App Overview & Merchant Review
Unlocking Shopify Flow: Automation Insights with Paul Nuschke & Matti Pihlainen
In this bonus episode we dive deep into the world of Shopify Flow with two remarkable guests. Paul Nuschke, the Senior Product Lead at Shopify, and Matti Pihlainen, a successful merchant who implemented Flow at Full Cycle, join us to explore the power of automation in e-commerce.
Episode Highlights:
About Paul Nuschke:
Paul Nuschke is a leading figure at Shopify, responsible for the development and growth of Shopify Flow. With a passion for automation and efficiency, Paul has dedicated his career to creating tools that empower merchants to streamline their operations. Before joining Shopify, Paul had a diverse career in tech, contributing to several groundbreaking projects and innovations. His insights and expertise have made him a sought-after speaker and a respected voice in the e-commerce community.
About Matti Pihlainen:
Matti Pihlainen is a pioneering merchant and the owner of Full Cycle, a successful bike shop in Ottawa. Matti has creatively leveraged Shopify Flow to automate and optimize various aspects of his business, resulting in significant time savings and operational efficiency. His hands-on experience and innovative approach offer invaluable insights for other merchants looking to harness the power of Shopify Flow.
If you enjoyed this episode, please review and subscribe for more insights into the world of e-commerce and Shopify. Don’t forget to check out our previous episodes and follow our guests on social media for the latest updates and tips.
Additional Resources:
Kurt Elster
My friends, we've got a bonus episode for you. In this one, we're gonna take a deep dive into Shopify flow. We're gonna talk to a gentleman at Shopify who works on flow. And then we're gonna talk to a real life but tame merchant uh who who uses flow in some creative ways that I had not thought of or did not know was possible. And my fascination with Shopify Flow is its automation. I love my gadgets, I love my shiny toys, and automation has always scratched that itch. But in doing so, you know, when I'm done with it, when I make it work right, well heck, I've just saved a whole bunch of time, potentially for for myself or for a Shopify merchant or for uh that merchant's team. It's just it's deeply satisfying when it w works right. Yeah. Automation feels like magic, like superpowers to me at times. And uh Shopify Flow is my best guess is uh is probably one in five Shopify stores have it installed. Uh and you know everyone's gonna use it to different degrees. And so I want more people to explore it and try it because the chances are it's available to you and free. It's available on the the basic Shopify advanced and plus plans. And then within that, like there's a handful of features. that are gonna be locked to certain plans. Uh, but the majority are available across all plans. And the thing keeps it it's been around years now. It keeps getting updates. In Shopify additions just recently, if I do control F flow, it pops up 28 times. So let's talk through it. Let's hear from some folks. who are working on it, who are using it, and hopefully can can get you inspired to try it or maybe revisit it if you've already got it installed. Because it could do a lot, save you some time, and that's going to save you money. We're gonna hear from senior product lead, the man who is responsible for and building flow for us, Paul Nushka, and uh Shopify merchant who set up flow for a bike retailer full cycle Maddie P. Linan. And uh well, take it away. So Paul, who are you and what do you do?
Paul Nuschke
Yeah, uh I'm a product manager uh for Shopify. I work on the Flow product. Uh, which is a automation product.
Kurt Elster
Uh tell me tell me what is flow. I use it all the time. I don't think about it. I love it.
Paul Nuschke
Yeah, uh so so it's it's a way to um customize like how Shopify or your apps work. Um and it you do it through automation. So you like uh have a drag and drop like builder for building Uh especially what would be code if you were a developer. Uh but you have a drag and drop tool for buildings like workflows that Customize something about what you're doing in your store.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, well often I love it because it it's a it's a first party app and There's no subscription fee. Like it's part of your Shopify plan if it's in if it's available on the plan. You know, I can never keep straight which is which. The what plans is Flow available on? Do you know off the top of your head?
Paul Nuschke
Yeah, basic, advanced, Shopify plus.
Kurt Elster
So we use it I'm gonna use it probably At least weekly I mess with it and it's always in the background helping me out. Uh give me some example flows so we have an idea of what it's capable of.
Paul Nuschke
You have an order that comes in that's fraudulent. Uh Shopify runs like a risk like analysis But it doesn't actually like do something. It just gives you the information. So you can, when you're fulfilling or whatever, you can make use of that. A lot of people have like automated fulfillment. Uh more where like maybe say a day after it comes in, they'll like auto-fulfill it. So if you use flow uh in there, you can listen for from when that risk is done on that order, check if it's high risk or not. If it's high risk like 99 plus percent of the time, you just want to cancel it right there. Um and then it gives you if you for like a medium risk, maybe you want to like check it in like mandular or something like that. Uh and then low risk you might want to um just Move it to the next kind of part of your process.
