by Fatema Mulla

Most Shopify Plus users are familiar with the platforms powerful Flow tool. With its wealth of automation and workflow features, Shopify’s Flow is ideal for high growth stores who have precious time to spare.

Most Shopify Plus users are familiar with the platforms powerful Flow tool. With its wealth of automation and workflow features, Shopify’s Flow is ideal for high growth stores who have precious time to spare.

With the peak Christmas trading period approaching quickly, it’s time for eCommerce managers to begin preparing for the peak retail period. With the last quarter of the year being the busiest, we’re always looking for ways to free up our workload.

Luckily, those on Shopify Plus have the opportunity to utilise the platforms highly useful Shopify Flow tool; an automation service that will allow brands to increase their efficiency and productivity ahead of the Christmas period.

Here are just some ways Shopify Plus’ Flow can automate your Christmas Trading:

1. Automate Inventory Management

Inventory management can be a stressful and challenging task during peak trading times, with stock moving fast during sales, meaning it must be updated regularly.

With Shopify Flow, inventory management is made much easier with its automation features. You can set up a workflow with specific conditions, so that inventory will be automatically updated and products re-ordered when stock falls low, or certain items go out of stock.

With inventory workflows in place, you can liaise with your vendor to automatically re-order products when stock falls below a certain level, ensuring that stock is kept replenished during your holiday sales and campaigns.

2. Automate Pricing and Promotions

Having to constantly update and change prices of products during sales events can take up precious time that may be better spent on more important business management tasks such as customer service or marketing.

Thankfully, with Shopify Flow, you can set up specific workflows to automatically adjust and update prices based on conditions you set.

For example, Flow can automatically adjust product prices for your VIP customers based on their tags, allowing you to set personalised discounts for your most loyal customers and reward them during the Christmas period.

3. Automate Customer Segmentation

Customer segmentation is made easier with Shopify’s Flow, enabling you to better target your customers during the holiday season. Set up workflows to automatically group your customers based on specific conditions.

Flow allows you to identify and automatically segment customers based on conditions such as lifetime spend, order history, location, campaign source etc. to drive marketing and sales initiatives. For example, this could then allow you to send personalised offers and upsell to your customers based on their order history and past purchases.

Flow helps to simplify your customer segmentation process by automatically grouping customers for you, allowing you to then easily go and create strategies to personalise campaigns for them.

4. Automate Repetitive Tasks

When it comes to busy retail and trading periods, the manual tasks seem to pile up, and the to do list is endless. Shopify Flow can help with the repetitive tasks and help to free up workloads during the busy retail period.

Set up workflows to automate manual tasks that can help to free up your time and allow you to focus your efforts on other aspects of your store, such as customer service, marketing and sales etc.

Shopify Flow can automate tasks such as adding relevant tags to newly added products, flagging up high risk products, hiding products that are out of stock, notifying the marketing team to pause ad campaigns for products that are low in stock etc.

5. Automate Customer Service

Keeping up with your customer service is of utmost importance, especially during such busy trading periods. From ensuring you provide a seamless and inspirational customer experience, to offering rewards and gifts to your VIP customers, there can certainly be plenty to take into account when it comes to providing excellent customer service during the holiday period.

But Shopify Plus’ Flow can be incredibly useful in allowing you to keep up with providing a consistent and excellent customer service. You can set up workflows that will automatically notify specific members of your sales team and prompt them to follow up with your top customers, ensuring that they are rewarded.

This can include prompting members to arrange follow up calls, send handwritten thank you notes or personalised welcome messages, or even invite top customers to loyalty programs. Flow can be an incredibly effective way to keep customer relationships strong during the Christmas season.

Free up Your Time With Flow

Shopify Plus’ Flow is a powerful and useful tool, even more so during busy periods such as the Christmas trading period. By using its automation features to schedule manual, time consuming tasks to free up time for the more important aspects, you can help you and your team work more efficiently and productively this Christmas season.

If you want to find out more about other Shopify Plus features and how it can help your store, just get in touch with our friendly team and we’ll be happy to help.

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