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Shopify Point of Sale automation using Flow

Overview​

One of the great benefits of using ShopFields over order notes is that any custom data that is added to your POS orders will come through in a structured format using key:value pairs.

This means that you can store a multitude of custom data on your orders, and easily use that data for further automation using Shopify Flow.

If you haven't used Shopify Flow before, it's a fantastic automation tool, built by Shopify and now available to merchants on all plans. Using Shopify Flow you can do things like:

  • tag orders or customers
  • add metafields
  • send emails to specific emails
  • send API Requests
  • and integrate with other apps

Triggering your Flow​

Any Flow starts off with a trigger. For a point of sale order, the trigger will typically be "Order created". You can then add conditions to your Flow to ensure that it only runs on particular orders. You could check if the sales channel is point of sale, or check if a particular product is in the cart.

If you have applied custom information to the order, Flow can look at the order attributes for a particular key. Flow can also look at the nested information within an order. So if you have applied custom information to products, you can loop over each product to check for a particular key.

Our help article on triggering events in your store based on a custom field has a more detail explanation of how to set this up.

shopify flow with custom pos fields line item example

For custom fields applied to individual line items within the cart, Flow can look over each line item in the order and check if it has the relevant field based on the field's key. In this example, we are adding a tag to the order to notify staff that certain products need attention.

Product vs Order fields​

Shopfields allows you to store custom information against the order, or products within the order. Read more.

You will need build your Flow accordingly.

Product fields​

Fields applied to products within the order need to look at order/line items. Shopify flow get line item attributes in Shopify POS

Order fields​

Fields applied to the order need to look at the order / custom attributes. Shopify flow get order custom attributes in Shopify POS

Further reading​

Shopify's Flow reference has some useful Liquid examples for more advanced solutions.

Examples​

Using the value of your custom field, you can do some really powerful automations within your store. Some examples might include:

  • Adding a customer's membership number to the customer's profile in Shopify as a tag
  • Tagging an order if it contains a particular field so that it can follow a different shipping process
  • Holding payment if any product contains a "high-risk" or "preorder" value
  • Asking customers instore how they found out about your store, capturing that in a custom field and using Flow to tag the order and customer for reporting

I'd love to update this with more examples! If you think of a cool idea - send me a message - josh@countertop.dev.