Marketing automations

Automations are lifecycle emails that send themselves: a shopper abandons a checkout, a product comes back in stock, a customer’s birthday arrives — and the right email goes out without you touching anything. Sellerlane ships a fixed set of eleven automations under Marketing → Automations. There is no flow builder to assemble and no branching logic to maintain. Each automation is a single toggle with a couple of timing settings, and every one ships with a working built-in email, so turning one on is genuinely one click.

Automation checks run continuously in the background (roughly every ten minutes), so sends land close to — not exactly on — their configured delay.

How an automation works

Every automation has the same anatomy:

A trigger — the customer behavior that qualifies someone, like reaching checkout without ordering or going quiet for six months.
Timing settings — how long to wait, or how far back to look. Each kind exposes only the knobs that make sense for it.
Emails — one or more email designs, of which exactly one is active. If you never design anything, the built-in default email sends. Design your own and activate it, and yours sends instead.
Safeguards — consent checks, suppression checks, and per-contact cooldowns are built in. You can’t accidentally mail the same person the same automation email over and over.

Turn an automation on

Go to Marketing → Automations and open the automation you want.
Review the Trigger line under the title — it states exactly what qualifies a customer.
Adjust the timing settings at the bottom of the page if the defaults don’t fit (see the reference table below).
Flip the Turned on switch. The status badge changes to Active and the automation starts evaluating customers on the next check.

The eleven automations

Automation	Trigger	Default timing	Settings
Abandoned checkout	Shopper entered their email at checkout but didn’t complete the order	6 hours after their last checkout activity	Send after (1–24 hours) · Also email guests
Abandoned cart	Customer added items to their cart but never reached the checkout email step	6 hours after the cart was last touched	Send after (1–24 hours)
Back in stock	A product a customer asked to be notified about is restocked	Immediately on restock	None — design only
Price drop	A product the customer recently viewed, carted, or wishlisted goes on sale	On the next check after the price cut	Minimum drop (5–50%, default 10%) · Interested within (7–90 days, default 30) · Skip past purchasers (on by default)
Browse abandonment	Customer viewed a product but didn’t add it, start checkout, or buy	4 hours after their last product view	Send after (1–24 hours)
Welcome	Contact subscribed to email marketing	Shortly after subscribing; once ever per address	None
Thank you after purchase	Customer’s order is paid	7 days after payment	Send after (3–30 days)
Post-purchase cross-sell	Order is paid and its products have bought-together recommendations	7 days after payment	Send after (3–30 days)
Win back lapsed customers	Customer with past orders hasn’t ordered in the configured period	90 days since the last order	No orders for (60–180 days)
Re-engagement check	Subscriber hasn’t opened or clicked any email in the configured period	180 days quiet	Quiet for (90–365 days)
Birthday	It’s the customer’s birthday	On the day, in your store’s timezone; once per year	None

Abandoned checkout — and the guests option

Abandoned checkout is the highest-value automation for most stores: the shopper got far enough to type their email, so the built-in email’s Return to your cart link takes them straight back to their waiting cart to finish checking out.

By default it only mails subscribed contacts. The Also email guests who entered their email at checkout checkbox extends it to shoppers who typed an email but never subscribed. This mirrors how most commerce platforms treat abandoned checkouts, and every send still carries a one-click unsubscribe — but it is your call to confirm it complies with privacy law in your region. Anyone who has ever unsubscribed is never mailed, guest or not.

Abandoned checkout and abandoned cart never overlap: a cart with a checkout email belongs to abandoned checkout, a cart without one belongs to abandoned cart. A shopper who abandons a cart, gets the cart email, then later starts checkout and abandons again graduates to the checkout automation.

Post-purchase timing — anchored on payment

Both post-purchase automations count their delay from when the order was paid, not when it was placed. A cash-on-delivery order that’s collected two weeks after checkout still gets its thank-you the configured number of days after the payment lands — it isn’t silently skipped. Unpaid orders never trigger either automation, and orders already in the review-request flow are skipped so a customer isn’t double-mailed.

Price drop thresholds

Price drop watches products your customers showed interest in — viewed, carted, or wishlisted within the Interested within window — and mails them when the price falls by at least the Minimum drop percentage. Each customer is alerted at most once per price: a later, deeper cut can re-alert them, but the same sale returning does not. Leave Don’t alert customers who already bought the product on unless your catalog is re-buyable — consumables, refills — where “it’s cheaper now” is welcome news rather than buyer’s remorse.