Kurt Elster
I'm glad you you used that one as an example because when I s when I'm setting up flow for the first time in a store, we're setting up a you know a new store, a migrated store. That is that is probably like the one universal flow that every store ends up getting is hey we're not you know by default we're not gonna um authorize and accept charges on orders until Flow checks that risk status and then based on that is either going to notify the merchant, restock the order, or uh accept the charge and pass it through. That just saves a lot of time and headache.
Paul Nuschke
Yeah, low inventory is another good one. The interesting thing about inventory is like it it just depends like what you want to do. And what do you even consider a low inventory? Like if you're a a new merchant or a smaller merchant, maybe you have like one location. Uh maybe you don't even have variants might could be a big difference. Uh so like for instance a low stock could be I'm I'm just I sold out of this like one product thing that I have and I want to do something or sorry a low stock could be I have like two left or something like that. Um it if you have multiple locations, you may only care about the one that's like doing online fulfillment. Uh so like Uh you you you need a different low stock notification because you only care about the inventory of a variant that's at my online fulfillment location. And so the the awesome thing about having something like Flow is you can you can build any of that that you need. No matter what the circumstances are of like how you want to do that, you could like change, for instance, I want product specific, like or product type specific notifications. You can check if the product has a certain tag or or a certain meta feel.
Kurt Elster
I think the the difficulty with something like Shopify Flow is it is so open-ended that people don't necessarily take the time to try and play with it. And if like you just because it seems intimidating at face value, but the reality is because you have this visual editor uh and these pre-built templates. Like once you've seen how a few templates are built, it's pretty clear how to make it uh do what you want. And sure, like anything, it has its limitations. Um, but it's been around several years and over time I've seen it capabilities in terms of like triggers and integrations and all this stuff expanding. It's much more powerful now than when it first launched. Uh how long has Flow been around?
Paul Nuschke
Uh I don't know what the official count is. I it it's more than a few years. It's I think it's like seven now. Whoa.
Kurt Elster
All right. Didn't seem like that long.
Paul Nuschke
Yeah, yeah. So I I came to Shopify like about four years ago and it was already It was already a product. They were in the process of like you used to have like a pretty different looking editor that was pretty like rigid in terms of what you could do. Um and we we basically redid the editor, made it more flexible. It was also like limited in terms of how much data you could get. And uh kind of like one of the principles we're after with flow is we want to like be able to do all the sh the Shopify use cases you could throw at it. And the one one way I'm thinking about that is can you get all the data uh that is in Shopify? Uh right now it's like 99% of the data you can get. Uh Actions. Can you do all the actions that you want to do? Uh and then events. Can you like can you run it when you needed to run it?
Kurt Elster
Yeah, one of the the the triggers I have found myself using more often than I thought I would is um scheduled. Just like hey you're gonna and wait as well. Like putting in You know, making things chronologically based, like all right, you're gonna do this, then you're gonna wait X hours, or on this time you're gonna do this. Um to run Some batch processes. And I find the thing very helpful. And so I'm excited to know what's new with it. What are how are we expanding its capabilities this year?
Paul Nuschke
Yeah, so many new things. Like uh just to get along with what I was just saying, uh like we're trying to like the the worst experience you could have is like because when you when you come to flow, you're trying to to do something you couldn't do somewhere else. So the worst thing can happen is you come to Flow, you're like, ah, can't do it. Uh, right. Or you dig for an hour, you can't find it. So like the first part of our strategy with flow is we need it to be capable of doing the thing. And in in some cases, like there's this like a tension between powerful and extremely usable. Um, and so Like we want it to be usable because that's where like the real value is for every merchant, the most easy to use experience. But when you do that, you have to like remove features and to make the to make it understandable. You have to like boil it down to the essence. So what we're doing right now is making it capable. So you come into Flow, you can do it. So uh some some things we released recently, like run code is a good example of that. Can't do a condition, you can go into run code, write it in JavaScript, done. Now obviously it requires quite a bit of like technical skill uh to do that. Uh one thing that's coming out of this edition is uh s the ability to send an admin API request. So what that means is any mutation, which is like an action in the Shopify API, like uh update a customer, uh, will be callable from flow. So you just go in there, select the mutation, put in the data that's required for that action, and it'll it'll run. No API key required. Uh, and we handle like building the URL and paging and things like that for you.
