With Black Friday just over a week away, most teams are afraid to touch anything that might break what already works. Beth Shero, CEO and Co-founder of Shero Commerce, sits down with Gavin McKew, Director of Innovation, to walk through three Shopify Flow automations that add protection and visibility without touching a single existing system, each one buildable in under ten minutes.
In this episode
-
Why rapid order fraud spikes during Black Friday, and how to auto flag and cancel it before it costs you
-
How to get an early low stock alert routed straight to your buying and marketing teams, no ERP required
-
A live build of an order and customer tagging flow that shows which discount codes are actually converting in real time
-
What makes an automation safe to deploy during peak season without risking any other part of the operation
Episode highlights
Gavin McKew walks through the first automation: a flow that watches for rapid order fraud, the pattern where a stolen card that slips past Shopify's fraud protection gets used to place several orders from the same brand in a short window. The flow counts orders within a set time period, and once a threshold is crossed it tags the customer, cancels the orders, and restocks the inventory automatically, catching activity that would otherwise surface only after the damage is done.
The second flow tackles a problem Gavin has seen even large, well-resourced brands still manage with spreadsheets: knowing when a SKU is about to sell out. By triggering on any inventory change and checking stock against a threshold, the flow sends an internal alert to buying, marketing, or merchandising teams the moment a product runs low, so ads can be paused and homepage placement adjusted before customers hit a disappointing out of stock page.
Gavin builds the final flow live: an order created trigger checks whether a discount code starts with a chosen prefix, then tags both the order and the customer when it matches. The result shows up directly on the Shopify orders page, giving teams a real time read on which campaigns and codes are landing without waiting on a full report, described on the call as less C suite reporting and more a live feel for how the day is going.