The situation
A four-person e-commerce brand based in Newcastle was selling through Shopify to both direct-to-consumer and wholesale customers, processing between 400 and 600 orders a month. The mix of customer types meant every order required a decision: was this a retail customer, a new buyer, a returning wholesale account? The answer determined what happened next in Klaviyo, how the order was routed for fulfilment, and how it appeared in the Sheets ledger used for weekly sales reporting.
A part-time admin was working through this process manually, spending roughly three hours every day on order-related tasks. The work was repetitive, low-error-tolerance, and completely predictable. Every step was the same each time. The only variable was volume.
The flow we built
A Make.com scenario triggers on every Shopify order create event. It reads the order tags to determine customer type: retail new, retail repeat, or wholesale. Based on that classification, it places the customer into the right Klaviyo segment, which controls which post-purchase sequence they receive.
It then adds a row to the Sheets sales ledger with the order number, customer type, product category, value, and fulfilment status. Wholesale orders are routed down a separate branch so they are flagged in the ledger and handled under the brand's wholesale process rather than the retail one. Retail customers continue to receive the standard Shopify order confirmation; no duplicate email is triggered for them.
The platforms
Shopify supplies the order data via its webhook infrastructure. Make.com handles the routing logic and the connections to Klaviyo and Google Sheets. All three platforms were already in use before the automation was built: the work was connecting them, not replacing them. The setup runs on a Bot Care Professional tier, so when Klaviyo's API introduced a rate limit change last quarter it was caught by monitoring and the scenario was updated before it affected any orders.
The results
Twelve hours of weekly admin disappeared in the first week of deployment. The part-time admin role still exists, but the time previously spent on order processing has been redirected toward customer service and returns handling, work that genuinely benefits from a person rather than a script.
Wholesale orders are now separated from retail within a minute of being placed, rather than whenever the admin next had time to work through the queue.
What this could look like for your e-commerce business
If your team is doing the same set of actions for every order, that process can almost certainly be automated. We build Shopify pipelines that connect to Klaviyo, Google Sheets, and other platforms your business already uses, configured to your specific customer types and business rules.