Inventory quantity changed

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Automation 101: Inventory
Use the power of automation to effectively
manage inventory

Effective management of inventory has a direct impact on the overall profitability of yourbusiness. As your business scales and your assortment grows, tracking inventory can take up
a lot of time and can prove to be quite challenging, especially for business owners that arewearing multiple hats. Automation helps drive efficiencies within your inventory management
process, resulting in a clearer and more accurate picture of your inventory levels. With workflow
automation you can keep a close eye on demand fluctuations to help you properly meetcustomer expectations.

Poor inventory visibility is one of the biggest
challenges that businesses face when it
comes to inventory management. Having
poor visibility of your inventory can resultin stockouts, over ordering of inventory,and overselling. These factors not only
drastically increase costs—driving down
profitability—but also negatively impact yourcustomers' experience when engaging withyour brand.

Automation helps you gain an accurate
account of your stock, and streamline
your inventory management processes byimproving the overall flow of inventory fromsuppliers, to your warehouse(s), and finallyto your customers. Shopify Flow has several
inventory management templates for you tochoose from based on your business needs,
making it easier to properly manage yourinventory and efficiently get your products in
the hands of your customers.

“Usual stock management involves human involvement, but by using
Shopify POS and setting up Flow, we have now shaved a huge amountof time and eliminated human error. When dealing with a catalog of
6,000-7,000 products, that’s incredibly helpful. Flow makes it easy.”
Panos Voulgaris, Creative Director

Shopify Flow was built to help brands create the custom workflows that they need to automate
tasks, processes, and campaigns within their store and across their apps.
Flow is based on a simple, no-code “trigger, condition, and action” format. Basically, a “trigger”
is an event that Flow looks out for and which sets an automation in motion. A “condition” is therule that determines if an action should occur, and the “action” is the task that is completed ifthe condition is met.

Here’s what that might look like for a workflow that automatically assesses real-timeinventory levels:• Trigger: Inventory quantity changed.
• Condition: If inventory is less than 10.
• Action: Send an email to reorder the product.
Empowering brands of all technical skill levels, Flow lets you quickly and easily install pre-built
workflows or create entirely custom ones, all without needing to touch a line of code.

Remove products from collections after
a set period of time

Hide limited edition products aftera drop

One of the most popular collections that we
see leveraged on Shopify is for New Arrivals.
This section is often the go-to spot for loyal
customers to check, especially if your brandhas regular product drops. However, you’relikely to alienate loyal customers pretty quickly
if you don’t keep this collection up-to-date.
That’s where ecommerce automation can help.
Instead of manually updating the collection
with new products, any newly released item is

Build excitement for your brand by creating
a sense of urgency and scarcity withlimited release drops. Use this workflow toautomatically hide unsold inventory after thespecific window of time you set has ended,ensuring customers can't buy these exclusive,
special edition items beyond the dates thatyou established.

automatically tagged and added to the New
Arrivals collection. Then, after 30 days the‘new’ tag is removed and the item is removed
from the collection, letting you put yourrelease schedule on autopilot.

Get started with the template

Get started with the Total Spend template

Get notified when inventory is low

Standardize tagging for new products

Stay on top of your inventory management
and be sure to reorder items as stock
becomes low. Flow will automatically notify
your inventory team to reorder low stock
items, as well as notify your marketing team
to pause efforts for products that are nearlyout of stock. In addition, this workflow will
add a low-stock tag which could be displayedon your store to create a sense of urgency
among your customers.

Gain a better understanding of sell-throughfor new items by standardizing merchandisingfor new products based on title, SKU, colorand more. This organization will enable abetter understanding of customer demand
for new products (e.g., what is working welland what is not working well) to inform futurebuying decisions.

Get started with the template

Get started with the templateWhatever your business needs—build it.

1B+

Automated decisions
each month

150+

Custom use cases
solved every week

34K+

Unique jobs completed
by Flow

Whether your brand is big or small, proper inventory management is critical in building a longlasting business. Accurately managing the flow of inventory positively impacts several areasof your business, from reducing operating costs to the ability to fulfill orders correctly and ontime. Through automation you can take the manual work out of this process, reducing errors
and inaccuracies, giving you back time to focus on other areas of your business.
Although we highlighted four inventory management use cases in this playbook, there are many
more pre-built workflows available in the Shopify Flow template library. Additionally, rememberthat Flow templates can be tailored to meet your needs—meaning you can always adjust things
like wait times, condition variables or tags to optimize your experience.

Get Flow