Ecommerce email automations on Shopify and WooCommerce: what to set up first

Set up four automations before anything else: a welcome message for new subscribers, an abandoned-cart message, the order and shipping confirmations, and a win-back message for customers who go quiet. Each depends on events that your shop must send to the email platform, and the platforms do not all send the same events: on Klaviyo, for example, the abandoned-cart trigger works differently on Shopify and on WooCommerce. So the first step is not building the message but confirming which events arrive and when.

This guide covers Klaviyo and Omnisend because those are the two platforms whose Shopify and WooCommerce behaviour we have read in the vendors' own help pages; we do not describe Mailchimp, Brevo or ActiveCampaign setup here. It also shows how to budget the monthly send allowance, which both vendors tie to the size of your list, and gives a test plan. For platform pricing see Klaviyo pricing by active profiles and Klaviyo vs Omnisend; for the sending-domain setup that sits underneath all of it see email sender domain setup.

Read the table as a list of things to test, not as a ranking. On WooCommerce the Klaviyo Started Checkout event needs a shopper who is logged in or has entered a billing email, so an anonymous visitor who leaves the cart before the checkout page never triggers it; on Shopify the event is available by default. If your abandoned-cart message depends on Added to Cart, switch on the behavioral-events setting on Shopify and check that the shopper is cookied. Omnisend's pages list pre-built workflows but do not state which events drive them, so confirm in your own account which shoppers it catches. The page we read for Klaviyo on Shopify says the last 90 days of orders and customers are imported first and older data up to 10 years afterwards, which matters for win-back: until history has loaded, "customers who have not ordered in 90 days" is not trustworthy.

Both allowances are multiples of the list: ten times the active profiles on Klaviyo, and twelve times the contacts on Omnisend's Standard plan. Campaigns and automations both draw on it, so a store that sends four campaigns a month to 5,000 profiles uses 20,000 of Klaviyo's 50,000 and leaves 30,000 for automated messages. Automated volume depends on traffic, cart abandonment and orders, none of which these pages state, so we give no estimate: count last month's carts, orders and new subscribers in your shop, multiply by the number of messages in each automation, and add that to your campaign sends.