Automation

How an automation works

Settings › Automation. An automation starts when something happens - an order arriving, its payment or fulfilment changing, stock running low, a return being raised, a parcel going out, a store losing its connection - and then runs its steps one after another. There are three kinds of step:

• Check if - conditions on what started it, combined with all of these or any of these. When they are true the automation goes down Then; when they are not, it goes down Otherwise. Either branch can be empty.
• Do this - tag or untag the order, put it on hold or take it off, promise stock to it, accept a return, stop sending to a store, or send an email.
• Wait - pause for minutes, hours or days, up to 30 days, then carry on. The steps after a wait see the order as it is then, so a check after a wait can ask whether it was paid in the meantime.

Automations run within about a minute of what started them, and a wait carries on within a minute or two of its time. Automations are part of the Growth plan and every plan above it.

Templates

New automation offers two ways in: Start from scratch, or a template. The templates cover what merchants set up most: promise stock as soon as an order is paid, hold big orders for a look and promise stock to the rest, chase orders still unpaid a day later, remind me while stock stays low, accept faulty returns, stop a store that has lost its connection. A template opens in the editor with its steps drawn and your email filled in.

A saved automation is off until you turn it on. That is true of templates too.

Building an automation

1. Press New automation and choose a start.
2. Name it for what it does - "Hold big eBay orders" - because that is what the history will be read by.
3. Click Start when and choose what starts it. Changing it later clears the steps, because each step belongs to what starts it.
4. Press + on a line, or Add a step at the end, and choose Check if, Wait or something to do.
5. Click any step to fill it in on the right.
6. Press Save, then Turn on when you are ready.

Anything still missing is marked on its step, and Save waits until it is fixed. Nothing can follow a check on the same line: the next steps go under Then or Otherwise. You can also describe what you want in a sentence - "hold orders over 500 and email me" - and the steps are drawn for you to read and save.

Testing an automation

Try it takes the id of a real order, return or store and runs the saved automation against it without changing anything. It says whether it would act and what it would do, and marks on the canvas the steps it reached - for a check, which way it went.

What happened

The What happened tab lists every run: did nothing, preview, done, partly done, failed or waiting. For a run that did nothing it says which condition was false and what it saw against what it wanted. Each automation's own Runs tab shows the same for that one, and its card shows how often it has done something and how many runs are waiting.

Deal with what is waiting runs everything queued now rather than at the next minute.

Events that could not be handled after four attempts are listed under Given up on. The automations themselves keep running for everything else.

Turning off and deleting

Each automation has an on/off switch. Stop every automation halts all of them at once for the whole organisation. Events are still recorded, so processing resumes from where it stopped. Turning an automation off drops the runs that are waiting in it.

Delete this automation removes it with its history and its waiting runs. On a plan without automations, the ones already set up stay, can be turned off and deleted, and do not run.