For those first few minutes, you're living the dream: you've created your new Shopify store, added a product, showed it off to your friends, and... it happens. You make your first sale. After taking a Scrooge McDuck-style dip in your new pool filled with hard-earned cash, you realize: That needs to keep happening. To make your shop really successful, people (customers!) need to keep coming back to your store, and keep making new purchases.
So you do the follow-up! You email customers back about their orders, chase down shoppers who abandon their carts to entice them back, and meticulously handcraft new Instagram posts to show off your latest wares. You might even have a team working with you, who need to be kept updated on new orders coming in, so deliveries can be made on time.
With Shopify and Zapier, you can turn time-consuming manual parts of managing your online business into automated workflows called Zaps. The Zaps below can save you time, effort, and help you get back to the part of running your business that you enjoy most.
Shopify is a Premium app, and you'll need a paid Zapier account to use it with Zapier. You can test these Zaps out during your free two-week trial when you sign up.
Stay in touch with customers
Now that you've made the sale, following up with your customer is one of the best ways to make sure they come back for more. Whether you use an email newsletter app like Mailchimp, or a customer relationship manager (CRM) like HubSpot or ActiveCampaign, these Zaps can help you automatically add new customers to your email lists, so you can keep your them notified on all your latest offerings.
Learn how to create these Zaps in our tutorials for adding new Shopify customers to Mailchimp and how to automatically add Shopify customers to Salesforce.
Chase down abandoned carts
The phrase "abandoned cart" sounds so much more negative than it actually is. There's a lot of positives! It means that someone made it to your shop, liked something enough to add it to the cart, and just… didn't follow through.
It can happen for a lot of reasons, too. Maybe they don't have the funds just yet, or got distracted by something outside, or just forgot that they didn't check out! No matter the reason, following up on an abandoned cart can remind those potential customers what they're missing, and help turn those almost-sales into money in the bank. With a Zap, we can take care of that whole process automatically.
Promote new products
I have to make a personal confession: While I love making things, I'm often very bad at promoting them. But to have a successful retail business, promotion is essential. How else are people going to know about all the great stuff you're selling?
To save time and take the pain out of advertising your new products, these Zaps take new product information straight from your Shopify store, and automatically create new posts in all of your social media profiles.
Keep your team on track
Working with a team can be an amazing experience, or it can be like herding cats. We prefer the former, and these Zaps help make that happen by automatically taking new orders and providing your team with the information they need, when they need it.
Tip: The New Paid Order trigger lets you set specific options for Order Status, Payment Status, and Fulfillment Status, which help narrow down which orders trigger the Zap. While they're optional, we recommend filling them in to avoid accidentally reminding your team about the same order over and over again. For example, to have the Zap trigger after the order's been fully completed, set the Fulfillment Status option to "shipped".
Part of keeping everything running smoothly is keeping track of sales. Send information about paid Shopify orders to a spreadsheet or database so you can analyze purchases and use that information to understand customer preferences and trends.
If you'd like a little help getting started, check out our step-by-step walkthrough to send paid Shopify orderse to a Google Sheet.
Take your store to the next level
You've already done the hardest part of making a successful online business: Starting it up. Zapier is here to help make the rest as easy as possible, so you can focus on what really matters.
Run an online store, but not with Shopify? Zapier integrates with lots of other eCommerce apps to help save you time no matter where you work.
Taking your brick-and-mortar online?
This is an update of a piece originally published in October 2018 and authored by Jill Duffy.
