For most Shopify store owners, it’s “the dream.” 

You come into the office, make a coffee, and with just a few clicks are able to watch your entire store run before your eyes — from marketing and sales, through inventory management, order fulfillment and delivery — every moving part of your business has been set up to run on autopilot with automation. 

And your only job is to watch the revenue roll in. 

What if this wasn’t just a dream? What if the tools existed today to turn end-to-end e-commerce automation into a reality? 

E-commerce automation has become more prevalent in recent years

According to Hubspot, 79% of businesses report using automation for marketing. 

The rise of automation is influencing how companies are hiring as well, with McKinsey citing hiring of experts in automation and AI has increased 35% since the start of the pandemic. According to Forrester, marketing automation alone is predicted to receive 9.3% of the budget of companies, compared to total services at 10.2% of budget. 

Among the most common applications marketers believe should be automated, bid adjustments (62%), retargeting (47%) and Ad testing (40%) are in the lead. Audience segmentation (31%) also makes up a significant share. 

When designing the Order Tags & Flows and Customers Tagging apps for Shopify merchants, automation was top-of-mind for the Shop Circle team. 

These apps enable store owners to harness the power of automation both in terms of order management and workflows and customer segmentation. Before discussing an exciting new integration with Zapier that takes automation to the next level, let’s get to know each. 

Order Tags & Flows: The app that makes order fulfillment easy

It’s typically great news for e-commerce merchants when the orders start to roll in. Unfortunately, there’s often a lot of work to be done before they can pop the champagne and celebrate, especially if they are operating with a lean team. 

Traditionally, e-commerce merchants would spend countless hours manually managing each order. Though this may not seem like a big deal for a handful of orders, what if hundreds, or even thousands of orders start coming in? Without order management automation in place, the manual labor could quickly become unmanageable. 

Order Tags & Flows was designed to solve a specific business problem facing Shopify merchants: too much time being spent on order management tasks. 

Order Tags & Flows lets you:

Save time - By automatically tagging your orders to remove repetitive tasks.

Be organized - By creating unlimited workflows and adding tags to orders to stay organized.

Streamline fulfillment - By instantly knowing what to do with each order from your Shopify admin page.

If Order Tags & Flows is your extra star employee for order management, Customer Tagging is your customer segmentation guru. 

Customer Tagging: The app that makes it easy to segment customers

If customer segmentation isn’t within your wheelhouse, you need to get on board. According to a recent study by Hubspot, segmentation email campaigns had 14.31% higher open rates and saw 101% more clicks than non-segmented campaigns.

Customer segmentation plays a key role in successful email marketing campaigns, with 77% of the returns from generation through email marketing coming from segmentation, targeted and trigger campaigns.

The Customer Tagging app was designed to help Shopify merchants leverage the power of automation and reduce the amount of time spent manually sorting customers. Organize and group all your customers into segments such as age, location, device, shopping behavior and more in order to send highly personalized email campaigns, offer exclusive sales or site access to individual segments, or run targeted campaigns and promotions. 

Customer Tagging lets you: 

Improve the ROI of email campaigns - By creating customer segments and applying and removing tags based on buyer behavior.

Better manage customers  - By using automation to streamline communication based on where customers are in their lifecycle.‍

Trigger actions - By influencing your email list and using tags to trigger actions across different marketing platforms.

Shop Circle + Zapier integration takes automation to the next level

Now you can do more with Order Tags & Flows and Customer Tagging. A new integration with Zapier allows you to connect these Shop Circle apps to thousands of other popular apps,  creating end-to-end automated workflows — with no coding required.

Here’s how Zapier works.

Zapier connects apps to other apps and allows you to set up triggers and actions to combine and automate business processes. 
Think of a trigger as anything that kicks off an automated process between apps, causing an action. The act of a trigger causing an action is called a zap.

In this example a new lead from Facebook triggers multiple actions, including notifying the team and sending a conditional email flow. 

But the real magic happens when hundreds of leads come in while you are asleep. With the ability to set up hundreds of triggers and actions between thousands of different apps, the possibilities for creating automated responses to triggers are virtually endless.

The zap editor is codeless and makes it easy for anyone to set up zaps, saving all the time in the world for team members who would ordinarily have to manually set up each action. 

Thanks to a recent integration with Zapier and Shop Circle, the power of automation is infinite. 

Imagine setting up triggers based on customer segments or order tags that trigger powerful sequences of actions based on highly personalized criteria. 

“The integration with Zapier expands the functionality of the apps, allowing actions to be completed once the order has successfully been tagged. Imagine a customer getting added to an email marketing flow once they hit a certain lifetime spend threshold. The possibilities are endless” - Brett Mikulik, Product Manager, Shop Circle 

Check out how you can connect Order Tags & Flows to more than 5,000 apps. 

The possibility to put your entire business on auto-pilot is now a reality with Shop Circle and Zapier. So your team can spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on what matters most, driving the high-level strategy of your brilliant brand or business idea.