Complete guide: automating your e-commerce with Make and n8n

8 to 15 hours a week. That’s how much time a medium-sized WooCommerce shop spends manually doing what a workflow could handle on its own: confirmation emails, stock updates, CRM synchronisation, and abandoned basket reminders. Make and n8n allow you to reclaim this time with a few well-configured automations. Here are the five that deliver the greatest returns, along with the exact logic behind each one.

Make or n8n: which one should you choose for WooCommerce?

Make (formerly Integromat) offers the best combination of power and ease of use for e-commerce businesses. Clear, visual interface, over 1,500 native integrations, EU-based servers for GDPR compliance. From €9 per month.

n8n It is open-source and can be self-hosted on your own server, which is ideal if you have sensitive data or if you want automation with no volume limits. Free when self-hosted; 20 $/month in the cloud.

Our rule: Start with Make to get up and running quickly and demonstrate ROI, then migrate to self-hosted n8n when the volume or sensitivity of the data warrants it.

Workflow 1: Personalised post-purchase emails

The problem

The default WooCommerce confirmation email is generic and does not make use of order data. A well-configured post-purchase sequence can double customer retention.

The Make solution

1. Trigger: WooCommerce «order.completed» webhook»
2. Filter: if order value > €100
3. Wait: 24 hours
4. Action: Klaviyo/Brevo, send an email titled «How did your order go?»
5. Wait: 7 days
6. Action: send an email containing a product review link
7. Wait: 30 days
8. Action: send a personalised loyalty offer (-10 % on the category they purchased)

As for WooCommerce, the trigger is based on a native webhook that needs to be configured in WooCommerce → Settings → Advanced → Webhooks. The payload sent to Make looks like this, and this is what you filter and route:

{
  "id": 8421,
  "status": "completed",
  "total": "149.90",
  "billing": { "email": "[email protected]", "first_name": "…" },
  "line_items": [
    { "name": "Product A", "quantity": 1, "total": "149.90" }
  ]
}

Result observed: +25 % product reviews, +15 % repeat orders within 60 days.

Workflow 2: Recovering abandoned shopping baskets

70 % of WooCommerce shopping baskets are abandoned. A well-designed recovery workflow can recover 15 to 20 % of them.

1. Trigger: WooCommerce, abandoned basket (via a custom webhook or the Cart Abandonment Recovery plugin)
2. Wait: 1 hour
3. Action: «Have you forgotten something?» email (items in the basket, excluding promotions)
4. Wait: 24 hours
5. Filter: if basket not collected
6. Action: email featuring a customer testimonial about the main product
7. Wait: 48 hours
8. Filter: if not yet collected AND basket value > €50
9. Promotion: email with promo code -10 %, valid for 48 hours

Workflow 3: Real-time stock synchronisation

1. Trigger: WooCommerce, «product.updated» (stock change)
2. Filter: if stock is less than the defined minimum threshold
3. Action: Notify the Slack channel #stocks with the product and the current level
4. Action: Update Airtable (stock management spreadsheet)
5. Optional action: automatically create a purchase order in your ERP system

Workflow 4: Automatic CRM enrichment

1. Trigger: WooCommerce, new order
2. Action: search for/create a contact in HubSpot via email
3. Action: Update HubSpot properties: last order, LTV amount, favourite category
4. Filter: if first order
5. Action: Send sales task «Call this new client within 48 hours»
6. Filter: if VIP customer (LTV > €500)
7. Action: notify the designated sales representative directly

Workflow 5: Automatic performance reports

1. Trigger: Scheduler, every Monday morning at 8.00 am
2. Action: WooCommerce API query, weekly turnover
3. Action: Google Analytics 4, sessions, conversion rate, traffic sources
4. Task: Google Sheets – update the dashboard
5. Action: Slack – post the weekly summary in #performance

The 3 mistakes that cause automation to fail

• No error handling : without a «failure» branch, a missed webhook goes unnoticed. Always add a Slack notification in the event of an error.
• Automating a vague process : if the manual step isn’t clear, automation will simply replicate the confusion. Map it out first, then automate it.
• Ignore duplicates : without an idempotence key (such as the order ID), replaying the same event will result in the email being sent twice. Filter by a unique identifier.

These five workflows save an average of 8 to 15 hours per week for a medium-sized WooCommerce shop. They can be set up in two to three weeks and pay for themselves in less than two months.

Workflow automation is the gateway to more ambitious systems: the same n8n platform powers a AI chatbot linked to your content or genuine autonomous AI agents. And if you haven’t yet chosen your e-commerce platform, our WooCommerce vs Shopify: A Comparison explains why WooCommerce can be automated to the full.

Would you rather delegate the set-up than learn Make and n8n? See our e-commerce automation service.