Automations for a small online shop: the fifteen jobs you can stop doing by hand

This is for the shop owner who does the admin after the shop shuts: confirmation emails, invoices, the stock count, the baskets that never became orders. By the end you will know which of those jobs a platform automates on its own, which need a plugin or the Enterprise plan, and which should stay with a person. Disclosure: we build Orbit Commerce, so the table and the sections after it describe Orbit. Every Orbit claim was checked against the feature pages and the platform code on 9 November 2026.

What can an online shop automate without an automation tool?

A hosted platform reacts to events: an order placed, a payment captured, a parcel scanned, a date passed. Each can set off a job you would otherwise do by hand. The fifteen we hear about most:

Built in means every plan, from Solo, with nothing to install. Plugin means installed from the plugin store, where each listing shows its price and any free plan, so we quote none. Enterprise is the £999 a month plan (£749 a month billed yearly, ex VAT).

Which automations are built into every plan?

Order emails. The order, payment, account, return, subscription, gift card and booking emails are templates that send themselves when their moment comes, in your logo and colours, editable block by block or in HTML. Verify a sender address at your domain and the order, return, subscription and gift card emails go out from it, so replies reach you. The customer emails page lists the set.

VAT invoices. Put your VAT registration number in Settings, then Tax, and every paid order gets a VAT invoice emailed the moment payment is captured; download or resend it from the order.

Stock reservation. An order reserves its units the moment it is placed; cancel it and they go back to available. They leave the count when the order is dispatched, and at zero the product page reads Out of Stock unless you allow backorders. Our post on inventory and fulfilment without the chaos has the operating model.

Ship-by dates. Give a delivery method handling and transit days and an order-by time: checkout shows the delivery date, the order carries a ship-by date, and the Orders list flags Late and Due today. The dispatch filter, pick lists and batches are Enterprise.

The abandoned-cart reminder. Pick a delay of 1, 2, 4, 6, 12 or 24 hours and every abandoned checkout with an email address gets one reminder with a link that restores the cart. Our post on abandoned carts covers timing; the feature page has every setting.

Subscription renewals. Each renewal charges the saved card and creates an order, and a product set to ship carries its delivery on that order. The customer is emailed at every change, from activated to renewed to a failed payment, and a renewal reminder can go out a set number of days before.

Gift cards. The card is created and emailed with the buyer’s message when the payment succeeds, marked Expired once a date you set passes (leave it blank and it never expires), and Depleted when spent to nothing.

Which jobs need a plugin?

These six are add-ons from the plugin store; a paid plugin bills on top of your plan.

Review moderation. Product Reviews is free. Every review starts as Pending and stays off the storefront until you approve it. For a review request, the Workflows plugin can send a templated email on a fulfilment trigger, and a reply to a review is an email from you.

Marketplace stock. The eBay and Amazon plugins push stock and prices to the marketplace on the schedule you pick, from every 15 minutes to once a day, and bring marketplace orders back into your Orders list. Both have a free tier, with paid plans above it.

Accounting. The Xero and QuickBooks plugins post each paid order as a sales invoice with its payment, and each refund as a credit note in Xero or a refund receipt in QuickBooks, against the accounts and VAT rates you map once. Our post on getting sales into Xero or QuickBooks explains the clearing-account method.

Newsletters. The newsletter goes out from Mailchimp or Omnisend, and their sync plugins keep those tools in step with the shop. Customers who agree to email marketing join your audience or contacts with their tags; products, orders and live carts sync for those tools’ emails; and an unsubscribe flows back to the customer record.

Tagging and follow-up emails. The Workflows plugin adds visual automations that react to orders, customers, fulfilments and payments, with time delays, if/otherwise conditions and A/B splits, and actions that tag orders and customers, set order metadata, archive orders, update statuses and send templated emails.

Chat rules. Live Chat is an add-on with a free plan and paid plans. Outside your opening hours it takes a name, an email and the question, which opens a ticket and emails you a link, and up to 20 rules auto-reply, assign or tag on triggers such as a new conversation or no reply for a set time.

Which automations come with Enterprise?

Two of the fifteen need Enterprise’s Warehouse operations suite. The morning reorder digest is opt-in: shortly after 9am the store owner gets an email of items below safety stock, at or below their reorder point, or low with no reorder point set. Purchase orders from sales start in the planning view, which reads 28 days of sales against your stock and works out when each line runs out. Tick the rows that need buying, press Create purchase order, and Orbit fills in enough to cover the supplier’s lead time plus two weeks of sales, less what you hold and what is on its way; nothing is bought until a person approves and sends the purchase order. The warehouse operations page has the detail.

A Solo, Team or Pro shop uses the Low stock filter (10 or fewer available) and the Nebula assistant, which suggests a restock from your sales when you ask. Separately, on every plan, an order with lines from a supplier in Orbit’s supplier directory raises one purchase order per supplier as it lands, and Orbit adds no fee to it.

What can the Nebula assistant do that an automation cannot?

