A basic definition of ecommerce automation is implementing any tool, process, or workflow that allows repetitive tasks to be handled automatically with little or no human involvement. The tasks are often error prone when done manually, and their impact can typically be measured as opportunity costs - in other words. what other valuable things could a merchant be doing to grow and sustain their business while letting automations handle the repetitive tasks more accurately and efficiently?
In promoting their Flow offering, Shopify themselves published a fairly comprehensive explanation of ecommerce automation and the benefits that can be obtained from its practices. While Flow is currently only available on the Shopify Advanced and Plus plans, merchants on any plan level can have automations developed for them using the comprehensive Shopify API.
Having custom developed automations sounds expensive. In addition to the costs to define, develop, and deploy these automatons, there is the ongoing maintenance and hosting costs of the automation code, which typically will be passed onto the merchant. While many of these costs should be offset by the time savings from the foregone collective manual work, once a merchant wants to begin automating more and more processes, then these costs can continue to increase linearly with the amount of solutions develop