A practical guide to using Shopify Flow with chat to send tracking updates when shipped

Let's be honest, how much of your support team's day is eaten up by endless "Where is my order?" tickets? If you're running a Shopify store, you know the drill. These WISMO inquiries are a constant drag, pulling your best people away from the tricky problems that actually require a human brain.

The good news? You can automate your way out of this repetitive cycle. Shopify has some handy built-in tools, like Shopify Flow, that can definitely help. But as your store grows, you'll find there are a few different ways to approach this, from simple native setups to dedicated apps and, eventually, full-blown AI agent examples.

This guide is here to walk you through the options for using Shopify Flow with chat to send tracking updates when shipped. We'll look at what works, what doesn't, and help you figure out the best strategy for your business.

What is Shopify Flow?

First things first, let's talk about Shopify Flow. Think of it as your personal automation assistant, built right into the Shopify admin. It’s designed to let you automate all sorts of tasks and processes inside your store and connect your various apps, all without needing to hire a developer or write a single line of code.

It runs on a pretty simple recipe:

• Trigger: An event that kicks off the automation. For our purposes, this would be an order getting fulfilled.

• Condition: A rule that needs to be met. For example, the automation only runs if the order has a valid tracking number.

• Action: The job that Flow actually does, like sending out a shipping update.

The best part is that Shopify Flow is now included on Basic, Grow, Advanced, and Shopify Plus plans. That means most store owners can jump in and start building automated workflows right now.

The pros and cons of using Shopify Flow for shipping updates

At its most basic level, Shopify Flow is the most direct route to automating your shipping notifications. You can build workflows that give your customers a heads-up the second their package is in the mail.

How it works in practice

The concept is simple enough. You’d create a workflow that starts whenever an order’s fulfillment status changes. When an order is marked as fulfilled and a tracking number gets added, Flow can automatically send a shipping confirmation email that links the customer directly to their order status page. Simple, effective, and a whole lot better than silence.

You can also get a bit fancier by using Flow’s connectors, which allow it to communicate with your other apps. For instance, you could hook it up to an SMS marketing app or a platform like Klaviyo to send tracking updates through text messages or more customized emails. You can find a whole list of apps that play nicely with Flow right in the Shopify Help Center.

The limits of a native setup

While Flow is a fantastic starting point, you'll probably start to notice its limitations as you aim for a truly top-notch customer experience. It’s a great tool, but it wasn't built to handle real, back-and-forth customer conversations.

• It’s a one-way street. Flow is great at pushing out a notification, but it has no idea how to handle a reply. When a customer texts back to that automated SMS with, "Awesome, can you ask the driver to leave it at the back door?" or "Thanks! By the way, what's your return policy?", Flow just shrugs. That reply creates a new support ticket, and you've just automated one step only to create another manual one for your team.

• Things can get messy, fast. A simple "if this, then that" workflow is easy to build. But what happens when you need to add special rules for different shipping carriers? Or for international orders that have customs delays? Or for VIP customers who get special handling? Your once-clean workflow can quickly become a tangled web of conditions that’s a nightmare to manage and frighteningly easy to break.

• It creates a fragmented toolset. If you want to use Flow to send a message to a chat app, you need another app to act as the bridge. All of a sudden you're juggling Shopify Flow, a chat app, and maybe an SMS app on the side. Each has its own monthly bill and its own dashboard, splitting your customer data into silos and making it impossible to see the full picture of a customer's journey.

• It can’t provide on-demand answers. Flow is reactive; it works based on triggers. It can't help a customer who lands on your website and asks your chat widget, "Hey, what's my order status?" in real-time. It’s a system that sends updates, not a resource that provides instant answers whenever a customer needs them.

The next step: Dedicated apps

Because of the gaps in a Flow-only approach, many merchants naturally move on to specialized third-party apps from the Shopify App Store. These tools are built to do one thing really well: manage the post-purchase tracking experience.

They usually fall into a few buckets:

• Branded Tracking Pages: Apps like AfterShip or Parcel Panel let you create a beautiful, custom tracking page that matches your store's branding. Instead of sending customers off to a generic UPS or FedEx site, you bring them back to your own domain, where you can control the entire experience and maybe even show them a few products they might like.

• SMS & Email Marketing Platforms: Tools like Klaviyo can tap into your Shopify data to send out much more sophisticated, multi-channel tracking notifications. This is often part of a much bigger marketing automation strategy.

• Chat Automation Apps: Some apps, like WhatFlow, are built specifically to send automated updates through platforms like WhatsApp, meeting your customers on the apps they already use every day.

