Fun With Zapier for eCommerce
Of all the business stats I track, there’s one that I really look forward to seeing more than all the others: the number of tasks my Zapier account runs each month. Seeing how many mundane tasks I’ve automated that used to eat up my precious time just makes me so happy!
The surprising thing to me is always learning just how many business owners aren’t already using the power of Zapier to simplify their lives. Zapier is like having a very well-behaved personal assistant that never asks for a day off - plus, it’s fun! You don’t have to be really technical at all and I promise that you can’t help but get a little giddy when work gets done magically in the background for you.
Not sure what to automate? The rule of thumb is that anything you have to do over and over could and should probably be automated. This is going to look different for every business depending on the exact tools you use but to get your wheels turning, below are some ideas specifically for eCommerce businesses!
Zapier 101
If you’re a Zapier neophyte, here’s the gist. You have triggers and you have actions. This is basically saying when this one thing happens (the trigger), do this other thing (the action). Each “zap” needs to have at least one trigger + one action. (Some advanced setups can string lots of different actions together or get really complex with different things like filters and conditional rules but that’s for another day.)
When you are setting up a Zap, Zapier will ask you which apps you want to connect but I think if you remember that you’re not just connecting them but rather asking them to talk to one another, that's the key. Each app that is connected to Zapier comes with its own playbook; a certain set of actions and triggers that that particular app’s developers built into it.
The reason why this is important is, as you’ll see below, knowing which actions can trigger other actions is the start of building yourself a future where you make technology work for you instead of the other way around. Now, while all my apps are busy talking to one another, I can be hanging out doing nothing. No more babysitting my apps. That’s it. Easy!
Ok, on to what I think are the best apps for shipping, email marketing, and eCommerce, along with some zap ideas to get your creative juices flowing.
Shipping Extensions
Shipping is kind of the linchpin of eCommerce, right? A lot of businesses are already using a shipping extension to make shipping faster, easier, or more affordable so why not take things a step further and include your shipping activity in some fun automations?
Winner: Easyship
Easyship just released their Zapier integration and it has some of the best triggers available when it comes to shipping extensions.
Fun Zaps to try:
(Bonus: these both can go hand-in-hand with the email marketing recommendations from the next section.)
Shipment Delivered (Trigger) - How awesome would you look to your customers if you sent them a nice little note right after their shipment was delivered saying thanks, letting them know what to expect or what to do if something isn’t right? You can use the Shipment Delivered trigger to do this or even to tag a customer in your CRM so you know to follow up X number of days later.
Shipment in Transit (Trigger) - Build some hype and excitement for what’s en route by letting customers know not just that their order has shipped but that it’s getting close. Depending on what your product is, this could also be useful if you are shipping anything timely or perishable that you want to make sure people know to keep an eye out for.
Runners Up: ShipStation and Shippo
ShipStation and Shippo don't have all the same cool triggers that Easyship does but they are both still plenty powerful. ShipStation has an “Order Shipped” trigger and Shippo has a “New Shipping Label” trigger that could both be used to keep customers in the loop on their order status.
Email Marketing
You know I preach the power of an email list time and again. Your email list is clutch and, when connected to all the other apps you use in business, worth its weight in gold.
Winner: FloDesk
This was a close one because Klaviyo (below) is super powerful when it comes to eCommerce email marketing and nice integrations with both Shopify & Squarespace, but when it comes to Zapier, Flodesk (use my code K4I8S1 to get 50% off for life!) has more triggers and actions to play with and that’s what makes it the front runner to me. This should show you that with Zapier it doesn’t matter if the apps you love have native integrations or not - you just make them on your own!
Fun Zaps to try:
Add or Remove Subscribers to/from Segments (Action) - Fun triggers to pair with this action would be things like when someone buys X, add them to X segment; when someone buys Y, remove them from Y segment, etc. This is especially useful when paired with the internal automations within Flodesk so that certain workflows are triggered based on getting added to certain segments.
Subscriber Added to Segment (Trigger) - This is different from above in that you can also think of what you might want to happen after someone gets added to a segment. Using the subscriber added to segment trigger, you could set up an email to automatically get sent out to someone on your sales team so they can follow up with leads personally or you could also add the subscriber’s name to your CRM so you don’t have to worry about double entry.
Remove from Workflow (Action) - Think of this as the escape hatch out of your email funnel! There’s nothing more annoying than companies that still send you sales emails after you’ve already become a customer. It really underscores how automated things are instead of using automation to make things feel personalized. Use a trigger that says when someone finally buys [the thing you’re selling], to remove them from the sales workflow so they no longer receive any of the sales emails.
Runner Up: Klaviyo
In much the same way as above, you can connect Klaviyo to a number of apps to help you send highly targeted messages. Some ideas are to create an event in Klaviyo anytime someone fills out the contact form on your website or to update a subscriber based on their activity so they only receive the messages that are most pertinent to them.
eCommerce
Help make sure your website isn’t lonely by connecting it to other apps! Keep in mind that I definitely wouldn’t choose a platform based on Zapier alone but it is definitely nice to know what the capabilities are for each of these if you’re starting to explore making a move to one of them from another.
Winner: Shopify
Shopify is the leader when it comes to Zapier with a whopping 10 Triggers, 9 Actions, and 6 Search functions available. The best thing to me is that even the lowest-paid Zapier plan (Starter, $19.95) could replace a ton of third-party apps that most Shopify store owners find themselves needing to add in order to get the functionality they’re looking for. All these apps add bloat - and cost! A little Zapier savviness could help on both those fronts.
Fun Zaps to try:
New Abandoned Cart (Trigger) - give people a reason to come back to your site with a custom abandoned cart email. Use this trigger to connect to an email marketing action (see above) and you can send abandoned cart emails that are 1000x better looking - and higher converting - than something generic.
Update Product (Action) - want to keep all your inventory in a nice little Google sheet and then have any updates automatically show up on Shopify? Totally possible and a total game-changer if you find logging in to your website every time you want to put something on sale super tedious and unnecessary.
Runner Up: Squarespace
Squarespace is woefully lacking in the primary triggers and actions department, but their Commerce API and some creative advanced Zapier tricks can make almost anything possible! For more on this, check out this post: How to Connect Squarespace to Anything!