Win back vs. re-engagement check

These two sound similar but watch different signals:

Win back watches orders. It targets customers who buy — they have order history — but haven’t bought lately. The email is a nudge to shop again.
Re-engagement check (sometimes called a sunset flow) watches engagement. It targets subscribers who have stopped opening or clicking your emails entirely, and asks whether they still want them, with an easy unsubscribe. Mailing people who never engage hurts your sender reputation; this automation is list hygiene, not a sales pitch.

A customer can be a win-back target while still opening every email, and a re-engagement target while never having ordered at all. The re-engagement check only considers contacts you’ve actually mailed before — enabling it on a freshly imported list won’t blast everyone.

Birthday needs a birthdate

The birthday automation reads the birthday saved on the customer’s profile — add it on the customer page or collect it in your forms. Customers without a birthdate are simply never candidates. The day is evaluated in your store’s timezone, each customer gets at most one birthday email per year, and February 29 birthdays are celebrated on February 28 in non-leap years.

Back in stock always sends

Back-in-stock alerts are user-requested — the shopper explicitly asked to be told — so they send even to contacts without marketing consent (suppressed addresses are still excluded). The automation entry exists so you can replace the plain built-in alert with a branded design of your own; see Stock alerts for how customers sign up.

Design your own email

Every automation works out of the box with its built-in email, but a designed email — your products, your voice, a discount block — almost always performs better.

Open the automation and click New email. Pick a starter template or start blank; you land in the full-screen email builder.
Build the email. Subject and preview text are edited here in the builder — automation emails have no separate subject setting anywhere else. Leave the subject blank and the built-in default subject is used.
Use merge tags like {{ customer.first_name }} to personalize; they fill in per recipient at send. The abandoned checkout, abandoned cart, and browse abandonment automations each unlock a matching Reengagement section in the builder that renders the shopper’s actual items — those sections only exist in their own automation and can’t be used elsewhere.
Send yourself a test from the ⋯ menu → Send test email. Tests render with sample customer and trigger data, so you can check an abandoned-cart layout without abandoning a real cart. Only the address you enter receives it.
Set the design active. Each automation sends exactly one design — the active one; activating a design deactivates the previous one. Your other designs stay listed as drafts you can switch to anytime.

Automation emails always send with your current branding. If you change your logo, colors, or footer under Marketing → Settings, every automation email — built-in or designed — picks up the new look on its next send. There’s no stale copy to re-publish.

Read the numbers

Each automation page shows its own scorecard for a selectable date range (up to the trailing 90 days): Sent, Click rate, Orders, Conversion rate, Sales, and Average order value. The same columns repeat per email design in the messages table, so when you’re testing a new design against the old one you can compare them directly — a design shows an em dash until it has sent at least once in the window.

Orders and sales are credited through the same attribution engine as campaigns: automation clicks are auto-tagged with a utm_campaign beginning with automation-, and orders within the attribution window count back to the automation. See Sales attribution for how crediting works.

Automations follow exactly the same consent rules as campaign email:

Recipients must be subscribed to email marketing — one exception below.
Suppressed addresses (unsubscribed, hard-bounced, complained, or manually suppressed) are excluded automatically at send time.
Every email carries a one-click unsubscribe; unsubscribing stops all marketing email, automations included, immediately.

The one exception is the abandoned-checkout guests option described above: with it enabled, a guest who typed their email at checkout but never subscribed can receive that one recovery email. Even then, anyone with an unsubscribed or invalid state for the address is never a candidate, and back-in-stock alerts follow their own user-requested rules.

On top of consent, each automation enforces its own frequency guard — welcome sends once ever, birthday once a year, win back at most once per lapse period, and the behavioral automations apply per-contact cooldowns (typically a week) so a customer who keeps browsing or buying isn’t mailed the same message every few days.

Marketing overview — campaigns, emails, templates, and where automations fit in the workspace.
Sales attribution — models, windows, and how automation orders are credited.
Customers & segments — where consent and customer profiles (including birthdays) live.
Stock alerts — the buyer-facing side of back in stock.
Store emails — sender verification and deliverability.