An automation runs the same job every time without being asked. Nebula, the assistant included on every Orbit plan, does the one-off job you ask for in plain words and then stops. It can tell you which products sold best last month, with a chart and a CSV. It can create a product, draft an order, or fill in a discount, gift card, popup or shipping zone for you to check. It can adjust stock across every location in one instruction, or draft an email in the template editor. Order actions such as cancelling or fulfilling go through a confirmation, and a multi-step job becomes a plan of two to eight steps you approve before it runs in the background. The Nebula page has the detail; to work from ChatGPT or Claude instead, read running your shop from ChatGPT or Claude.

How do you decide what to automate?

Two numbers decide it: minutes a week (how long the job takes once, times how often it happens) and the cost of getting it wrong. A three-minute job done forty times a week is two hours; a twenty-minute monthly job is five minutes a week. The dearer a mistake, the more you want a person, or at least a weekly check, in the loop.

• Automate and forget: frequent, identical, cheap to get wrong, like order emails and stock reservation.
• Automate, then check weekly: frequent but costly if wrong, like subscription renewals and accounting postings.
• Keep by hand: rare, irreversible or a judgement call, like refunds and a delay apology.

A worked week for a 40-order shop

Our assumptions, so you can argue with them: one person, 40 orders a week, VAT registered, 8 abandoned checkouts, 10 subscription renewals, 2 gift cards, eBay and Amazon listings, books in Xero or QuickBooks.

Call it nine and a half hours a week: about £170 at the £18 an hour we used for a virtual assistant in our ChatGPT post, or roughly £8,900 a year. The 25 minutes that remain are the checks, and they are the part not to skip.

What can go wrong, and what should stay by hand?

An automation that emails the wrong thing repeats the mistake every time the trigger fires. Test with your own address first: the template editor has Send test, the abandoned-cart settings page has Send Test Email, and a real order on your own shop shows the whole chain. Run a new workflow on one order for a week before you widen it, and review every automation quarterly, because it keeps running after the shop has changed.

The second failure is legal. The ICO’s guidance on identifying direct marketing (updated 20 August 2025, read 9 November 2026) says that “if your service message has elements that are direct marketing, even if that is not the main purpose of your message, then it will count as direct marketing”, while general branding or logos do not. “Your order has arrived” is a service message; add “20% off your next order” and it becomes marketing, under the consent and unsubscribe rules.

What not to automate

• Refunds. Money leaving is a decision. On Orbit a refund is issued from the order by a person.
• Review replies. A response to a review is an email from you to the customer, in your own words.
• Delay emails. Orbit flags a carrier delivery exception on the order; the email with the new date and the refund offer is yours to write.
• Bulk price changes and deletions. Ask for the list first, read it, then run it. Archive rather than delete.

Where Orbit fits

Everything marked built in is on every Orbit plan, from Solo at £25 a month (£19 a month billed yearly, ex VAT), with a 14-day trial and no card. That covers the customer emails, VAT invoices, stock reservation, the ship-by dates in the Orders list, the abandoned-cart reminder, subscription renewals and gift cards, plus the Nebula assistant with its monthly allowance. The plugins for the next six jobs install on any plan: Product Reviews is free, Live Chat has a free plan and paid plans, eBay and Amazon have a free tier with paid plans above it, and the rest are priced on their own listings. The reorder digest and purchase orders come with Enterprise at £999 a month (£749 a month billed yearly); the comparison is on the pricing page.

Read next: reorder points and purchase orders, rewriting your shop’s emails in your own voice and live chat for a one-person shop.

Questions people ask about shop automations

What does an online shop platform automate by itself?

On Orbit, every plan sends the order, payment, return and account emails, emails a VAT invoice when a VAT-registered shop is paid and reserves stock when an order is placed. It stamps orders with a ship-by date once a delivery method carries a dispatch promise, sends one abandoned-cart reminder per cart, charges and emails subscription renewals, and issues and expires gift cards.

Do I need a separate automation tool for a small online shop?

Usually not for the fifteen jobs in this post: seven run on every Orbit plan, six come from plugins and two come with Enterprise. Before you pay for a general automation tool, check whether a setting, a plugin or a webhook already does the job.

How do I send a review request email automatically on Orbit?

Through the Workflows plugin, which can send a templated email on a fulfilment trigger; the Product Reviews plugin then holds every review as Pending until you approve it.

Does Orbit sync with Xero or QuickBooks?

Yes, through the Xero and QuickBooks plugins. Each paid order goes into your accounts as a sales invoice with its payment, each refund as a credit note or refund receipt, against the accounts and VAT rates you map once.

Can I automate reordering stock?

On Enterprise, almost: the planning view works out run-out dates from the last 28 days of sales, a morning digest lists what has fallen to its reorder point, and Create purchase order fills in the quantity, but a person approves and sends it. On other plans the Low stock filter shows what is running low and the Nebula assistant suggests a restock when you ask.

The quickest way to see which of the fifteen you can hand over is a fortnight of real orders on the 14-day free trial, no card required, with the first emails sent to your own address.