Testing eCommerce Automations Under Fifty Bucks a Month

1. Zapier free tier throttling makes order syncs unreliable

I started testing a basic WooCommerce to Google Sheets order logger with Zapier’s free plan late one night, mostly just to help a friend stop manually copying order numbers into invoices by hand. It worked during setup. Then broke silently the next morning.

If you’re on the free Zapier plan, it will process 100 tasks a month, 15-minute polling intervals only. But here’s the weird part: if two orders come in during the same interval, only one triggers consistently. The Zap run logs show occasional skipped runs with no apparent error. It’s a rate limit, but it doesn’t alert you or queue missed events. The webhook doesn’t backfill, and because Woo sends no retry signal by default, the Zap just never runs.

We confirmed it by simulating 3 test orders in a 10-minute span. Only order #2 triggered the Zap. Orders 1 and 3? Nowhere in the task logs. Resending the webhook manually in WooCommerce triggered both instantly. Zapier doesn’t log the other missed ones as errored runs. They vanish.

Solution: we upgraded to the Starter plan ($19.99/month) to get 2-minute polling and added a backup RSS polling trigger (using Make) pointed at a custom order feed that logs all orders in case Zapier misses one. Definitely overkill for “free” automation.

2. Make scenarios can loop infinitely on Shopify variants

Make has way more flexibility for Shopify workflows — especially around variants and metafields — but runs on operation counts. I once tried to automatically update description copy across all variants for edited products. Thought it was working. Then opened the execution summary and saw one product triggered 94 operations.

Turns out the iterator module doesn’t automatically protect against circular loops if your Shopify API module uses embedded checks that re-trigger the same product update. It sees the change, thinks it’s new, runs again. And again. There’s no debounce logic by default.

Aha moment: Adding an unlinked text field like “last_auto_update” timestamp prevents the loop. As long as you write a timestamp only once per product, the identical update avoids re-recognition. Not documented. Not intuitive. But it worked.

You can also set an execution limit using Make’s “Stop” module after N runs, but that’ll break multi-product batches unless you segment by SKU manually.

3. Pabbly Connect hides webhook retries behind a paid wall

Pabbly is cheap — ridiculously cheap — and gets hyped a lot in Facebook groups. I tried running a basic Stripe-to-Mailerlite flow there. Setup was simple. Test webhook worked first try. Seemed solid.

But real webhook events failed at random. Stripe fired them consistently, I could see them hit the endpoint, but Pabbly dropped them silently sometimes. Contacted support. They said: “Retries are only available in our Standard plan.”

That line in the chat made me flip a table. Retry isn’t advanced behavior in 2024. Some events need three tries to make it through Cloudflare. Not having it as default is dangerous. There’s no logging unless it fails a module with an explicit error. Silent failures just… fail.

Workaround: I rerouted the Stripe events through a tiny Cloudflare Worker proxy that buffered the JSON and resent via fetch if Pabbly didn’t respond within 5 seconds. It held up, but now I have a $4/month automation plus custom JS maintaining idempotency headers manually. So much for “set and forget.”

4. Integrately UI looks friendly but masks brittle data mappings

I’ll admit I fell for the “100 ready-made automations” pitch on Integrately. Installed the Wix–Gmail confirmation automation in three minutes flat. Orders came in, emails looked clean. Until someone bought two items with special characters in the name.

Instead of sending one email per order, it tried to split the product name string by commas, then fed each into the {product} variable at send time. The email body came out as a broken HTML array. Turns out that specific automation mapped product arrays to inline email lists using naive delimiter logic — and doesn’t sanitize special characters or quote wrapping properly.

System behavior: If you edit the automation and click deeper into “Advanced Settings,” the delimiters used for parsing product lists are visible. They default to comma-plus-space. That’s undocumented unless you edit the JSON flow manually, which the UI blocks unless you’re cloning another automation.

After some fiddling, switching the source app to “formatted HTML” mode (instead of array) avoided the issue. The flow became stable, but it required dropping the pre-built template entirely and rebuilding from scratch. Took longer than setting it up in Make to begin with.

5. N8n’s Airtable integration truncates nested lookups by default

I like n8n. Local-run, transparent, lots of modules. But the Airtable node — specifically the read node — flattens all relationships unless you manually write an extended lookup. I lost an entire morning wondering why linked record data wasn’t propagating.

“Lookup values with more than one record will show empty fields, unless you manually dereference using the Airtable API again.”

That’s from an n8n GitHub issue. Not the docs. Not the UI. The “Include Fields” option only controls visible columns, not relationship dereferencing.

To fix it, I had to switch to HTTP request mode and query the Airtable REST API manually with filterByFormula set to match the IDs from the first step. Ugly, but it let me recurse into the linked table and fetch those values directly.

I now use n8n only for flatter Airtable tables. Anything with junctions and lookups gets routed over to Make, where the Airtable integrations are opinionated but consistent in output shape.

6. AppSumo deals trap you into outdated builds missing core triggers

I still have lifetime deals gathering dust. One of them was KonnectzIT, which looked promising — especially since it had a WooCommerce trigger and claimed AI step suggestions. Tried to set it up for a client’s opt-in upsell emails post-checkout.

The UI showed WooCommerce as an app, but the only available trigger was “new product created.” No order or customer triggers available. Reached out to support and got this reply:

“Those were part of v1. We’ve removed v1 from AppSumo builds due to performance concerns.”

So I had a forever deal for a product that literally didn’t support the use case I bought it for. No roadmap for re-adding triggers either. And clicking “View Triggers” on their docs linked to a 404.

This isn’t isolated — similar thing happened with Albato (no Shopify triggers unless on Pro plan) and Stackby (Zapier integration only supports new rows, no updates or deletes).

If anything, I’ve learned to test all automation tools post-purchase with fake transactions the same day I get access. Don’t assume the presence of an “app” means all relevant triggers exist — or still work.

7. Bento has great data detail but triggers are only daily

For email and event logging, Bento is surprisingly decent — especially as a budget-friendly Klaviyo alternative. But their automations are time-bucketed. Tried building a win-back sequence on added to cart but not purchased in 20 minutes. No dice.

After asking in Slack, their CTO confirmed:

“Automation triggers run on daily schedules right now — we batch everything at midnight UTC.”

No webhooks, no live triggers. So even though the customer journey section logs real-time Magento or Shopify storefront events, you can’t react to them in real-time. Delays are baked into the architecture.

I hacked it using a Zapier step that logged ‘added to cart’ events directly via webhook and then used Bento’s API to tag them if no purchase followed within 30 minutes. Worked, but broke the intentional simplicity of having all logic inside Bento’s UI. Also reset user scoring each time. Not ideal.

8. Limitations of Tally automations with submission rate bursts

Tally forms look slick and are great for low-friction checkout side flows — like capturing ZIP codes for shipping rules. But we tried building a promo system for an eCommerce plugin launch (sign up → get code → verify → trigger email) and ran over a rate limiter mid-demo.

What’s unstated: Tally webhook pushes have burst limits. If more than 40–50 submissions happen per minute, some webhooks just don’t fire. You won’t see a failed event or logged miss.

The fix? We piped the submissions through Make’s email parser instead of using Tally’s built-in webhook. It sounds insane, but parsing the form alert emails had 100 percent delivery reliability under load. Even at 200+ requests/minute (we got Reddit’d).

Saw one submission come in 17 seconds after it was created on the backend. Not great, but better than vanishing requests. It’s still running on that patch eight weeks later.