Case Study: How We Helped a Popular Canadian Bakery Automate Order Routing with Shopify Flow

Crave Cupcakes is a well-loved Canadian bakery known for its handcrafted cupcakes and custom cakes, with busy storefronts in cities like Calgary and Edmonton. With online orders picking up speed, their team needed a better way to manage how those orders flowed into their day-to-day operations, especially when it came to custom cakes and store-specific pickup or delivery.

Background & Challenge

Crave’s operations relied on a shared Google Sheet to keep track of incoming orders and manage production schedules at each store. But as order volume grew, it became clear that their existing system was slowing them down. Orders weren’t being sorted by location or flagged for special handling, like custom cakes or requests left in the order notes. This made it harder for the team to prep the right orders at the right location, especially during busy periods.

What They Wanted — and How We Got Them There

  • Their Goal

    The goal was to build a smarter, automated system that could:

    • Identify which store location the order belonged to
    • Flag custom cakes and any special order notes
    • Push this info into a shared Google Sheet by location and notes
    • Make life easier for the operations team while keeping their manual tracking system intact

  • Our Solution

    We created a custom automation using Shopify Flow, Zapiet, and Google Sheets. When an order is placed, the system checks whether it includes a custom cake or has any notes added by the customer. If it does, it automatically pushes the order into a shared Google Sheet used by the Crave team. A short delay is built in to ensure the order is fully processed before it appears in the sheet. From there, Crave’s team is able to review the orders and begin preparing them in the kitchen, keeping operations organized without needing to change their existing workflow.

Results That Moved the Needle

8,212
of repetitive labour reduced
0
chance of human error
$111,000
saved

Time saved: No more digging through Shopify for details. Everything shows up where it should, ready to go.
Less room for error: Orders are clearly split by location and flagged for notes or custom cakes, helping teams prep with confidence.
Real-time visibility: Each store only sees the orders that matter to them.
Supports existing workflow: The solution fit perfectly into Crave’s existing process of manually tracking capacity—no big changes needed.

Results

Shopify doesn't give great logs on the number of times a flow has been executed. However in a typical day this automation runs ~270 times. If a human needed to catalogue those orders by hand, and say it took them 5 minutes per order that would be 22 hours a day or 8,212 hours a year in Labour. At minimum wage, that would cost ~$111,000 in wages. Crave had a positive return on their investment in just under 2 weeks

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