Kurt Elster
Hmm. What uh what's your favorite use case for flow?
Paul Nuschke
Um it's there's a long tail of things people want to do with flow. And if it's something that's like maybe like three people, three merchants need this thing, is that worth is that worth like building a dedicated action for it and c and putting in the UI? And then like everybody else has to wade through that action, right? So because Frill Kaplo could have like 2,000 actions if we built every single thing as an action. So things like um with with by having access to mutations, you can you could change uh the product template. So like low stock, maybe when it goes low stock, I actually want to switch the template. to say, hey, the there's uh yeah now's the time to buy or this thing's gonna go away. Um so little dis and that's like one a single field in that mutation. We wouldn't probably wouldn't build that as a dedicated action, but
Kurt Elster
And they're they're so you're in you're in charge of flow, aren't you?
Paul Nuschke
Yeah, I'm I'm deep in flow.
Kurt Elster
So what are What are some of the the technical challenges you faced while developing flow and then you know overcoming them? Like I I it sounds like the big The the big troublesome thing is, you know, feature requests on any software, how do you prioritize? How do you decide like what's the one that this is what makes the cut?
Paul Nuschke
Yeah, it's tricky because like flow is a programming language. That's how I think about it. It's a visual programming language. And so like a lot of people think in terms of use cases, like that one I just gave you of changing the product template, but like that you wouldn't be able to build a feature into a programming language for one specific use case. So one of the tricks is how do you how do you think about building a programming language such that it can solve those use cases in an easy-use way? And that the same thing you're using to solve that is actually going to solve a bunch more problems for other use cases.
Kurt Elster
Clever. You know what's funny is that it's really hard.
Paul Nuschke
It's this it's like I don't I don't know there's no shortcut to it other than like going deep on it.
Kurt Elster
I never thought about it as its own programming language, which is really credit to like the ease of use of the app because it's got this visual builder. But when you think about it, it is you're right, it is. Like that must be what it it's outputting on the back end. Um, you know, like a visual representation in a programming language does the computer no good. That's for my benefit.
Paul Nuschke
Uh that's right. We we compile it down into machine language d like that it's its own programming language.
Kurt Elster
Are there ever I have never run into like memory or resource resource limitations with flow. Is it can I make enough flows that it finally they're like, all right, you're at your limit, buddy?
Paul Nuschke
Uh there are some bad things you could do to get yourself into that situation, yes. Uh and and one thing we've done actually is just uh making sure that we actually cap that uh so that people don't just like unfairly use up a lot of resources and things like that. A a common one that people get tripped up by is They'll try and select maybe like a product variable or something like that. They'll go in, they'll choose product. And because of the the way I don't know if you're familiar with GraphQL, but it's a you know it's It's a gr it's a tree of data and you can almost infinitely go through the tree. And flow gives you access to which is really powerful. Like if you use um zapier to um if you wanted to get like uh information that's related to a product, maybe like in a collection, you wouldn't be able to do it the way you would do it in Flow. You would have to actually fetch the code collection as a separate step. And then maybe use the the uh the data in another step after that. Flow, you can get all that data in a single step because when you go into flow's like environment like picker thing. You choose product. You see collections, you can choose collections. Now the the downside of that, which which is which happens sometimes, is people that will select collections and then product and then collections, because they're a little confused. about how like that data is structured. And so basically they're building an infinite almost an infinite loop where they're they're actually f trying to fetch all that data and it just won't fetch it. Because there's like an ATI limit for the the max like size of a fetch.
Kurt Elster
Right. It's trying to they're asking it to loop through loop through like, hey, go go look at every skew in a catalog, you know, in a a hundred thousand.
Paul Nuschke
It's like, all right, we give up now. Yeah. And then the the the thing that we're so meta fields is actually one where um so so when you when you have a list, like uh so product has meta fields on it, when you have a list, uh Yep, floor has an approach of looping over that list. Yeah, so look at this item, this item, and this item. So if you're going to check like a value field or something like that. Uh the problem with meta fields we were running into is people were putting HTML in each of those value fields, and then you could have a lot of meta fields on a single resource. So that was one other one we were hitting. And actually the one of the improvements we're we're we're launching at additions is the ability to access a single meta field, get its type. And use like that typed meta field in flow. So for instance, uh like a type might be it's a number field. So when you get it, flow knows it's a number. And then when you try to use it in conditions, uh you it it knows to like check it against other numbers or, you know, stuff like that.
