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Flows worth building on day one
Notify purchasing when stock drops below the reorder point. Tag customers who abandoned a cart over €500 so sales can call them. Escalate an order that has been unpaid for ten days. Each of these is fifteen minutes of configuration and replaces a recurring human check.
Where Flow Builder stops
Flow Builder is event-driven and stateless. It cannot loop, it cannot wait for an external system, and it cannot do a nightly reconciliation against your ERP. The moment you need those, you need a scheduled task or a message queue worker — not a flow with a clever workaround.
Custom flow actions are cheap
Writing your own flow action is a small plugin: a class, a config form, done. Now your non-technical team can wire 'push this order to the ERP' into any trigger they like, without a developer in the loop each time.
Log everything, or debug nothing
A silent flow that stopped firing three weeks ago is worse than no flow. Log every execution and alert on failures — automation you cannot observe is a liability, not an asset.
- Stock, abandoned carts and dunning are the fastest wins.
- No loops, no waiting — that is a worker's job.
- Unobserved automation is a liability.
We do this for a living — Shopware, Node.js, React, ERP integration and automation for B2B.
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