Shopify makes it easy to open a store. But once orders start coming in and your catalog, team, and customers grow, running that store becomes a lot more complex.
You’re tagging orders. Updating products. Notifying staff. Following up with customers. Sending reports. Fixing things that slipped through the cracks.
Most merchants don’t need more hours. They need fewer repetitive tasks.
That’s why we created this series: What You Should Automate in Shopify.
In the posts that follow, we’ll walk you through real, practical workflows that help you replace busywork with automation — so your store runs smoother, your customers stay engaged, and your team can focus on what actually moves the business forward.
Why Shopify automation matters right now
Most stores, even successful ones, are still doing way too much by hand.
Manual tasks slow you down
Tagging orders after they’re placed. Cleaning up out-of-stock products. Copy-pasting customer notes. Checking in on fulfillment status manually. These aren’t edge cases. They’re part of daily operations, and the odds are you’re even dreaming about them.
The problem is, they don’t scale. As you grow, these same tasks pile up and pull you away from strategic work.
Automation increases consistency
Automated Workflows don’t forget. They don’t delay. They don’t miss edge cases. When you set up a rule once, it runs instantly and correctly every time — no matter how many orders come in or who’s online.
That means fewer mistakes, faster fulfillment, and better internal communication.
You don’t need to automate everything
The goal isn’t to remove people, despite what doom and gloom social commentary might say. The goal is to remove friction.
You’ll still talk to customers. You’ll still make decisions. But the repetitive steps that slow your team down? Those can be handled automatically in the background on a daily basis.
What this series covers
Each post in this series focuses on a different part of your store, so you can automate one area at a time and build a system that fits how you actually work.
Part 1: Automate your Shopify orders and fulfillment
We’ll show how to tag orders based on value, content, or shipping method. You’ll learn how to route them to the right fulfillment location, notify your team in real time, and monitor fulfillment status without checking dashboards all day.
Part 2: Automate your customer lifecycle in Shopify
Once a customer buys, the real work begins. This post walks through how to tag new customers, recognize VIPs, personalize post-purchase flows, and re-engage dormant buyers — automatically.
Part 3: Automate your product and inventory management
Catalog maintenance is one of the most time-consuming parts of store operations. You’ll learn how to unpublish products when inventory runs out, schedule price updates, flag low stock, and remove outdated tags, all without manual cleanup.
Part 4: Automate team notifications and internal workflows
When your team is in sync, everything runs smoother. We’ll show how to send alerts to Slack or email, create tasks in Trello or Google Sheets, and trigger follow-ups for key order and customer events.
Part 5: Automate scheduled campaigns and store updates
This post covers time-based automations: from launching a sale at midnight to removing promotional tags after a weekend push. You’ll learn how to plan ahead and automate around launches, seasonal updates, and campaign windows.
Part 6: Automate your metafields and advanced store data
Use Workflows to update, sync, and manage metafields at scale, powering personalized experiences, advanced filtering, and cleaner backends without manual edits.
Part 7: Automate pre-launch and seasonal workflows
Build Workflows for new product drops, collection launches, and promotional events, from publishing to tagging to timing-specific changes that make campaigns smoother.
Part 8: Automate Shopify B2B and wholesale operations
Support your wholesale customers with Workflows that tag accounts, apply pricing logic, manage order flows, and trigger B2B-specific follow-ups automatically.
How to start automating with confidence
If you’re new to automation, don’t worry, you don’t need a complete system right away. You just need to solve one problem you deal with every week.
Look for repeatable patterns
Start by asking: what do I do more than twice a day?
Those are usually your best automation targets. It could be tagging new customers, sending team notifications, or organizing unshipped orders.
If it happens often — and follows a pattern — it can likely be automated.
Focus on small wins
You don’t have to build complex logic from day one. Start with a simple Workflow: tag an order, send a Slack message, remove a product from a collection. That one Workflow will save you time and attention every day.
Once it’s running, you’ll start seeing more things you can streamline.
Build momentum, not complexity
Smart stores don’t automate everything. They automate what matters: the tasks that are reliable, predictable, and repeatable. Start there. Then refine, expand, and connect your Workflows as your business grows.
Shopify automation is how smart stores scale
You don’t need to do more. You just need to do less of the wrong things.
Shopify automation helps your store stay clean, consistent, and responsive without relying on memory or manual input. The right Workflows let you move faster, deliver better experiences, and focus on growing, not just operating.
This series is designed to give you ideas, examples, and real Workflows to get started. And if you’re looking for a Shopify Workflow app that can help automate everything from customer segmentation to inventory cleanups, Arigato Automation gives you the flexibility to build it your way with less code to write, and less stress.