Kurt Elster
So we're adding a little bit of like context error correction to it, which is nice, makes life easier. Um makes it harder to make flows that don't do anything. I will say when troubleshooting of like my approach to building a flow is number one I I don't want to build it. I search through your pre-built template library. Right. And yeah, even if I can't find exactly what I want, often I could find something close and then tweak that. And then should it not work the way I want, which you know A complex series of if-then-else logic, um, you could easily get yourself in trouble where it doesn't do quite what you want. The troubleshooting tools in flow I find very useful. being able to go like, hey, because it keeps a log, and then I could filter that log and go, all right, show me like only show me times you took an action. Only show me times you didn't take an action. Right. And then it tells you like, well, this was the condition that was unmet. That's very helpful. Yeah. The so I love those templates. Uh do we have new templates coming? I mean, I always want more.
Paul Nuschke
Yes. Yeah, in fact, I I have someone who's who's like exclusively looking at templates and making the template system better. Um, so 100%. Um One thing that we're actually doing is you can imagine there's like probably hundreds of thousands of use cases for flow. Um you can't like It's just like not feasible for a team to build all of those or whatever. But what is what is feasible is giving that power to developers. Like if you have an app that uh does subscriptions and you want your want to show people how to use your app in subscriptions with Shopify or to get notifications you want related to subscriptions or something like that. Uh as part of the this like uh additions you can you can now like actually declare that template and it'll show up in Flow's template library. Yeah, so right. So you could have a developer maybe contributes 10 templates or something like that. Each developer has that capability now. So we're hoping that that will really enrich like the temple library.
Kurt Elster
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Paul Nuschke
Yeah. Yes.
Kurt Elster
There's a lot of eyeballs. Oh. I did notice that email builder. The one inside Shopify um did look suspiciously familiar to Flow.
Paul Nuschke
Yes, everything in marketing automations, it like uh the the workflows are built on top of Flow. And so there's a a lot a lot of merchants that that use marketing automation. Marketing automatic, it's obviously a great use case for automation because there's a Uh it's especially templates, right? Because there's a set of known like best practices for marketing. And a lot of people don't don't really know how to do marketing. And so it's just like a perfect fit for templates. I'm really excited about marketing automation in general. Actually, one of the big things that's coming out is uh segmentation triggers. Um so uh for instance The the one people always use is like uh VIP, like uh as like a a segment. With the segment trigger when they become like a VIP, like enter that segment, it'll fire an event and you can use that in flow. So if you want to do something when when they become a VIP then you you can now do that in flow. And it basically means you don't even need conditions in a lot of cases because the segmentation, the segment is a condition. It has like all these variables that you can put it in stuff. So I'm really excited about that.
Kurt Elster
So we've got the flow we know and love just keeps getting more powerful and more expansive in its templates capabilities. It really Like having more and more templates just means ease of use. But then on the developer side of things, I have this fabulous opportunity um to to get impressions, to get eyeballs from people who have a problem to solve, right? If I'm in flow looking for a template, I got I'm trying to fix something.
Paul Nuschke
Yeah. When we show like if you even if they don't have your app, we allow them to see your templates. And we actually allow them to see tasks that you build as well. So it is like another discovery surface. Like well, one example is like Flow doesn't have a transactional email action right now. We we have, I think, four transactional emails that you can get through an app partner. So if you search for email, you can discover those and use them.
Kurt Elster
That's that's excellent. And so we've got all right, so that flows evolving here. It's innovating. Where do you see the future of flow going, but I think more so the future of automation on Shopify?
Paul Nuschke
Well, like for Flow, the our future is obviously gonna continue the work that we've already like committed to with with like um these capabilities and we like for instance run code we we we want to allow you to actually write http requests in there and so we're gonna we're gonna finish that. Once we get this like set of capabilities that we feel like you can come to flow and just do whatever job you need to do, that we're you're gonna see a real a real big pivot to better user experience. Um tested like the testing experience is one that's like really on my mind. We made some improvements to to make that like not as painful. We we do have some ideas on how to make that like way better. Um So so UX is is definitely central to that. In in terms of like uh automation in Shopify, like it I I I just think it's It's it's only going to get better and better. What one of the things that I'm really excited for is when there's like a critical mass of developers who are building for flow. when they're like let's say 10 10 25% coverage or something like that of all the apps. As an app developer, you'll you you can then build a task and immediately be able to be connected to every other app that's built something. It's really powerful when that happens. I haven't even seen this happen actually in another company. And we're we're like we're close. So I'm I'm I'm very excited for that future.
