How to use Shopify Flow to automate pre-order workflows with Early Bird?

What is Shopify Flow?

Shopify Flow is a free but powerful tool that helps you automate complex tasks and niche processes within your Shopify store and across your apps, including Early Bird.

It monitors events in your store and lets you create custom workflows that trigger a series of actions based on specific conditions. This makes it easier for you to handle tasks that may not be supported natively by Shopify or other apps.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to use Shopify Flow to automate some of your pre-order workflows with our Early Bird app, giving you more control and efficiency over your pre-order processes.

You can learn more about Flow in the Shopify Help Center.

A screenshot of a Shopify Flow that automatically holds the fulfillment if a customer has placed a mixed cart order
An example Flow for automatically holding the fulfillment if a customer has placed a mixed cart order (i.e. an in-stock item + a pre-order item)

Creating Flows using Early Bird

Early Bird provides a number of triggers and actions within Flow to help with your pre-order processes and can extend the functionality of the app.

To create a flow, first make sure you have the Shopify Flow app installed on your store (this should come as a default for new Shopify stores).

You have the option to start from pre-built templates, but we're going to build our own Flow from scratch in this guide.

  1. Open Flow and click Create Workflow.
  2. Click Select a trigger to open the Flow interface and get started.
  3. You should see a list of available Triggers appear. You can browse through what's available from Shopify directly, and any app integrations you might have for apps which support Flow.
A screenshot of the Shopify Flow Select Trigger page, showing Shopify, Flow and pre-order app Early Bird's available triggers.
Shopify's own native triggers and any app integrations you might have which support Flow will show up here.

Example workflow: Notify your team when a customer signs up for a back-in-stock alert

For this guide, we'll use a simple Early Bird trigger that sends an internal email to your team whenever a customer signs up for a back-in-stock alert. (See the bottom of this article for other examples.)

  1. Click on the app and then select the relevant trigger (in this case Customer signed up for back in stock alert).
  2. You will see the first step in our Flow appear on the page. Clicking the + icon will show two options: Condition and Action.
A screenshot of Shopify Flow showing two options after clicking the + icon as the first step - condition and action.
Clicking the + icon as the first step in your Flow will show two options: Condition and Action.
  1. Let's start by adding a Condition. This can be anything you'd like, and is useful to narrow down when you want this Flow to execute. You can create complex branches using conditions, and chain them together however you like. For this example, we're going to set up our Flow so that it only notifies us for a specific product.
The second step in the Shopify Flow where we ask it to check if a customer has signed up for a specific product's back in stock alert before Flow should notify our internal team about it.
Take a look at all the available options, and consider how you might use this for your own Flow.
  1. We have the choice of branching from this condition, and dictating what happens when the condition is true, and when it is false.
  2. In our example, if the condition is false (i.e. the product isn't "My Example Product"), we just want the Flow to stop there, so we can leave that branch blank.
  3. When it's true, we want to run an action, so click the + icon next to Then, and select Action.
  4. You once again are presented with a list of apps which can perform an action. Click on Flow, and then Send internal email.
  5. From here you can enter the details of the email you want to send, including using variables to pull in relevant information.
Third step in the Shopify Flow where if a customer has signed up for a back in stock alert for a specific product it will trigger the shopify flow to send an internal email to a specific email address.
We've set the starting condition and the trigger condition, so the final step is to let Shopify Flow know what we'd like them to do if all conditions are met.

Different actions will have different variables available, depending on their context. You should have access to the entire customer and product objects for this action, so you can pull in the name, email or any other piece of information. You can even do this in conditions to create some complex Flows.

  1. Once your Flow is complete, click the Turn on workflow button in the top right corner. Click the confirmation and your Flow will be running!
  2. You can rename the Flow by editing the title at the top to keep things organised.

Now when a customer signs up for a Back in Stock notification via the Early Bird app, it will run through this Flow and send you a notification if the condition is met (you can also remove the condition if you want to receive a notification for every sign up).

Viewing previous workflow runs

Flow will log some useful information every time it runs a workflow. This can be used for debugging (e.g. checking why a Flow didn't behave as you expected), or auditing (e.g. checking when and how a Flow was processed).

To view previous runs, click on the workflow and look at the table underneath the main Flow diagram.

A screenshot of the table underneath the main Flow diagram showing all previous workflow runs in Shopify Flow.
In the table underneath the main Flow diagram, you can view all previous workflow runs.

Clicking on one of these runs will show a step-by-step of the logic followed by the Flow and what the result of each step was.

Screenshot of workflow run history showing a back in stock alert automation with failed condition check between product handles 'My Example Product' and 'the-out-of-stock-snowboard', demonstrating how to debug workflow execution
You can examine the Logic and Condition Verification when viewing previous workflow runs.

Other Flow examples

Here are a couple more examples of what you can automate using Shopify Flow to help with your pre-order processes:

Need help?

This help article only just scratched the surface of what Flow is capable of facilitating. Play around with the different triggers, conditions and actions to see what workflows you can start automating in your own store!

Got further questions about Flow or what other flows you can automate with Early Bird? Feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn or email us at support@shopside.com.au and we'd be happy to assist you with the set up.

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