A Practical Guide to Automation

Automation is a key factor in improving efficiency, saving time, and reducing manual errors. Shopware's Flow Builder provides a powerful tool for automating business processes within your webshop. This visual workflow builder allows you to define and automate tasks based on specific triggers, without requiring any coding. Moreover, in this blog, we will explore several usage cases for the Flow Builder and show how it can enhance your webshop operations.

Shopware's Flow Builder 

Flow Builder is a drag-and-drop tool in Shopware that allows you to automate workflows by creating triggers and actions based on events in your webshop. With Flow Builder, you can define specific tasks, such as tagging customers, sending documents, or notifying teams triggered by business events like customer registration, order placement, or payment status changes. Hence, this tool helps to reduce the need for manual interventions and improves the overall speed and accuracy of your operations.

Why use Flow Builder?

The Shopware Flow Builder provides an easy way to automate common webshop tasks and integrate with external services. Here are a few reasons why you might want to consider using Flow Builder in your webshop:

1. No coding required
   Create complex workflows using a drag-and-drop interface.
   
   
2. Time-saving
   Automate repetitive tasks, freeing up resources for other critical areas.
   
   
3. Increased accuracy
   Reduce the risk of human error by automating processes such as document generation and customer tagging.
   
   
4. Scalable
   As your business grows, you can add new workflows to handle increased complexity without additional manual work.
   
   

A few examples on how-to use the Flow Builder 

1. Tagging new customers by country

You can automate the tagging of new customers based on their country of origin during registration. By using Flow Builder, you can set up a flow to check the customer's country and automatically apply a relevant tag.

Steps

• Trigger Customer registration event
• Condition Customer country equals for example, USA, Austria, or Switzerland
• Action Add a country-specific tag to the customer profile

This workflow ensures that you can easily segment your customers by location, which is helpful for targeting marketing campaigns or offering location-specific services.

2. Limiting product purchases to one per customer

For certain products, you may want to limit each customer to a single purchase. Using Flow Builder, you can create a workflow that detects if a specific item is in the customer's cart at the time of order and restricts them from purchasing it more than once.

Steps

• Trigger Order placement event
• Condition Check if a specific item is in the cart (using Rule Builder)
• Action Assign a tag to the customer and apply restrictions, such as hiding the product or disabling the checkout option

This helps ensure that limited-quantity items are not ordered multiple times by the same customer, either manually or by error.

3. Automating document delivery

Flow Builder can be used to automatically generate and send documents, such as invoices or order confirmations, to customers once an order is placed. This eliminates the need for manual document handling and ensures customers always receive the correct paperwork promptly.

Steps

• Trigger Order placement event
• Action 1 Generate invoice document
• Action 2 Send an email to the customer with the invoice attached

This process is particularly useful for reducing administrative work, especially in high-volume shops.