Kurt Elster
So building for that and getting into that really like you know, they often say uh platforms are more valuable than apps. This lets every app become part of that platform by adding in that extensibility. But like maybe I don't have an API in my app But functionally, I have something very similar if I'm attached to flow, because now that my app could talk to other apps in an open-ended way.
Paul Nuschke
Well, like if someone like someone comes to you, like a merchant comes to you and you're a developer and they want a Slack integration or something like that. Maybe there's like four four of them that want that. It does doesn't mean it's not valuable, but like do you do you want to go built build a direct integration to Slack and maintain that? Slow has that. Um so you by getting that you get access to that Slack action and and and everything else that Flow has to offer. Um so I I I think there's a pretty big value there.
Kurt Elster
Oh, for sure. Yeah, my sky's the limit as these these tools expand. And that's I love my tools. Yeah. Right. I like productivity. And so Just the I'm I'm familiar with the potential that we have with an automation tool like Flow, um, and based on what you're telling me. And so but you know, let's say I'm a Shopify merchant. I haven't played with it yet. I'm new to automation. I I want to use flow. Obviously, it's like step one, install it in my store. Then what? What would what would your advice be to someone who's like looking at flow for the first time?
Paul Nuschke
Uh I think to have have something in mind you want to do is is probably the first thing. But if if you don't, take a look at the templates. Uh For sure there there is something in there that will be useful to you in your store. Um just just even browsing them or choose a couple categories and look at them, you'll you'll find something.
Kurt Elster
And then just I always start with the risk ones. Like you can add there's uh one that will it'll like write into an order, it'll mark the the customer uh the customer record when they have a chargeback, either like a tag or a meta field. I forgot how it writes it in there. And of course you could modify it. But it's like, okay, that's useful to have that historical data automatically stored in a programmatic way. Uh yes. And if like earlier we talked about the risk mitigation stuff, that's the thing. I think if the schedule one you're using there.
Paul Nuschke
You're getting all the orders that had that had uh chargebacks and then you can tag the customer or whatever. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. No, that it it's helpful just to identify someone who's like, okay, may Yeah, could this person be a return abuser? And if it's like spread over a long enough time, you may not have necessarily noticed. But then, you know, having Shopify Flow being able to do that work. Well now I could segment it, now I could see it. Now I could, you know build KPIs off of that. There's just so much that uh kind of spirals out of having access to something like flow.
Paul Nuschke
Yeah, and I think like one thing to keep in mind if you're a merchant is you don't have to actually do like have the automation do something right away. If you're just trying to understand how it works, there's actions like there's a log output action that we added this year. It's amazing. I use it pretty much for building anything. as a start, because you just put it in there. You can see what the data looks like. You can see if that action gets called gets called if you're not sure like, you know, if the if your condition is written the right way or something like that. So you don't have to start with like actually having the action take effect and potentially messing up something in your store. Um so it's a good like low risk way to get started.
Kurt Elster
You know, that's smart. I had not actually I hadn't tried it that way yet. Right, but like like our a draft version of a template to test a proof of concept. That's clever. All right, I learned something. Um anything else you'd like to share about flow?
Paul Nuschke
Uh I I think I think that like c covers um you know everything we're you know we're releasing. Um I I'm just like I I just w if you're a merchant, I guess Try it out. Like is it it really can add a lot of value to your store? And you know, if once you learn it Like you're gonna find a lot of uses for it, uh, things that will save you time, things that you thought you couldn't do, uh, that will help your business. Like it can it can make that possible. Uh for partners, I I want this similarly, if you haven't thought about flow, check out our like our our developer documentation. Think about tasks because there's There's like uh definitely a a need for for developers to build tasks. There's so many use cases out there that people want.
Kurt Elster
Absolutely. I don't know. It's just it's a fun tool. I just like my productivity automation tools. Um and like that visual editor, honestly, even if you don't know programming, it kind of teaches you the concept visually. It's like, all right, you know, you're going step by step, if then else um conditions and actions and triggers. Really that's like That's intro to computer science right there. If you could master Shopify Flow. So, uh kind of fun. Well, Paul, I'm I'm so glad to have been able to talk to you about uh what over the years has become, you know, one of my my favorite tools to play with.
Paul Nuschke
It's my favorite tool to work on.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, lucky job to have. Um so all right, so next step would be play with flow, install flow, take a look at the templates. Um, if I'm a merchant, if I'm a developer, consider building out um what do we call the if an app wants to add that flow integration, what do we we call that? How would I look up the documentation for that?
