Written by Alexandre Benyekkou

If you run an ecommerce store, chances are that you use Shopify — arguably the most popular ecommerce tool on the market.

It’s not hard to see why: setting up shop with Shopify is easy. There’s a large theme store for an out-of-the-box setup, a beginner-friendly UX and dashboard, and attentive customer support. Once you’re up and running, there’s a huge app marketplace, a wealth of ‘how-to’ education on the blog, plus tons of free courses, all of which you can use to take your selling success further.

But despite the easy setup, running a store on Shopify (or any other ecommerce tool) isn’t always as simple.

One challenge you’ll likely run into when selling online — whether you use Shopify or not — is handling all the moving parts of your business. You may find you’re using many different apps and integrations to manage your sales, products, promotions, data, operations, and more. 

And, if your business is growing at pace, then what was once a simple ‘challenge’ might end up becoming just too overwhelming.

This is where automation comes in.

No matter what stage of setting up and running an ecommerce store you’re at, automating parts of your Shopify store can prove to be super-effective in simplifying how your store is run and how many tasks you have to take care of. 

Introducing Parabola

Parabola is a no-code tool that directly integrates with your Shopify store and makes it easy to automate many of your manual and repetitive data tasks. Using drag-and-drop, you can create and automate operations and marketing scenarios.

I’ve been using Parabola myself for my own Shopify store, mostly to catch, store and display my data dynamically while synchronizing everything on Shopify.

I’m going to walk you through how you can automate your Shopify store using Parabola — specifically how it can save time on your sales, marketing and inventory reports.

To follow the steps in this post, you’ll first need to set up an account at https://parabola.io/.

Sales: How to automate sales reports with Parabola

Sales reports are incredibly easy to build in Parabola. Once set up, this report will automatically send you a daily order summary by email. It calculates the number of orders that were made the day before and sends you (and/or your colleagues) a round-up of the results.

First, from within Parabola, click on the Shopify icon and authorize access to your Shopify store. Parabola will then pull through all your order data. Here, we want orders, but you can choose to pull customers or products data instead. You can also filter down by status, depending on how specific you need the data to be.

A neat feature of Parabola is that, as you build your flow, you can see your data updated in real time with the library of customizable, pre-built components. 

Parabola helps you build a flow that combines, transforms, formats and cleans data automatically, with no extra work on your side.  

Next, we want to count values. In the pre-built components list, choose “Do Math” and then “Count by Group”. As you can see, there are many other options available — so play around with how you customize your flow.

I have a little time-saving hack to share with you: Parabola’s recipes list. It’s a menu of pre-built scenarios to automate the most common and important ecommerce reports. For our sales report, you’ll want to use the Daily Shopify Orders Summary Email.

Finally, enter the email you want to send the report daily to, customize the title and message, and you are good to go. You’ll also see an option to schedule it as you wish.

That’s it! Fresh daily automated sales reports in your inbox in just a few clicks.

You can of course build more complex flows, but the automation process is the same: choose data to pull from your store, build your flow, choose the output and run it manually or on schedules. 

For more ways you can automate your sales process on Shopify with Parabola, check out this link.

Marketing: How to automate an Average Order Value (AOV) report using Parabola

You can automate many marketing-related tasks with Parabola, synchronizing your Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and more. But for now, let’s stay in the Shopify environment and build an average order value over time report. 

AOV is one of the most important metrics for online stores to measure and monitor. It can influence key business decisions like advertising spend, store layout, and product pricing.

You can of course calculate AOV manually since it’s not a complicated sum to do (simply revenue divided by number of orders), but automating the report generation will save you time and the effort of remembering to do it!

Your report will give you your store's average order value over time including key metrics such as number of orders, total sales, and average order value by day.

In summary, the steps involved are: first, we pull data from Shopify, just like the sales report above. Then, we use a date formatter to give us uniform and clean data, followed by a new math column. This column will allow us to do a new formula in the aggregated orders block, to total the daily orders automatically.

At this stage, it should look like this:

Then we clean the table, renaming some columns and adding a new one with our formula to calculate AOV.

A final few tweaks include sorting the data by date, formatting the numbers the way you want and setting up a daily email. Once complete, schedule the email to send daily (or however often works for you), and you’re done!

Inventory: How to automate your inventory, fulfillments and products page using Parabola

If you regularly create or update many products in your store, you may find Parabola’s automatic notification for incomplete data function very useful. It will fetch products from your Shopify store, filter those without images or descriptions, turn those products into task lists, and automatically email the employees responsible for those areas. No more risk of human error; this flow will be your ears and eyes! 

You can also receive unfulfilled order notifications or unfulfilled items value reports. These functions help with prioritizing your product tasks and creating a sense of urgency for your team. 

If you’re ready for something a little more complex, you can also automate a top-selling items page to dynamically display your most popular products on one page.

Using the pre-built flow, this function will find the best selling items, create and/or update the product page and sync the updated products to your Shopify. In each block, just choose the right settings for your needs and Parabola will do the rest.   

No-code, no developers, no data experts

Hopefully you’ll now have an idea of how powerful Parabola’s automation functions can be in helping you streamline your operations without the help of developers or data scientists. 

With a few clicks and customizations, you can get updated, cleaned and formatted data automatically, that you can also schedule or trigger based on events. 

If you’re running a busy online store but don’t have the time to handle tasks manually, Parabola can give you back hours, and remove the risk of human error. The best part is that you don’t need to know how to code to implement Parabola flows on your Shopify store. The app is intuitive, easy to use for no-coders, and it may even replace other (sometimes complex) apps that you’ve been using to do the same jobs.