The main benefit here is that these apps are purpose-built and often deliver a much slicker user experience than a DIY Flow setup. The catch? They add another monthly subscription to your software bill. They also still only solve one piece of the puzzle. A customer might get a tracking update via SMS from one app, then open your website's chat widget (powered by another app entirely) to ask a follow-up question, resulting in a clunky and disjointed conversation.

A quick look at AfterShip pricing

To give you a concrete idea of the costs, here’s a peek at AfterShip, a very popular choice for creating branded tracking pages.

Plan	Price/Month	Shipments Included
Free	$0	Up to 50
Essentials	$11	Up to 100
Essentials Plus	$35	Up to 500
Pro	$119	Up to 2,000

While there's a free plan to get you started, any growing store will quickly need to jump to a paid tier, adding another line item to the monthly budget.

The modern AI agent solution

This brings us to the most modern approach: a single, integrated AI platform that plugs into the tools you’re already using. Instead of just firing off a one-way notification, it’s designed to handle the entire support interaction, from the first question to the final "thank you."

A platform like eesel AI is built to solve the problems that both a standalone Flow setup and a patchwork of single-purpose apps create. Here’s how it pulls everything together.

• Get up and running in minutes, not months. Forget about wrestling with complicated workflow builders or installing and configuring three different apps just to get them to talk to each other. eesel AI offers a one-click integration with Shopify and your existing help desk (like Zendesk or Gorgias). You can launch a powerful AI agent in literally minutes, and you can do it all yourself without sitting through a single sales demo.

• It’s actually conversational. When a customer asks, "Where's my order?" eesel AI doesn't just reply with a canned response and a tracking link. It uses custom API actions to look up the real-time order status directly in your Shopify store. It then gives a clear, human-sounding answer right there in the chat window or support ticket. It might say, "Hi Jane! Your order #54321 is out for delivery right now and should be there this afternoon. You can follow the driver's progress here."

• It knows everything. What happens if Jane replies with, "Great, and what's your return policy?" The AI can answer that, too. Because eesel AI is trained on all of your knowledge sources, from your public help center to your internal Google Docs and past support tickets, it can handle the entire conversation seamlessly. No more disjointed experiences or making customers repeat themselves.

An infographic showing how eesel AI connects to various knowledge sources to provide comprehensive answers, improving on the basic Shopify Flow with chat to send tracking updates when shipped.

• You're always in control. You don't have to flip a switch and automate everything overnight. With eesel AI's powerful simulation mode, you can test the AI agent on thousands of your real, historical support tickets. You can see exactly how it would have responded to actual customer questions before you ever let it talk to a live customer. You can start small, letting it handle only WISMO questions while escalating everything else to your team. As you see how well it works, you can gradually give it more responsibility.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, allowing users to test how the AI handles inquiries for Shopify Flow with chat to send tracking updates when shipped before going live.

A glance at eesel AI pricing

eesel AI’s pricing is designed to be transparent and predictable. There are no surprise per-resolution fees that punish you for having a busy month.

Plan	Monthly (bill monthly)	Effective /mo Annual	Bots	AI Interactions/mo	Key Unlocks
Team	$299	$239	Up to 3	Up to 1,000	Train on website/docs; Copilot for help desk; Slack; reports.
Business	$799	$639	Unlimited	Up to 3,000	Everything in Team + train on past tickets; MS Teams; AI Actions (triage/API calls); bulk simulation; EU data residency.
Custom	Contact Sales	Custom	Unlimited	Unlimited	Advanced actions; multi‑agent orchestration; custom integrations; custom data retention; advanced security / controls.

Moving from notifications to conversations

So, we’ve walked through three ways to automate your Shopify shipping updates:

1. Shopify Flow: A great, free tool for sending basic, one-way alerts. It’s easy to get started with but can get complicated and isn't built for real conversations.

2. Dedicated Apps: These point solutions are good at what they do, but they can lead to a fragmented tech stack, rising costs, and a clunky experience for your customers.

3. An Integrated AI Agent: This is the unified approach. It handles the entire WISMO conversation from start to finish, connects all your existing tools, and is easy to set up, test, and scale with confidence.

At the end of the day, the goal isn't just to send out a tracking number. It's about resolving your customer's question completely, right then and there. It's about freeing up your support team to focus on what matters most and leaving every customer feeling heard and taken care of.

Ready to stop answering "Where is my order?" and start having better conversations? Try eesel AI for free and see how quickly you can integrate a powerful AI agent with your Shopify store.