Paul Nuschke
They're all app extensions. So if you go into apps, there's a flow section in the dev docs. So it's kind of near top of the navigation at the current moment. And uh yeah, there's there's task extensions for like triggers and actions, and then there's a template app extension if you want to add templates.
Kurt Elster
Okay, very cool. Yeah, because we had started looking at it ourselves. Um for some of our our own apps at work. And so I gotta I gotta dive back into it now. Nice. Paul, thank you so much.
Paul Nuschke
Yep. Thank you.
Kurt Elster
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Matti Pihlainen
Yeah, I don't know what heavy constitutes, but uh yeah we have a bunch, or we have maybe ten that we use.
Kurt Elster
And so tell me about give me the background, you know, uh what's your store? Who are you? What do you sell?
Matti Pihlainen
So we're a bike store in Ottawa. Um we have two physical locations and then we sell a lot online. So we sell bikes, we sell bike parts, accessories. We've got about 14,000 items on our Shopify, of which about 7,000 are in stock at any given time. Spread across four locations.
Kurt Elster
Okay. Because I love Shopify Flow. It's been around forever. And but there's a lot of Shopify merchants that's just like they have no idea this thing is available to them.
Matti Pihlainen
That's exactly it. We didn't even know it existed until
Kurt Elster
A month ago, two months ago. So what was the how did you stumble on Shopify Flow?
Matti Pihlainen
Uh customer of ours mentioned it to me. Interesting. Because he thought it could interact with Google Sheets and I that kind of piqued my interest.
Kurt Elster
So you've and does it? Are you able to link Shopify Flow in Google Sheets? Because I've never attempted that.
Matti Pihlainen
So we programmed it to sort of generate a picking list for our in-store staff? So when a customer place an order, if the item is in stock there, it'll populate a Google Sheet with a picking list for the staff member. Whoa. So it needs to be done manually by us.
Kurt Elster
And Flow does this out of the box? Like did it have a template or did you build the template?
Matti Pihlainen
It's got a basic template just to add a row, but um we had to build out sort of the logic behind you know, i is product one in stock at this store? If so, how many are in stock? Is it enough to fulfill the order? If it's not, how many do they have? So we we um to run a loop on each item in the order. So yeah we we had to build it out I guess on our own.
Kurt Elster
Okay. But it works? You're happy with it?
Matti Pihlainen
Oh yeah, no, it works.
Kurt Elster
What what else are you using flow to do? Give me the the highlight reel.
Matti Pihlainen
One thing that we wanted that isn't supported in Shopify is like automatically printing out picking slips. Oh like send it direct to a printer? Exactly. Yeah, the second's in. Um but we were able to use Shopify flow to Take an order that comes in. If it's for shipping, send an email to an email address we set up on a computer where the email is just set to print automatically. Uh uh that's cool. Because we were able to print our orders automatically using Shopify Flow.
Kurt Elster
How'd you get the computer to print automatically?
Matti Pihlainen
Uh we use Mozilla Thunderbird. Oh, old Thunderbird. All right.
Kurt Elster
It's been a long time.
Matti Pihlainen
Yeah, and I think there's an app in Thunderbird we had to download actually that runs a uh an automatic rule on every incoming Email to print it.
Kurt Elster
I see, I thought I was good with flow and already like you're blowing my mind because I've not didn't even occur to me that I could plug it into Google Sheets. So It sounds like you're it it's like it's automating repetitive tasks. Like there's just there's several steps in your fulfillment flow that have just are now a computer does it for you. So you show up and as orders come in and there's like, hey, here's the sheet, go.
Matti Pihlainen
Yeah, and these are all things we used to like. Even just printing the orders, you know, it doesn't doesn't take forever, but that was Whereas now that we just arrive in the morning and it's all ready to go for us. What another Google Sheet use we have is that we sell bicycles which we have to build up for each customer. So when the customer buys a bicycle online, it automatically sort of gets fed to a Google Sheet to the person building it with all the information.
Kurt Elster
That's super cool. The cause I you know years ago, many years ago I used to work in a bike shop and so um and we did like custom uh recumbent bikes and stuff. And yeah, it was just like, all right, you know, there'd be like a handwritten piece of paper, you know, or you know, it it would be like a f hand filled out sheet.
Matti Pihlainen
We still call that Google Sheet our build hook 'cause it was a hook like eleven years ago that we would push receipts onto. Yeah. Yeah, and Scribble and Sharpie.
