Author: Sherwin Ramezani, July 15, 2025
What is Shopify Flow?
Shopify Flow is an event-based automation tool that helps merchants streamline tasks like inventory management and customer engagement. Using a trigger-condition-action model, it powers custom workflows that respond to events in real time. Updated regularly since launch, it now handles over 1 billion decisions each month, saving merchants an estimated 3.2 million hours.
Core Components:
- Triggers - Events that initiate a workflow (e.g., an order is created, a customer registers)
- Conditions - Logic gates similar to if/else statements in programming
- Actions - Operations performed when conditions are met
What's new in Shopify Flow?
The Horizons Summer 2025 update transformed Flow's capabilities through several key enhancements:
1. Metaobject Access in Shopify Flow
Flow now provides comprehensive tools for working with metaobjects in workflows through new actions:
- Get metaobject entry - Retrieves a single entry by handle
- Get metaobject entries - Retrieves a list of entries for a metaobject from your store
- Metaobject entry created trigger - Triggers workflows when new metaobject entries are created
These actions enable sophisticated data storage and retrieval patterns, such as:
- Managing fraud deny lists queried from Flow for automated order cancellation
- Storing product configuration data in metaobjects for batch updates
- Creating dynamic product catalogues with complex business rules
Learn more about metaobjects in our blog post about complex content structures.
2. Secrets Management
Shopify Flow now includes a dedicated secrets management interface that allows:
- Secure Storage: Secrets such as API keys, access tokens, and passwords are encrypted and obfuscated
- Template Parsing: Reference secrets in workflows using template syntax: {{ secrets.foobar }}
- Enhanced Security: Eliminates the need to hardcode sensitive credentials in workflow configurations
3. Enhanced HTTP Request Capabilities
The improved Send HTTP request action represents a major advancement:
Key Features:
- Data Return: HTTP responses can now be returned to the workflow for use in subsequent actions
- Secret Integration: Securely configure requests with encrypted credentials
- Response Parsing: Full HTTP responses are available for processing
This represents a shift in Flow's architecture, moving from one-way communication to enabling bidirectional data exchange
4. Additional Enhancements
Support Nested 'For Each' Loops: Enables more complex and granular automation workflows by iterating over lists within lists, allowing processing items within orders or handling multiple customer attributes simultaneously.
Improved Template System: Allows merchants to create, customise and share powerful automation workflows with pre-built templates.
Sample Data Support: Shopify now supports the use of sample data within variables, allowing you to test workflows more effectively before going live.
Advanced Practical Examples:
Here are some practical examples of what some of these new capabilities may enable.
1. Dynamic Pricing Adjustments
Automatically update product prices based on competitor data.
- Trigger: Scheduled Daily
- Action: Send HTTP GET to a price comparison API
- Condition: If competitor's price is 10% lower
- Action: Trigger webhook or backend app to update product price.
Note: This requires a backend to change the product prices via the admin API.
2. ERP / OMS Integration
Send new orders directly to your ERP or OMS system
- Trigger: Order Created
- Action: Send HTTP POST with order payload to ERP/OMS
Error handling:
- Condition: Parse the response to check for confirmation or failure
- Action: Tag order or alert the ops team based on the outcome
3. Metaobject-Driven Catalogue Rules
Use structured data to drive merchandising and tagging. This could be used to dynamically apply merchandising badges like "Best Seller" or "Limited Stock" based on business logic stored in meta-objects.
- Trigger: Metaobject entry created or updated (E.g. "product tagging rules").
- Action: Retrieve the metaobject entry with details like product_reference_, badge_type, stock_threshold.
- Condition: Check if the product matches logic (e.g. inventory <5)
- Action: Add or update product tags or metafields (e.g. badge = "Limited Stock").
4. Intelligent Inventory Replenishment Alerts
Use nested loops to check variant-level inventory across multiple locations and flag products that need reordering based on custom re-order points.
- Trigger: Daily schedule at 6 AM
- Action: Search products with tag "track_inventory"
- For Each: Loop through products (up to 1000)
- For Each: Loop through product variants
- Condition: If variant inventory_quantity < variant.metafields.custom.reorder_point
- Action: Add tag "needs_reorder" to product
- Action: Update product metafield with reorder details (variant SKU, current stock, reorder quantity)
- Action: Send email to the purchasing team with variant details
- Action: Send Slack notification: "Low stock alert: [Product Title] - [Variant Title]"
See this reference article on how to trigger Slack notifications directly from within Shopify Flow!
Hearing your use cases
We'd love to learn how you and your team are using Shopify Flow today. Which of your flows are saving you the most time?