tips to help you optimize your operations and achieve your business goals.

Let’s start!

What Is Shopify eCommerce Automation?

In short, Shopify store automation is a strong tool that helps business owners save money and run their businesses more efficiently. It can handle repetitive tasks, like sending messages when shipping is delayed or responding to customer complaints.

In the next section, we'll walk you through the tasks you can automate for your Shopify store.

10 Ways To Automate Your Shopify Store

Let's explore ten effective ways to automate your store and boost your efficiency:

• Automate inventory management systems.
• Marketing automation.
• Automate pricing, discounts, and fees.
• Automate customer support.
• Automate order processing and fulfillment.
• Automate refunds, exchanges, and returns.
• Automate issue gift cards.
• Automate abandoned checkout automation.
• Automate ecommerce accounting.
• Automating request product reviews.

1. Automate Inventory Management Systems

When you first start a store, managing your stock can be a mess! You might use spreadsheets or even count things by hand. This can be slow and easy to mess up.

You can monitor stock, low stock, and reorders using an automated inventory system. What to do: 

Step 1: Enable Inventory Tracking

First, make sure you're tracking your stock in Shopify. This will help you see what you have and when you need to reorder.

Go to Products > select a product. In the product setting, scroll down to find the Inventory section. Turn on the option to track its quantity, and decide if you want to keep selling it even when it's out of stock.

Step 2: Add Low Stock Alerts

In this step, you will need to look at Shopify inventory management solutions. We have a detailed review article of 11+ Shopify inventory management apps for you to refer to when choosing a suitable app.

We also propose a process management tool. The product may demand different notification levels or a different strategy.  

In general, this is how the process works:

An example of the workflow app works.

Step 3: Enable Automatic Fulfillment For Shipments

To make things even easier, you can automate your orders and shipping. This means you won't have to manually update your stock levels every time an order goes out. This is great because it helps you predict how much you need to sell, forecast your sales, and keep your inventory records accurate.

To enable automatic fulfillment for shipments in your Shopify store, follow these steps:

In your Shopify admin, go to Settings > General.

When you're handling an order, choose "Automatically fulfill the order's line items." 

Optionally, you can choose to notify customers of their shipment by selecting Notify customers of their shipment.

Finally, click Save to apply your changes.

Please keep in mind that automatic delivery only works if you sell digital downloads or all of your goods are fulfilled by a third party. If you need to ship and package items yourself, you might want to use hand delivery instead.

Step 4: Monitor Inventory Levels Regularly

By tracking your inventory, you can predict when you'll need more products and ensure you always have enough to sell. This helps you avoid losing money or having too much stock.

You can use filters in your Shopify admin to create custom views of your inventory. This helps you track important areas and ensure smooth operation.

2. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation helps you promote your products or services without having to do everything yourself. You can use automation for main things like:

• Email marketing.
• Digital advertising.

With the right tools, you can automate almost anything in your digital marketing strategy.

2.1. Email Marketing

There are lots of apps that can help you send automated emails to your customers. You can find some great options in our article about the 12+ best email marketing platforms.

Graza, an olive oil company, uses Klaviyo to send personalized emails to different customer groups. This would be very difficult to do manually, especially for a big company like Graza.

For example, you might send one email to new customers and another to customers who buy from you often. 

Here's an example of how your automated email flow might look:

2.2. Digital Advertising

Ads can get expensive, so it's important to make sure they're working well. One way to do this is to use automation. This means showing different ads to different people or testing different versions of the same ad and choosing the best one.

Cozy Earth, a bedding company, uses Facebook ads to target people who might be interested in its products. It uses special machine learning technology to test different ads and find the ones that work best.

Cozy Earth runs paid ads on Facebook.

You can find more at Comprehensive Guide to Marketing Automation For Shopify.

3. Automate Pricing, Discounts, And Fees

Setting prices for all your products can become time-consuming, especially as your business grows. But with the right tools, you can automate this process. Apps like Prisync and PriceMole can help you do this.

This means prices can change based on things like:

• Where the customer is. 
• When they're buying. 
• What are your competitors charging, and how much are they buying? 

You can also use other apps to automatically calculate shipping, handling, and taxes. This is super helpful if you sell to customers in different places, as the costs can vary greatly.

Explore more: 10 Shopify Tax Apps Free & Premium.

4. Automate Customer Support

Customer support automation helps your team handle customer questions and problems more efficiently. This is especially important as your business grows and you have more customers to deal with.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can be use in customer service. For example, AI chatbots can answer customer questions 24/7, which means customers don't have to wait for a human to reply.

You can find a tutorial on how to add live chat for Shopify store in our article 12 Shopify chatbot apps FREE & Pro.

5. Automate Order Processing And Fulfillment

Automated order fulfillment manages retail order fulfillment processes using technology. It automates inventory monitoring, order picking, packaging, and shipping via software and hardware. 

