Home/Guides/Building your first automation

Building your first automation

Automations · 7 min read · Updated September 9, 2026

An automation is the difference between a scheduling tool and a system that runs without you. This guide walks through every field on the automation form, explains what each choice does downstream, and ends with a rule you can copy exactly.

The anatomy of an automation
Choosing product conditions
Attaching a template
Selecting networks
Setting the schedule
What happens when the run ends
Reviewing the queue
Running several automations

1. The anatomy of an automation

Every automation answers five questions:

Which products? — a condition evaluated against your catalog
What should the post say? — a template, optionally with AI copy
Where does it go? — one or more connected networks
When? — weekdays and hours
And then? — what to do once every matching product has been published

AutoPost evaluates the condition, queues the matching products, and at each scheduled slot renders and publishes the next one. That is the whole loop.

2. Choosing product conditions

Condition	Best used for	Watch out for
Any products	A continuous rotation through the catalog	On a large catalog it will take a long time to come back around — that is usually the point
Product creation time	New arrivals; the highest-value automation for most stores	Pick a window (7–30 days) wide enough that quiet weeks still have something to post
Product update time	Price changes, refreshed descriptions, restocks	Bulk edits can suddenly match hundreds of products
Product title contains	A product line, a collection keyword or a campaign tag	Depends on disciplined naming in your catalog
Product status	Publishing only active products	Worth combining with other rules as a safety net
Sales channel	Only promoting what is actually available on a given channel	Remember to publish new products to that channel

Out-of-stock products are skipped automatically, so you never advertise something a follower cannot buy.

3. Attaching a template

Pick a template that matches the intent of the automation. A new-arrivals rule should not use a Black Friday template. If you want copy that varies per product, choose one with an {AI_RESULT} block; if you want every post phrased identically, use a fixed template with product variables only.

The preview renders the template against a real product before you save, which is the moment to notice that your caption reads awkwardly when the product title is long.

4. Selecting networks

Tick every network this automation should publish to. Two things follow from that choice:

Credits. Each network counts as its own post. One automation publishing to three networks uses three credits per product.
Validation. The caption is checked against each selected network's limits. X (Twitter) is the strictest; a caption written for TikTok may not fit.

If a caption needs to differ meaningfully between networks, run two automations with the same condition and different templates instead of compromising on one.

5. Setting the schedule

Choose weekdays and hours. A few rules of thumb:

Fewer slots, kept forever beats many slots abandoned after a fortnight.
Spread slots across the day. Two posts eight hours apart look natural; two posts a minute apart look automated — and can trigger platform spam checks.
Mind the daily cap. Free allows 2 posts a day, Basic 5 and Advanced 10, across all automations. If your schedule asks for more than the cap, the surplus waits.
Match your audience's timezone, not your own working hours.

6. What happens when the run ends

Setting	Behaviour	Use it for
Keep posting on schedule	Starts over from the beginning of the matching set	Evergreen feeds you never want to go quiet
Post once, then skip	Each matching product is published exactly once	Announcements, where repetition would be noise
Post twice, then skip	Each product gets a second airing, then stops	Giving good products a second chance at a different time of day
Disable automation	The automation switches itself off	Dated campaigns — the promotion cannot outlive the sale

7. Reviewing the queue

Save the automation and open the Calendar. The queue is now populated, and nothing has been published yet. Read the first five queued captions. You are looking for:

captions that break when a product title is unusually long;
AI copy that drifts from your brand voice;
products you did not intend to include — a sign the condition is too broad;
media that does not suit the network, such as a wide banner heading for TikTok.

Fix the template or the condition rather than editing posts one by one. Individual edits are for exceptions, not for correcting a systematic problem.

8. Running several automations

One automation rarely covers a whole strategy. A practical set for a small store:

New arrivals — creation time, last 7 days, AI template, TikTok and Instagram, three times a week, keep posting.
Evergreen bestsellers — any products, Bestseller template, Facebook and Pinterest, daily at 18:00, post once then skip.
Campaign — title contains the campaign keyword, Flash Sale template, all networks, dense slots during the sale, disable when done.

They coexist because they draw on different product sets and different hours. The daily cap keeps the total sane, and the calendar shows you the combined picture.

Next: Writing product templates and AI captions · A social content calendar for a Shopify store