Order ready to fulfill

Paid equals false

Hold fulfillment order

Ecommerce
Automation 101: Fulfillment
Speed up fulfillment with workflow automation

Fulfillment is at the heart of your customer’s experience and in today’s climate, customers
expect orders to arrive accurately and quickly. Adding to this pressure, is the fact that
ecommerce brands incur logistics costs of up to 15% of their total business, whereas traditional
retail stores are below 5%. Further to this reality, as a business scales, so does the complexity oftheir logistics operations, making it critical for brands to find ways to streamline the fulfillment
process and ensure customers have a positive experience.

We know the level of care that you put intochecking your orders to ensure accuracy.
We also know that this effort can be a very
time-consuming and error-prone manual
process. In fact, on average, manuallychecking orders can add up to a full day
delay to getting orders out the door, greatly
increasing the time it takes to arrive at yourcustomer’s doorstep. Based on data from
Shopify's Future of Commerce Report from2021, 37% of online shoppers are frustrated
when shipping takes too long. In addition,
67% of US customers expect either same-,next-, or two-day delivery.

Ecommerce automation can streamline tedious, repetitive tasks so you can get back to focusing
on how to grow your business. With Shopify Flow, you can satisfy customer expectations bysetting up custom workflows to fully automate the order review and fulfillment process.
For example, you could build automations that automatically:• Move orders that are ready to ship to the fulfillment stage• Hold orders that require more attention before shipment• Tag orders by their shipping method• Prepare draft shipping labels• Send follow-up messages for orders that didn’t ship on time
Regardless of the situation, ecommerce automation can help speed-up, and simplify
fulfillment operations.

“The biggest limitation of Flow is your imagination, and the things I’ve
been able to automate have been game-changers for our operations.”
Jacob Lambert | Landyachtz Skateboards

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 if
the condition is met.

Here’s what that might look like for a workflow that automatically assesses fulfillment requests:• Trigger: An order is ready to fulfill.
• Condition: If the order requires shipping and if the order is paid.
• Action: Send the fulfillment request and ship the order.

Prepare draft shipping labels
If you are taking advantage of all thegreat benefits of Shopify Shipping, with
Shopify Flow you can set up workflows to
automatically prepare draft shipping labels
based on where the order is being fulfilledfrom (currently limited to the U.S., Canada andAustralia) and by the buyer’s shipping method,
product and weight.
Install Shopify Flow now, then get
started below.

Send a message if an order isn’t
shipped on-time
Several unforeseen hiccups can occur during
an order’s lifecycle – keep a tab on things
by automatically tracking and notifying
your fulfillment center about orders thathaven’t shipped within 2 days or the specifictimeframe that you have established. This
template helps ensure your orders are
fulfilled on time based on your service
level agreement.
Install Shopify Flow now, then get

Get started with the U.S. template
Get started with the Canada templatestarted below.
Get started with the template

Get started with the Australia templateTag orders by their shipping method
Request or hold fulfillments based on
specific criteria
Whether you are self-shipping or
outsourcing your fulfillment process,you can set up preset conditions toautomatically hold fulfillments based onrisk level (i.e. order value, payment status,
location of delivery, etc.) and automaticallysend notifications to a third party to request
fulfillment of orders that are ready to ship.
Install Shopify Flow now, then get
started below.
Get started with the template

Quickly identify and sort orders based on
their shipping method. Using this workflow,orders are automatically tagged so you canensure that fulfillment is prioritized based on
customers that have requested expedited vs.
standard shipping methods.
Install Shopify Flow now, then get
started below.
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 completedby Flow

With more people turning to online shopping, reliable and fast fulfillment has become an
important factor that will differentiate your business from competitors. Shopify Flow helps youstreamline and reduce the manual work that comes with managing the end-to-end fulfillment
process, giving your business the speed and agility to meet customer delivery expectations.
Although we highlighted four fulfillment use cases in this playbook, there are many more prebuilt workflows available in the Shopify Flow template library. Additionally, remember that Flowtemplates can always be tailored to meet your needs—meaning you can always adjust things
like wait times, condition variables or tags to meet your needs.

Get Flow