Kurt Elster
Yes. Okay. That was my experience many years ago. Yeah. And so you've been able to use flow in really clever ways to automate these repetitive tasks and you're getting time savings out of it. Um any improvement for like that that wonderful for you, and obviously the customer potentially gets the order sooner. Any improvements in customer experience, satisfaction as a result of flow?
Matti Pihlainen
I would say it's it definitely comes from the fact that flow is never wrong. So let's say that we process in order incorrectly on our end. Well because the flow has already generated the picking, even if we didn't put it sort of in the back end properly, that's gonna get flagged because it's on the picking list. So even if we do things wrong, it helps us um helps us spot errors, which definitely helps the customer experience because it means that we're, you know, instead of batting 98, we're now batting 99. 5 or so.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, well and who wants to and then there's the extra cost of like the order comes back, you've got to ship the new one, the customer's annoyed, maybe they don't buy with you again. Like there's there are bigger costs here to messing that up. So you've got, you know, like ten automation flows running, any How do you approach creating and testing new workflows? Or like in my head, it's generally like, hey, there's a problem I don't have an immediate solution for feature-wise. So then I go, like, all right, well can I make flow do this? Or hey, I've got an annoyance. Can I make flow automate this? What's your approach?
Matti Pihlainen
I mean the approach first was just anything that we're manually doing, like is there a way to get this done, you know, without us having to do anything? We've kind of, I think, hit all of those now. You know, the ones that we want to be able to mod automate now, I think are I think we're possibly getting to the limits of flow where You know, we'd love to have triggers that are, you know, once the item sold, I'd love it to be able to change inventory records, maybe at other locations. For various reasons, but it uh it doesn't support changing product data right now, I believe. Or meta fields. So yeah, there's a few things that we'd like to see coming as features in it, but till then we're just restricted mostly to Google Sheets. That's really what it's Doing for sale.
Kurt Elster
So any um any tips or or best practices for other merchants who are thinking about getting deep into automation with flow?
Matti Pihlainen
I think a key thing was using the um I think this might be a new feature, but you can look through pass flows and see why they didn't work. And that's I think been the most important thing for us. Is the i i if anything ever doesn't run for any reason, just making sure we get to the bottom of it right away because It's a bit of a black hole if an automation doesn't run. You're not there's not like a trigger to tell you that it's not working necessarily. Um so it's really important that we know if there is a reason for something not to run properly, we need to know why and fix it right away 'cause It can really c create some crazy problems if you're if you're not set up properly.
Kurt Elster
And for troubleshooting flow, what I find is so helpful is they They let you filter by like, all right, action ran, you know, action succeeded, action failed, or action succeeded with no action, and it kind of gives you some of the conditions that went into it. Um but you're right.
Matti Pihlainen
It kind of shows you through the flow where it where it went and then where it you know turned around or where it ended. So you can see, okay, this exact trigger didn't occur for my specific event. Um and you can use that to figure out where it like off.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, I found that really helpful. But what you're saying is like, hey, it it It is not necessarily going to be proactive and communicating that there's some condition that's creating errors where flows aren't running. So you gotta at least like yeah, you if you automated everything, you still have this one thing you gotta make sure doesn't fail.
Matti Pihlainen
Sure. Yeah. Which the other thing that flow we've uh we've noticed like you know I can't filter I can't make a flow that only uh runs on shipping orders natively. So there you we have to get creative and like Yeah, I don't know. It's something we tag each order incoming with its shipping method and then we use the tags to to operate the flow. Once we're ready to run the flow.
Kurt Elster
Okay.
Matti Pihlainen
So there's some things that feel like they should be native and just easy, but there's a couple extra steps involved. I'm sure there's a reason. The Shopify Zen, but it it makes it a little tougher to use.
Kurt Elster
Well, f you know, Flow's been around eight years. And like the version of Flow eight years ago would be significantly more limited than what we get today. And they've still they're still evolving it, but yeah, I I think the best way is is give them that feedback. Say like, hey, here's a thing we're trying to do. We'd love to be able to do this. We think this is the best way, but we think you know, currently available, but we think it would be way easier if it could work like this. Um Because they don't necessarily know. You're one product product by one product manager working on one app or feature, but and there's thousands of people potentially using it every day. But it's so weird 'cause like they they don't get a chance to see them and those people just have they're like, Oh, this would be you know, you told me like, hey, this would be easier if I could do it like this. What are the chances, you know, the guy in charge ever hears it? Well, all right. And what's funny about flow, like we're talking about automation. AI has not even come into the picture yet. So knowing that, how do you see the role of automation evolving? Do you think Or do you have like any future plans for stuff you want to change or do?
