How to Automate Your Shopify Work-Flows

Running an ecommerce business on Shopify can be overwhelming, but with the help of automation, you can automate your marketing workflows, complete tasks more efficiently and free up time for strategic growth. If you're using Shopify as your store system, there's good news. As one of the leading ecommerce platforms, Shopify can significantly boost your business performance when combined with the right automation tools.

In this blog, we'll show you how you can use automations to automate your Shopify workflows. This includes the ongoing optimization of your ads or product pages, the adjustment of your advertising budgets and the resulting increase in efficiency of your online store. We'll also introduce you to Shopstory, a powerful tool that allows you to automate your online store's workflows in Shopify without any programming knowledge - and without a single line of code.

From managing product feeds and order fulfillment to optimizing SEO and performance marketing, discover how automation can revolutionize your Shopify store. Are you ready to dive in? Then let's explore some of the possibilities together!

1. Automate Your Feed Management

Managing product feeds is essential for anyone in ecommerce to increase the visibility of their online store. But, updating product titles and descriptions can be extremely time-consuming, especially for larger online stores. Fortunately, automation tools can help by synchronizing product data, prices and availability across all platforms within minutes, reducing manual updates and errors. This ensures consistent information and engaging copy, while giving you more time for other tasks. For seasonal campaigns, you can automatically update and optimize product titles and descriptions at scale to increase SEO relevance and visibility. Automated workflows can also tag products en masse to reflect current events or promotional activity to support your performance marketing.

2. Streamline Your Fulfillment 

Ecommerce relies on efficient order fulfillment, inventory management and shipping. Automating or outsourcing these tasks can significantly improve your fulfillment. For example, you can automatically route orders to the appropriate fulfillment centers and track inventory levels in real time. Reorders can also be automated, minimizing delays and errors.

Shipping automation goes even further by creating labels, tracking shipments and informing customers about the status of their order. This not only increases transparency with customers, but also speeds up delivery times. Last but not least, don't overlook the importance of efficient returns management automation, as it is crucial to staying competitive with the larger ecommerce providers.

3. Enhance Customer Support

Good customer support is the new benchmark for satisfaction and loyalty. Automation can help you provide timely and efficient support. For example, you can set up automated responses to answer common queries immediately. Chatbots can handle basic customer service tasks, while more complex issues are routed to human agents. Automated ticketing systems also help to manage and prioritize support requests and ensure that no customer request goes unanswered. Some companies may also consider outsourcing this function if it is not part of their core business.

4. Generate Custom Reporting

Keeping an eye on your online store's performance and making informed decisions is important, but hours of manual reporting can drain your resources. Automation streamlines this process by creating custom reports exactly how you want them and when you want them - all on autopilot. This way, you stay up to date with accurate data and trends without having to spend a lot of time on it. Whether you're analyzing performance marketing, sales or stock levels, real-time data-driven insights are essential for success in ecommerce.

5. Optimize Your SEO & Visibility 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is important to generate organic traffic and increase the visibility of your online store, which can ultimately lead to more sales. How can automation simplify SEO tasks? By optimizing product listings, meta descriptions and other SEO elements, you can improve your search ranking with less manual effort. Tools like Shopstory, for example, analyze your Google Search Console data to make organic suggestions for improving product titles and descriptions. They can also identify underperforming pages and recommend pausing high-ranking keywords in your campaigns to save money. In addition, automation simplifies keyword research, content updates and performance monitoring, ensuring your SEO strategy remains current and effective.

6. Automate Your Email Marketing

Email marketing continues to be an effective strategy for engaging customers, nurturing leads and increasing sales. Automation takes this to the next level by allowing you to send targeted messages with greater efficiency. For example, welcome emails can be sent automatically to new subscribers, while abandoned cart emails can gently remind customers of the items they left behind and encourage them to complete their purchases. Promotional campaigns can also be automated to seamlessly promote products, sales and special offers. Not only does this save time, but it also increases conversion rates through personalized recommendations based on customer behavior and tags. By streamlining these processes, you ensure that your email marketing is both effective and efficient.

7. Optimize Your Performance Marketing

Finally, performance marketing, or online advertising, has become essential to any ecommerce strategy. It helps refine your campaigns and ensure they align with your business goals and make the most of your advertising budget. Automations in performance marketing are therefore crucial as they increase your ROAS - with less manual effort.

