Flow to check for down periods — order count is low or nil

Hey all — I’m investigating Flows that could generate alerts for a merchant when there are unexpected outages or unexpected issues with a theme (ie. malfunctioning app, employee broke something without realising, etc.)

One such example I’ve been trying to put together is a Flow that runs a check every 2 hours to see if the count of orders has gone up or not, or if the order count has increased meaningfully or not. This could indicate that there may be something wrong with the theme that needs to be investigated, or a possible Shopify Outage. (Context — this particular merchant has high order volumes).

Would anyone have a suggested approach to achieve this in Flow? I’m guessing a sheduled time trigger, but then needing to log the store order count to use in subsequent logic. The action would be an email sent.

The outcomes from this would be for merchants to be on the front-foot with updating any necessary on-site comms, enabling CX teams with responses, engaging partner support in a timely manner, etc.

Unfortunately, there’s no RSS feed for Shopify Status and often merchants aren’t finding out about issues until a partner informs them (or they’re savvy enough to check shopifystatus).

Additionally, we have explored Custom Insights alerts in GA4, however these can be unreliable as the data streaming into GA4 is not always instant.

If anyone has any other suggestions for similar type Flows, please feel free to share!

Cheers!

You can use “Get order data” paired with that scheduled time trigger to get recently created orders. You can also use shop metafields to store data from one run to the next. The trickier thing is the actual logic as the order volume may change quite a bit throughout the day.

There’s also tools like Pingdom that periodically ping your website to see if the pages respond, and notify you if they are down.