← All guides · By Agents4Ecom · Published Oct 14, 2026

What Is Shopify Flow (and Is It Free?)

Shopify Flow is Shopify's own automation app: you pick a trigger (something that happens in your store or a scheduled time), optional conditions, and actions Shopify takes for you, like tagging an order or emailing you. Yes, it's free. It's a free app on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans. A few features are plan-gated, most notably the "Send HTTP request" action, which needs Grow or higher.

If you've never opened Flow, this guide covers what it is, what it can and can't do on a small plan, and how to build a first workflow in about 15 minutes.

What does Shopify Flow actually do?

Shopify describes Flow as an ecommerce automation platform that "monitors your store for events and lets you create a sequence of actions that are taken in response." In practice, every workflow has three parts:

• Trigger: what starts the workflow. Examples: Order created, Order paid, Product variant inventory quantity changed, or Scheduled time (run every Monday at 8am).
• Condition (optional): a yes/no check, like "is the inventory now 5 or lower?" or "is the order total over $200?". The workflow follows a True or False branch.
• Action: what Flow does. Examples: Add order tags, Add product tags, Send internal email, Hold fulfillment order, Get order data, Count, Sum.

Think of it as "when X happens, if Y is true, do Z", running 24/7 inside your store without a separate tool or login.

Is Shopify Flow free?

Yes. According to Shopify's Help Center, Flow is "a free app available on the Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Plus plans." You install it from the Shopify App Store, and then it lives in your admin under Apps.

What's not the same on every plan:

• Send HTTP request (calling an outside web service or API) is only available on Grow, Advanced and Plus.
• Tasks from custom partner apps are Plus-only.
• Usage limits follow your plan's API limits, so very high-volume Plus stores can do more per minute than a Basic store.

For most small stores, that means everything internal (tags, emails to yourself, scheduled reports, holding risky orders) works on Basic. What you can't do on Basic is call an AI model or an outside API directly from inside Flow. That's why the beginner recipes on this site only use Flow's built-in actions and keep any AI step as a copy-paste prompt.

What can a small store use Flow for?

A few jobs that work on Basic with built-in actions only:

1. Low-stock alerts. Get an email when a variant drops to your reorder point, and tag the product low-stock. See our low-stock alert guide.
2. Stuck-order digests. Every morning, email yourself a list of paid orders still unfulfilled after 2 days. See how to get a stuck-orders alert.
3. Weekly KPI email. Every Monday, count last week's orders and sum revenue, then email it to yourself.
4. High-risk order holds. When Shopify's fraud analysis rates an order high risk, hold fulfillment and tag it so it doesn't ship before you check.
5. Customer tagging. Tag repeat or high-spend customers so you can filter them later.

Shopify also publishes a library of ready-made templates, including "Send email summary with all unfulfilled orders older than 2 days" and "Send weekly email summary with list of low stock variants." Templates are a great place to start, because you edit something that already works.

For more ideas, see Shopify Flow examples for small stores.

What can't Shopify Flow do?

Knowing the limits saves you an evening of frustration:

• It can't email your customers freely. "Send internal email" goes to you or your staff. Flow has a few customer-facing actions tied to specific Shopify emails (like sending an order invoice or a payment reminder), but it has no general "email this customer anything" action.
• No outside calls on Basic. Without Send HTTP request, Basic stores can't push data to Slack-like webhooks, Google Sheets endpoints or AI APIs from inside Flow. Some apps add their own Flow actions, which do work.
• "Get data" steps have caps. The Get order data action returns at most 100 results per step, so a weekly report for a store with 300 orders a week will undercount.
• Scheduled workflows run at most every 10 minutes. Shopify limits the Scheduled time trigger to a minimum 10-minute interval.

How do you build your first workflow?

Here's a simple, safe first workflow: an email to yourself when stock runs low. It changes nothing customers see.

1. In your Shopify admin, open Apps → Shopify Flow. If you don't see it, install the free Shopify Flow app from the Shopify App Store.
2. Click Create workflow.
3. Choose the trigger Product variant inventory quantity changed.
4. Add a Condition: the variant's inventory quantity is at or below your reorder point (for example 5) and the prior inventory quantity was above it. The second half stops you getting an email on every single sale.
5. On the True branch, add the action Add product tags with the tag low-stock.
6. Add Send internal email, put your email as recipient, and write a subject such as "Low stock: {{product.title}}". Paste Liquid text in one go rather than typing it, because the editor auto-closes braces.
7. Name the workflow, click Turn on workflow, and confirm Turn on in the dialog.
8. Test it: change a test product from 10 units to 3 and Save the product. Within about a minute you should see the email, the tag, and a success under Recent runs.

That's a real automation running in your store. Our Low-Stock Reorder Alert recipe is the finished, live-tested version, with copy-paste settings, a supplier reorder note and troubleshooting. With the recipe you skip the build: download, import, add your email, turn on, in about 5 minutes. (Shopify signs Flow files, so you type your email once.)

How do you know a workflow is working?

Every workflow has a Recent runs list. Each run shows whether the trigger fired, which branch the condition took and whether each action succeeded. When something doesn't happen, check there first. The usual culprits are:

• The condition evaluated to False (wrong threshold, wrong field).
• The workflow was never fully turned on (the confirmation dialog was skipped).
• Your test didn't actually fire the trigger (for example, you edited inventory but didn't click Save).

A good habit: write down a "done when" test before you build. For the low-stock example: "done when I get one email, not two, after dropping a test product below 5."

Where does AI fit in?

Flow on Basic doesn't call an AI model by itself. The practical pattern for beginners is:

1. Flow gathers the data and emails it to you (orders, stock, stuck orders).
2. You paste that email into ChatGPT or Claude with a ready-made prompt ("draft a reorder note to my supplier", "summarize what changed this week and give me 3 actions").

That's still a big time saving, because the boring part (collecting the data every day or week) is fully automatic. Once you outgrow it, tools like Make, Zapier or n8n can add an automated AI step. We compare them in Make vs Zapier vs n8n for Shopify.

FAQ

Is Shopify Flow really free?

Yes. Shopify lists Flow as a free app on the Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus plans. You pay for your Shopify plan, not for Flow.

Do I need to know how to code?

No. You build workflows by picking triggers, conditions and actions from menus. Some text fields accept Liquid variables like {{order.name}}, which you can copy from a guide.

Can Flow send emails to my customers?

Not freely. "Send internal email" is for you and your staff. A few actions send specific Shopify emails (like an order invoice), but there's no general customer-email action.

Which Flow features need a higher plan?

Send HTTP request needs Grow, Advanced or Plus. Custom partner app tasks need Plus. Usage limits also scale with your plan.

How often can a scheduled workflow run?

At most once every 10 minutes, and at least once a year, per Shopify's documentation for the Scheduled time trigger.

Next step

Not sure which workflow to build first? The free AI audit reads your public storefront (catalog, stock, product pages and visible apps) and lists the top 5 jobs worth automating, each linked to a step-by-step recipe. No login, no app install.

Related guides

• Shopify Flow Examples for Small Stores: 10 Workflows That Work on Basic
• How to Set Up a Low-Stock Alert in Shopify (Free, With Shopify Flow)
• AI Agents for Shopify: What They Are, What They Aren't, and the Easy First Step
• All automation recipes