Automation can optimize key strategies, such as:

• Budget allocation: Dynamically adjust budgets based on performance metrics to maximize your ROI.
• Bidding strategies: Refine your bidding strategies or experiment with different campaign types for optimal ad placement.
• Keyword adjustments: Pause or optimize keywords or generate entire sets of new relevant keywords for your ads.‍
• Reporting: Use automated reports to make data-driven adjustments and improve your campaigns.
• Tagging: Automatically categorize products or ads based on their performance.

Automating With Shopify Flow

Shopify Flow is a basic tool built into Shopify that makes it easy to automate workflows both within Shopify and in various apps like Asana, Google Sheets, Slack, and Trello. With Shopify Flow, you can create workflows that automatically notify you when stock is running low or send emails to customers when products are back in stock. You can also automatically create invoices and tag products based on predefined events or criteria. These automations not only save time and reduce errors, but also ensure that your online store runs smoothly. With Shopify Flow, you can generally automate ecommerce activities, but not the marketing of your online store. This is where Shopstory comes into play.

Automating More With Shopstory

Shopstory's no-code automation platform offers a range of features that allow you to put your ecommerce marketing workflows on autopilot. With Shopstory, you can not only automate within Shopify, but also connect your online store to tools such as Google Ads, Meta (Facebook), ChatGPT, Google Search Console, Merchant Center and Slack.

Here are 10 examples of automations for Shopify with Shopstory: : 

1. Burned Budget Tracker: Monitor how much of your advertising budget is wasted on ineffective ads.
2. Weather-Based Ads: Dynamically adapt your ads to the current weather conditions to increase the relevance and revenue of your ads.
3. Automated Product Descriptions With ChatGPT: Create compelling product descriptions at scale to improve SEO and visibility.
4. Automated Product Titles With ChatGPT: Create engaging product titles that improve SEO and visibility.
5. Meta & Google Ads Report: Make data-driven decisions with auto-generated reports on your ad performance.
6. Sync Shopify & Google Shopping Feed: Ensure your product feed is accurately aligned with Google by syncing all necessary attributes.
7. Tag Products in Shopify: Automatically tag products based on sales and ad performance.
8. Automated Descriptions & Titles From Search Console: Optimize your product descriptions and titles based on organic search queries from Search Console.
9. Shopify Brand Report: Analyze your brand’s performance without factoring in the cost of goods sold (COGS).
10. ‍Low Stock Alerts: Receive notifications when your stock for a specific product drops below 10 items.

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These are just a few examples of how Shopstory can automate ecommerce workflows. Whether it's automating budget adjustments, refining campaign goals or managing search campaigns, Shopstory's Flow Library offers a wide range of ready-to-use workflows that cover many ecommerce needs. Alternatively, you can create flows from scratch without having to write a single line of code. 

Conclusion: Why it makes sense to automate Shopify with Shopstory

Shopstory is designed to seamlessly integrate your store system with common ecommerce marketing and advertising tools to automate as many of your ecommerce workflows as possible. All app integrations are natively integrated into the software, which, unlike other tools, minimizes errors and enables in-depth automation across all channels (learn more in our comparison between Zapier vs Make). 

There are three good reasons why you should rely on Shopstory when it comes to automation in ecommerce:

1. Increased efficiency: By automating repetitive tasks, you gain valuable time to focus on strategic growth and innovation. This means more time to expand your business, your products and your customer base.
2. Cost-effective: Unlike other providers, Shopstory offers a straightforward pricing model that simplifies cost management as you grow your ecommerce business, keeping costs transparent and fair.
3. Scaleable solution: Shopstory's automation features are designed to grow with you. Whether you're a small startup or a large enterprise, Shopstory gives you the tools you need to maintain the performance and cost efficiency of your business.

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Automation allows ecommerce businesses to take it to the next level, one flow at a time, saving valuable time and maximizing profitability. For more insights, check out our free white paper, “How to Unlock Efficiency Through Automation in Ecommerce,” where we present practical automation strategies and real-life examples.

If you’ve heard enough already and want to take a look at our software for yourself, get started for FREE today: