Three Shopify stores, three ways I overbuilt them

The first store I built had eleven Flow automations running before it processed its first order. Abandoned cart sequences, inventory alerts, a Slack bot for restocks — all built before we knew what the store actually needed, because building automations is more fun than waiting for sales data.

Two of those eleven ever mattered. The rest were solving problems the store didn't have yet, and a few actively got in the way — one automation kept re-tagging customers in a loop that quietly ate API rate limits for a month before anyone noticed the store was slower than it should've been.

What I do differently now: launch with the absolute minimum — checkout, inventory sync, one abandoned-cart email — and only automate a step once I've watched a human do it manually at least a dozen times. If it's not a real bottleneck yet, it's not worth the surface area.

It's a less exciting way to build, and it's also the version that doesn't break in ways nobody's watching for.