Learn how to set up abandoned cart recovery, inventory alerts, and customer review automation for your Shopify store in under a day.
Ecommerce automation is one of the highest-ROI investments you can make for your store. Even a single, well-built workflow can pay for itself inside the first month. In this guide we walk through the three automations we install for almost every Shopify client — and the exact configuration we use to make them work without babysitting.
You do not need an engineering team to ship any of this. Most of the wiring lives in n8n (or Make / Zapier if you prefer), and the Shopify side is a handful of webhooks and a tagging convention.
1. Abandoned Cart Recovery
On average, 70% of shoppers who add items to their cart never complete the purchase. A well-timed recovery sequence will reliably bring back 15–25% of those carts. The trick is to make the sequence feel personal, not pushy, and to stop the moment the customer converts.
Our default flow is a three-touch sequence — email at 1 hour, SMS at 24 hours with a small incentive, and a final email at 72 hours focused on the product itself rather than the discount. Every step checks the order status first; if the cart converts, the rest of the workflow is cancelled automatically.
The biggest wins come from two small details: writing the SMS message in plain customer language ("hey, the size you picked is still in stock — want me to hold it?") and only offering a discount on the second touch. Discount-first sequences train customers to abandon on purpose.
2. Inventory Low-Stock Alerts
Running out of stock without warning is one of the most avoidable problems in ecommerce. You only realise it has happened once the first frustrated support ticket arrives, and by then you have already lost the sale and most of the customer's goodwill.
We set up an n8n cron that polls Shopify's inventory API every hour and compares each SKU against a configurable threshold. When stock drops below the threshold, the workflow posts to a dedicated Slack channel with the SKU, current quantity, and a one-click button to draft a reorder PO in your supplier-facing Google Sheet. For your top 20% of SKUs we usually wire in a second, lower threshold that triggers an immediate Twilio call to whoever is on-call that week.
A good rule of thumb: set the threshold to two weeks of demand for fast movers, and one week of demand for the long tail.
3. Customer Review Automation
Most stores never ask for reviews, or they ask at the wrong moment. The right moment is roughly 3 days after the customer has actually received the product — long enough to have used it, short enough that the experience is fresh.
The workflow listens for the "fulfilled" webhook, waits for the carrier's delivery confirmation, then waits 72 hours more before sending a personalised review request. If the email goes unopened for 3 days, we send a single SMS reminder. We never send more than two touches; review fatigue kills future open rates across the rest of your email programme.
Clients running this exact sequence typically see a 3× lift in review volume within 60 days, with no measurable hit to email deliverability.
Putting It All Together
If you only ship one of these, ship abandoned cart recovery — it almost always pays back the setup cost in week one. The other two compound over time: inventory alerts protect your gross margin, and review automation compounds into long-term conversion lift.
None of these workflows should take more than a working day to set up if you already have Shopify and an automation tool connected. If you want us to handle the entire setup end-to-end, we typically ship the full stack inside one calendar week.