Now that you know what you need to do, it's time to find the right tools to automate your orders. We’ve reviewed 13 fulfillment apps for Shopify stores that can manage your inventory, track orders, and ship items.

6. Automate Refunds, Exchanges, And Returns

Returns are a part of doing business online. According to Statista data, about 16% of things people buy online are returned. That's why having an easy way to handle returns is important.

Shopify Flow can help you automate some parts of the return process. You can set up automatically approve returns that meet certain conditions.

7. Automate Issue Gift Cards

Shopify Flow can help you automate gift cards, too. You can set a default expiration date, and the platform will automatically handle them when customers use them.

Here's how to set it up:

Step 1: Create a gift card product with the amount you want to use for this purpose. If you don't know how to do it, read our guide to issuing a shopify gift card.

Step 2: Go to Shopify Flow and create a new workflow.

Step 3: For example, we will start the workflow with the "Order paid" trigger.

Step 4: Then, you should add a condition. For example, we will set up to check if the order amount is greater than or equal to $199 and none of the item names are equal to the name of the gift card (in our case, it's "Free Gift Card—$20").

Step 5: Mark the gift card as paid automatically.

Now, customers will get an email with their gift card and can see it in their order history.

Note: This method might have a small issue where the gift card's value still shows in the order total. You might need to look into additional ways to hide or remove this.

8. Automate Abandoned Checkout Automation

Did you know that many people start buying things online but never finish? If you can reach out to these people, you might be able to get them to buy what they are interested in.

Shopify has a built-in tool that can help you do this automatically. It sends emails to people who leave items in their cart without buying them. Here are how to do it:

Step 1: Click on Marketing > Automations in the Shopify dashboard.

Step 2: To get to the abandoned checkout automation template, click View Templates and then pick it.

Then, you choose the Abandoned checkout option.

Optional: If you want to change the text of the email or the way the system works, click Edit.

Step 3: Click Turn on automation.

Step 4: Review the information and click Continue.

Once the new automation is set up, you can change its settings and control it from the main page of the automation. You can also turn it off and on. 

9. Automate Ecommerce Accounting

It is the job of an ecommerce accountant to keep track of, organize, and manage all of an ecommerce company's financial information and business activities. You can think of it as a part of small business budgeting that is set up to meet the special needs of an ecommerce service.

Shopify doesn't connect directly to accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero, but you can use an app called MyWorks to make it work. MyWorks lets you share your financial data between Shopify and your accounting software in real-time.

The best part is MyWorks is right there in your Shopify dashboard, so you don't have to switch between different programs. 

10. Automating Request Product Reviews

Shopify doesn't automatically send emails asking customers to review their products. But there are apps you can add to your Shopify store that do this for you.

We have a list of 12 great Shopify product review apps you can use. You can also use Shopify Flow to create your product review email flow.

Tips For Identify Shopify Tasks Suitable For Automation

If your employees are spending a lot of time on tasks that are repetitive and boring, you can use automation to free them up to do more important work. These repetitive tasks might include data entry, order processing, or customer service.

Automation can help with things like moving data from one place to another, cleaning up data, processing claims, and changing data. This will help your team work more efficiently and focus on tasks that really matter.

However, some tasks are more complicated than others. To consider if a task is worth automating, think about:

Even though complex tasks can be automated, it takes more work to set up. An excellent way to start is to automate simple things first. See how well it works and use that to convince people to invest in automating more complicated tasks.

Other Than Automating Shopify Store, Do Other Options Exist?

Automation is great for many things, but it's not perfect. As we said, some tasks are too complicated for robots to handle.

So for these tasks, we recommend hiring a virtual assistant, which can be a big help. They can do things that need a human touch, like making decisions or handling tricky situations. They can also adjust their workload to match your needs, which is something automation can't always do.

FAQs

Does Shopify Automatically Dropshipping?

Shopify doesn't automate dropships by itself. But it does offer tools and connections, such as dropshipping apps, that make order handling automatic. 

Read more: 14 Shopify Dropshipping Apps. 

Can I Use Shopify Flow To Automate?

You can, of course. We've covered using Shopify Flow in automation, scroll up for more.

What Should I Do If An Automated Workflow Fails?

Here are some steps you can take if an automated workflow fails in your Shopify store:

• Identify the issue. Determine the specific cause of the failure. Check for error messages, review logs, or consult the workflow's documentation.
• Pause the workflow. Temporarily pause the workflow to prevent further issues while you troubleshoot.

Read more:

• How To Automate Shopify Social Media Posts?
• Marketing Automation For Shopify - Comprehensive Guide

Key Takeaway

Remember to find processes that can be automated, pick the right tools, begin small and build up over time, and use Shopify's built-in features. Review and update your automated processes on a regular basis to make sure they keep working well and meet the changing needs of your business.

For more Shopify knowledge, visit our blog.