Matti Pihlainen
Um I could see it making some of the creations a little easier. Like we're having to sort of program in all these weird things to see if it's a shipping order, but I would hope that in the next couple of years we'd be able just to say like listen, if it's a shipping order, do this. And that it would just kind of know because it it does know. It's just I feel like It doesn't know and right now it doesn't know in the sense that I know it's a shipping order. Like it can only tell it's shipping because some sort of deep things in the order that Shopify is looking at. I don't know. I would hope that it I would hope that it could help uh with just things that seem simple to a person that the computer thinks are complicated.
Kurt Elster
Do you have uh any programming experience?
Matti Pihlainen
I don't know.
Kurt Elster
I think that's the magic here. So essentially what Shopify Flow is doing, like it's got this big visual editor and you use that. That's just generating a piece of code that runs in the background that you never see. And so if you are using Shopify Flow, you are you're doing development, you're programming, you just don't know it. And like when that occurred to me, it just blew my mind. Um, like that's what And that's part of the limitation, is I think really it's like, all right, well, how are we going to code it to translate from the visual editor to code in the background, you know, and make it conditional and consistently work?
Matti Pihlainen
Yeah, I am amazed how often it does.
Kurt Elster
It's so simple it's it's deceiving, you know, in in what it's really doing on the back end. So sometimes I have to remind myself of that when I'm like, why can't I get this to work right? It's like, well it's probably think if it could think it'd be thinking the same thing about you, buddy. All right, so at uh fullcycle. ca is your your shop. Any other uh apps, features, clever things you're proud of you wanna highlight for us?
Matti Pihlainen
Um not so much. I mean we have a second website where we ship small bike parts globally. So part of flow is being able to by it putting into Google Sheets one central shipment dock, I can combine all our shipping from both of those sites. into one central place, uh which is really helpful. Oh yeah. So we have a second site called full suspension. bike And it's uh it's strictly small parts set up for international shipping. So the trouble with international for us is like a helmet could cost us $200 to ship to Japan. But a little bike specialized bicycle like a linkage bolt or that, for example, would only cost fifteen to twenty And those small things, the the carrier calculated shipping actually works well for. So yeah, flow combines all those into one by having it um go onto one central Google Sheet.
Kurt Elster
So you got two totally separate stores, but then all the order fulfillment just lives in one place. And so you don't have to think about it as two separate things. Smart. Yep. If you could wave a magic wand, you change anything about Shopify. What is it?
Matti Pihlainen
Uh I haven't kept a list going, but I feel like uh there's the odd thing that seems like it should be native to Shopify that Yeah, it's one example like variant eliminated the number of um filters by variant. I think at the limit's a hundred or twenty no, it's the limits twenty-five. There's some weird small things that just seem like they wouldn't take much to make it different, so we have to use an app for it. That's probably the biggest gripe we have generally.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Well unfortunately there's always there's usually a a way out. You know, it's like well here's the workaround, here's the app, here's the solution. Um but yeah, there's like there's a lot of little nuances when you start getting deep into it. Um yeah, but yeah, overall things things working well. You're happy. Were you on did is this a new thing or did you move from a different platform?
Matti Pihlainen
So we were on a uh there's a bicycle specific platform called Smart E-Tailing.
Kurt Elster
Oh one familiar?
Matti Pihlainen
Um which is uh You're familiar?
Kurt Elster
I'm familiar with smart e-taling, yeah.
Matti Pihlainen
Okay, yeah. It's it's quite helpful getting started because they have built in all the product descriptions and images and they make it really easy to connect your POS system. But it was very limited in functionality and you know we couldn't choose our payment provider. There was no um no real shipping calculation that could we could do. There was you know just a ton of limitations that eventually we weren't able to square anymore. So Yeah.
Kurt Elster
So I mean like easy way to get go from nothing to up to speed, but then you know, you start slamming these limitations and then you go, Oh, all right, well time to move to Shopify is what I suspect happened.
Matti Pihlainen
Well yeah, I mean we could have gone anywhere, but I think the shop device is quite easy to use and reliable. Like we uptime was another consideration. Like our old website went down frequently, I thought.
Kurt Elster
Uh all right. Uh we'll wrap it up there. Maddie, thank you. Uh if we want if we want to order some bike parts, where are we going?
Matti Pihlainen
www. fullcycle. ca
Kurt Elster
Fullcycle that's C A. Got it. Alright, I will check it out because I have I got two bikes and one is in disrepair.
Matti Pihlainen
Please do.
Kurt Elster
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