Shopify Flow: diving deep into ecommerce automation at scale
A hallway chat between Shopify and Submarine.
The full power of Shopify Flow and why merchants aren't harnessing it
While merchants leverage Shopify Flow for some workflow automation, developers can harness its full potential by extending its capabilities through API integrations and custom logic. But many stores underutilise Flow’s capabilities, leading to inefficiencies in automation and a lot of manual work.
Submarine's founder & CEO Gavin Ballard sat down with Paul Nuschke (Product Leader for Shopify Flow) and Rolando Peñate (Staff Product Manager for Shopify Flow) to talk about why it's a game changer for everyone in the Shopify ecosystem.
What Makes Flow a Game-Changer
For many merchants and partners, including us at Submarine, Shopify Flow has revolutionized how we approach customization and integration. As our founder shared during the chat:
"For us, it's really been a game changer in terms of avoiding the need to build like a one on one integration with a whole bunch of other systems. And because we're a platform and an app that is really focused on flexibility and we're coming into situations where merchants want to do really specific things for us, it's been really handy being able to say, okay, well, we don't have a direct integration with Klaviyo, for example, but we do have all of these prebuilt flows that we've been able to put together."
This flexibility enables merchants to create custom solutions without having to rely on direct integrations between every app in their stack. Flow acts as the connective tissue of the Shopify ecosystem, allowing disparate systems to work together seamlessly.
The power of Flow in the Shopify ecosystem
Paul Nuschke explained how Flow's position in the ecosystem has evolved:
"What's particularly interesting is how Flow connects the entire ecosystem without requiring point-to-point integrations To me, this is one of the biggest long term values of Flow is how it can connect the whole ecosystem without each of the individual apps having to write point to point integrations with each other. So the more people that build on flow, the more valuable it becomes for that, because it just has all the things already."
This network effect is powerful — as more apps and partners build with Flow, the entire ecosystem becomes more flexible and interconnected.
Flow's Growing Capabilities
Over the past year, Shopify Flow has become increasingly powerful with new features that expand what merchants can accomplish without custom code.
"So many of the customisation use cases that we're trying to solve for can now be achieved with Flow because it has been getting more and more powerful in the background with additional triggers and actions like the send API admin or admin API request tool. With these new capabilities, merchants can now handle more complex scenarios without leaving the Shopify ecosystem. 80% percent of the things that we might originally have turned to a custom serverless function to solve for a specific version use case, we can now get into Flow, which is actually really pretty exciting. The recent addition of the "Run Code" feature has been particularly transformative, allowing merchants to incorporate custom logic into their workflows."
The scale of Shopify Flow today
The scale at which Flow is currently operating is impressive. According to the Shopify team there's about 800,000 merchants that have active workflows!
"And that's just the beginning! Effectively all merchants are actually running on flow because we power 'abandoned checkout'. And that's basically all merchants have that enabled. So scale wise that's millions of merchants who are doing many of those events."
This massive scale demonstrates Flow's importance in the Shopify ecosystem and its reliability as a platform for business-critical automations.
How we're using Shopify Flow at Submarine
At Submarine, we've embraced Flow as a central part of our platform.
"Because we have that focus on flexibility and customization. One of the big things that we're quite excited about building into our platform is sort of similar to Shopify Functions but for the specific domain that we work in. And in the past 6 to 12 months our thinking on that has evolved a little bit where for anything that will work asynchronously, we're way better off just investing in the flow integration, making that as good as it possibly could be. "
Popular use cases & future potential
While marketing automation has been a major driver of Shopify Flow adoption, there are many other exciting use cases emerging.
"Some of the ones that I've kind of seen are the loyalty or merchandising, like flows that automatically adjust how products are merchandised based on inventory, for example. So, like, this is a low stock item, let's, like, demerchandise it from the site or or push it up because we want to get rid of the inventory."
Paul Nuschke also highlighted the power of Shopify Flow for working with metafields.
"Flow is a superpower for metafields because you can automatically get data into a metafield using flow, whereas you can't really do that any other way."
The road ahead for Shopify Flow
The Shopify team shared some exciting developments on the horizon, including:
Better observability and debugging tools
"The test observability work we have coming up might be useful to a lot of partners and service partners to really get a better sense of what their flows are doing and how to debug them."
Enhanced education and implementation resources
"We are working a lot more with the external education and implement team to put a lot more content to help partners and merchants, especially service partners, get up to speed with using Flow."
Continued improvements to metafield integration
"We still have a little bit of metafield, meta object stuff coming. There's more we can do to make that better."
Shopify Flow as a first class citizen
At Submarine, we've come to view Shopify Flow as an essential component of the Shopify ecosystem.
"We kind of see Flow as a first class citizen of the platform the same way that we have all of our webhook endpoints or our GraphQL API. We spend just as much time with the Flow integration."
For merchants, Shopify Flow offers a way to create custom solutions without expensive development work, and for deeply integrated partners like us, it provides a powerful tool for us to help merchants scale and streamline while maintaining ownership of it all.
Watch the entire chat here to learn more
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