5 ways to increase profits using Flow on Shopify Plus

Is your Shopify Plus store suffering growing pains right now? Don’t listen to your friends that tell you that growing pains are a good problem to have. Growing pains are stressful and often cost you money. You know first hand that each stage of your business growth presents a new challenge.

So how do you scale without exploding?

By harnessing the power of automation. The biggest, most profitable Shopify Plus stores in the world are all using automation to maximise profitability and reduce overheads. It’s time you level up and join the leaders in the e-commerce industry.

The second habit in Steven Covey’s classic book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is, to begin with the end in mind. So that’s exactly what we are going to do with our approach to automation within Shopify. Here are the top five business outcomes that can be achieved with Flow on Shopify. Focus on the end benefit to your business and automation becomes a no-brainer.

1. Automation drives sales and increases the average customer lifetime value.

What if I told you that you could automatically send a custom discount code to customers after they make their second transaction. This can easily be done with Shopify Plus’s free Flow tool. The good news is, that is just the beginning.

Some of the biggest Shopify merchants are also using Flow to create personalised marketing messages based on customer purchasing behavior. An example of this would be emailing a customer when an item they once had in their shopping cart but didn’t buy is now on sale. Pretty cool right? There are so many possibilities with this and with cost to acquire new customers continuing to rise, its time to get creative with ways to increase the profitability from the customers we already have.

2. Reduce costs from fraudulent transactions

Transaction fraud is always going to be a part of e-commerce, there is no controlling that. What you can control is how much it becomes a part of your business. With billions of transactions taking place on Shopify every year, there are now automated ways to detect high-risk transactions.

Shopify Flow can create workflows that automatically detect orders that are defined as high risk. From this point, several things can happen. You could prevent the payment from being processed or you can place the order as the status pending and have someone in your team review it before processing the order. With this workflow in place, you will greatly reduce the number of fraudulent transactions that are processed on your Shopify store.

3. Protect your brand and products from negative reviews

As your Shopify store grows it can very difficult to track and manage all of the customer feedback and reviews. Positive reviews are great, but studies have shown that people are more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one. You know what would be great, anytime someone leaves a negative review a support ticket is created. The Shopify Flow and Gorgias integration make that possible.

The Flow and Gorgias integration opens up customer support automation possibilities that protect your brand longterm. It also makes your life much easier. Negative reviews impact conversion rates. This automation helps you combat this on auto-pilot.

4. Avoid losing sales from products being out of stock

With your range of products increasing, do you have systems in place to reduce or eliminate loss of sales due to products being out stock? Having products surprisingly out of stock hurts your bottom line and can also frustrate customers. There is definitely a time and place to limit stock availability to increase demand but you are walking a very fine line.

Shopify Flow gives you the power to be automatically notified when products are low in stock and even hide products based on inventory levels. This may sound like a small thing but inventory management can become a serious bottleneck in your Shopify store if you don’t have adequate systems in place.

5. Create custom experiences for your best customers

A recent study by Outbound Engine found that acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. What they also found was that simply increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 25%. Sounds exciting right? But how do we increase customer retention as your Shopify store begins to scale?

By automating personalised customer experiences.

Loyalty Lion has an integration with Flow that lets you personalise experiences for some of your best customers. For example, Loyalty Lion and Flow can create a workflow where the top 5% of your customers are sent a physical gift card for their birthday. These gift cards create a real incentive to make further purchases.

Automating this process makes your best customers feel like you are taking to time to think about them. They will thank you for it with extra purchases.

So that’s a high-level overview of why some of the biggest and most profitable Shopify stores are using automation to drive sales and increase profitability. Automation is becoming a major part of the conversation when Shopify merchants are planning a path to scaling in 2020. Are you going to join them?

If you have any questions about automation or would like help implementing automation within your Shopify store, feel free to contact us