Ideas to Improve Your Shopify Workflow with Order Automator

Ideas to Improve Your Shopify Workflow with Order Automator

November 28, 2024

Author: Joe

Shopify Expert, store owner for 7 years, developer, former eCommerce marketer and consultant

Order Automator is a high rated Shopify app that automate tasks + expands your store's functionality.

⭐️ It's been recommended by Shopify support, other apps, fulfillment services, and people that work in the Shopify ecosystem.

Here we've collected popular use cases for the app to give you ideas.

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How it works

Create workflows to automate tasks + actions for Order Automator to perform.

If the app doesn't do what you want out of the box, send us a message with your request and we'll try to make it happen.

✉️ Custom Notifications

Send custom order notifications

Create a template to send emails to staff, suppliers, partners, or yourself based on certain order conditions. See How to Send Custom Order Notifications in Shopify for a detailed guide.

Examples:

  • Notify your team of orders they're responsible for
  • Dropshipping stores: send orders to your supplier (optionally filter to show only their items)
  • Get notified on high priority orders or orders from a specific sales channel
  • Get notified if someone makes a big or unique purchase
  • Get notified if order contains a certain product or collection
  • Get out of stock notifications when a product's inventory is low

🏷️ Auto Tagging

Automatically tag orders

Create rules to identify conditions in the order / customer / products and choose a tag to add if the conditions match.

Examples:

  • Tag orders from a certain country
  • Tag orders based on the marketing campaign, referral site, utm parameter, etc
  • Tag an order if it's the customer's 1st order
  • Tag orders that applied certain discount codes to monitor marketing efforts

Automatically tag customers

  • Tag 1st time customers
  • Tag repeat customers
  • Tag VIP customers
  • Create tiers to tag customers on their order levels (10 orders, 20 orders, ...)
  • Tag customers that used a certain discount code
  • Create marketing lists by auto tagging customers that purchased certain product types

🚚 Fulfillment

Create rules to automatically trigger fulfillment actions

Examples:

  • Auto fulfill digital items, fees, gift cards, shipping insurance
  • Request fulfillment to a 3PL
  • Route orders to different fulfillment centers based on shipping country
  • Change location of fulfillment order based on the product
  • Hold certain orders that need to be reviewed
  • Use Order Automator to have more control fulfillment and routing

Allow remote tracking updates

Use the Remote Tracking feature to include a tracking link in a custom order notification to allow the person receiving that email to update the tracking on the order + mark it fulfilled, without needing a Shopify staff account.

The included link will have a secure code that allows them to submit tracking information (for all or some skus) in the remote tracking portal.

🔗 Amazon

Connect your Shopify store to your Seller Central account

Sync inventory and automatically fulfill Shopify orders using your Amazon FBA inventory.

  • Create rules in Order Automator to decide what items to auto fulfill using Amazon MCF
  • Tracking automatically gets updated (and order fulfilled) after Amazon fulfills the order
  • Map your skus and shipping methods to Amazon
  • Control options like shipping in blank boxes, packing slip comments

Set up is easy. Follow this guide to see how to configure it.

🕵️‍♂️ Identify + Handle Risky Orders

Use the Fraud Guard feature to help monitor and mitigate scam orders

Examples:

  • Notify staff on high or medium risk orders
  • Auto cancel high risk orders

See How to Deal with Fraudulent Orders and Minimize Chargebacks on Shopify for details and tips.

🔎 Order Monitoring

Create rules that monitor activities on orders

Examples:

  • Get an email when an order is X days old and unfulfilled (stale orders)
  • Get an email when an order is refunded
  • Do something (email, tag) when an action happens on an order (tagged with a certain tag, fulfilled, etc)

☀️ Daily Jobs

Create a job that runs daily (or weekly, monthly) at a certain time to handle tasks

Examples:

  • Get a daily summary email of orders
  • Process certain fulfillment rules at a specific time every day
  • Release fulfillment holds every day at a specific time
  • Get a weekly summary of orders

🗂️ Attach CSVs + PDFs

An extension of the Custom Notifications feature, add a csv with the order details

Examples:

  • Attach a csv with the order, customer, shipping details to an email that goes to your fulfillment partner
  • Send a daily or weekly csv with order contents
  • Coming soon Attach a PDF or custom purchase order (contact us to set this up)

🫡 Batch Process old orders

Process your rules on past orders by selecting a date range and the rules to process

  • Great for organizing orders and customers with tags

  • You can also process 1 order, commonly used to test new rules

🎁 Auto update orders

Create actions that trigger on orders that match your rules

Examples:

  • Add a free item to a customer's first order

  • Add specific notes to the order, based on order conditions, that show up on the packing slip

⚙️ Customize the app

Order Automator is designed to have a simple interface to create workflows using rules and actions, but it's quite powerful under the hood and widely expandable.

Here are a few examples of customizations people have with Order Automator.

  • Dynamically tag orders (ex: tag all the vendor names of the products in the order)
  • Dynamically tag customers (ex: tag customers with the name of collections they purchased from)
  • Make calculations based on the order contents and add those to notes or an email
  • Cancel orders in X hours if unpaid
  • Capture payment after X hours

Some public app features started as a customations, requested by 1 person. Feel free to contact us through the app if you want something customized.

We love helping to automate workflows for you! ✅

🧙‍♂️ If you liked this post please check out our apps Order Automator and Product Automator.

✅ We've built a suite of tools to automate tasks and extend Shopify functionality. Our mission is to help Shopify stores and the people that work in them save time and money.

About the Author: Joe

Joe's a 10+ years Shopify partner, certified Shopify Expert, 7 year Shopify store owner, former Shopify optimization agency owner, creator of Order Automator and co-creator of Product Automator. Outside of tech he's into nature adventures, travel, trees, music, books, and art. 🏕🌎🌞

Some of our blog posts contain affiliate links, meaning Automator Apps could receive a commission if you sign up for an app or service using those links. We only recommend things we believe in, and there is no additional cost to you, we're just recommending trusted partners.

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About Us

We make Shopify apps, custom plugins, and automated solutions.

We also have years of experience working with and managing Shopify stores.

Our goal is to help Shopify stores be more efficient and more successful with smart solutions.

Contact us if you need a technological solution for your business.


⚙️ Automation Apps for Shopify Stores

Use Order Automator to automate routine Shopify tasks, connect your store to 3rd party marketplaces (Amazon, TikTok, etc), and save you time and money.

It's customizable too, so you can request specific functionality for your store.


Product Automator has a suite of features to help organize your products and collections, increase your conversion rate, and get operational notifications.

It's a newer app so we're adding new functionality every week. Try it now and contact us to make a request or custom tailor a feature to your store.


🚚 Recommended Fulfillment Solutions for eCommerce Stores

ShipBob is a 3rd party fulfillment service that connects easily with Shopify, ships worldwide, and has no minimum requirements.

Connect ShipBob to your Shopify store, send inventory, then your orders will get automatically fulfilled.

Available in the US, UK, Canada, Europe, and Australia


Use Amazon FBA to automatically fulfill your Shopify store orders domestically and internationally.

See How to Automate Shopify Order Fulfillment with Amazon MCF / FBA to learn how to set it up.

Using the Order Automator app connected to your Amazon Seller Central account, you can do things like:

  • Automatically sync inventory between Amazon and Shopify
  • Automatically fulfill Shopify orders using Amazon FBA inventory
  • Route Shopify orders to Amazon marketplaces around the world, handling international fulfillment

Fulfilling off-Amazon orders with your Amazon inventory is called MCF. Learn more about Amazon MCF here.


🤖 Cool AI Apps for Shopify Stores

Zipchat is an AI chatbot that automates sales and support. Visitors can ask questions on your site and get instant answers based on information from your site + additional details you feed it.

We tested it and instantly found a few use cases to automatically answer common questions, like shipping and product recommendations.

Highlights

  • Give instant answers and cut down on support inquiries
  • Increase AOV by recommending cross-sell products
  • Provide order updates and tracking links

Bonus: The team is knowledgable and active in the eCommerce community. Ask them about their newsletter.


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