A furniture company in Texas reached out last month with a problem that sounded simple.
They were spending 20 hours a week manually sending order update emails to customers. Someone would check Shopify, see an order moved to production, copy the customer email, write the update, send it.
For hundreds of orders every month.
They wanted it automated.
What They Actually Needed
Modern Bungalow sells custom furniture, lighting, and rugs. Made to order stuff that takes weeks to produce.
Their workflow: Order comes in. Goes into production queue. Moves to production. Gets completed. Ready for delivery.
At each stage, customers need an update. "Your order is in the queue." "Your furniture is in production." "It's complete and ready."
Different products need different messaging. Lighting emails are different from furniture emails. They have three delivery partners, each needs specific information in the delivery email.
All of this was being done manually. Every single email.
The automation seemed straightforward. Monitor Shopify orders. When status changes, send the appropriate email.
Except I made it more complicated than it needed to be.
The Part I Got Wrong
Here's what I didn't think through carefully enough.
The "order is queued" email was supposed to send 24 hours after an order was placed. That buffer gives them time to check inventory before telling the customer anything.
I built the logic so once that email sent, they had to manually clear a field before the next email would work.
That's an extra step. The whole point was eliminating manual steps.
Worse, if they forgot to clear it, the status emails wouldn't send at all. I'd built something that required the team to remember an arbitrary technical rule.
That's bad automation.
Three weeks after launch, I rebuilt the core logic. Now the queue check and status check are completely independent. They don't interfere with each other.
The team can leave fields alone. Just update the order status and everything happens automatically.
That's how it should have worked from the beginning.
What Actually Worked
The system monitors their Shopify orders every five minutes. When they update an order's status, the automation sends the right email within five minutes.
Nine different email templates:
- Queue notification
- In production (lighting, rugs, furniture - each different)
- Production complete
- Ready for delivery (different for each delivery partner)
Every email logs automatically to the order notes with a timestamp. Complete audit trail.
Zero manual work. Just update Shopify like they normally would.
The Real Numbers
They're saving 20+ hours a week. That's 80+ hours a month they're not spending on email management.
But the bigger impact is consistency. Before, customer communication depended on who was working and whether they remembered. Now every customer gets clear updates at the exact right time.
95% reduction in manual data entry. 100% order accuracy. Zero duplicate emails.
What I'd Do Differently
I should have spent more time upfront mapping the workflow before writing code.
I jumped into building too fast. Built the queue logic before fully thinking through how it would interact with status emails.
That's why I had to rebuild it three weeks later.
I should have drawn out the entire flow on paper first. Worked through every combination before writing a line of code.
The other mistake: not testing enough edge cases before launch. The system worked fine for the happy path. But what about when someone makes a mistake? What if an order skips a step?
I found those issues in production. Should have found them in testing.
The Part That Took Time
The technical build was maybe three days including testing.
Everything else took way longer.
Understanding their actual workflow. Mapping every scenario. Building email templates they were happy with. Writing 34 pages of documentation so they're not dependent on me.
That's where the work actually is. The code is the easy part.
The system saves them about $40K a year in labor costs. They paid me a fraction of that to build it.
That's what good automation does. Removes manual work, makes processes reliable, pays for itself in months.