Omnisend Alternative for Shopify: Start With Your Flows

Because the requirement already exists and nobody has written it down. A feature comparison asks what a tool can do. Your automation list asks the better question — what are you actually paying this category to do, and which parts of it earn? Those are different lists, and only the second one is yours.

Open whatever you run today and write out every automated message, one line each: what starts it, who receives it, and what it brought in over the last ninety days. The exercise takes about an hour and it survives the switch, because it is a description of your shop rather than of a product. If you want the store-level numbers to go with it — repeat rate, order gap, value per customer — the four numbers worth pulling first are in the same admin.

A shortlist built this way tends to be short. That is the point. The alternative is scoring vendors on capabilities you will never switch on, which is how stores end up paying for a suite and running three messages out of it.

Two or three, in nearly every shop. The distribution is lopsided and it is worth knowing which end you are on before you let anyone sell you breadth.

On WhatsApp the pattern is clear enough to plan around. Cart Recovery converts at 18–30% and typically accounts for around 40% of the channel's revenue on its own. Back-in-Stock converts at 25–40%, because the intent was already there when the customer asked to be told. A Welcome Series earns less per message but sets up everything after it. The rest — browse abandonment, re-order reminders, winback, review requests, birthday — are real and worth running, and none of them decides a tool choice.

Ask your current reporting for revenue per automated message, not per channel. A channel total hides the asymmetry completely: it cannot tell the one message carrying the programme apart from the five diluting it, which is exactly the comparison you need. Which flows pay first also depends on what you sell — re-order reminders carry pet, beauty and food shops much further than considered-purchase categories, and the per-vertical ranges are on the industries page.

Three things, and they are checkable in an afternoon on a trial account. Everything else is preference.

1. The trigger has to exist. A flow is only as good as the event that starts it. Keaz flows begin at a documented event — a purchase, an abandoned checkout, a chat-in, or an incoming webhook. Write down which event should start each of your earning messages, then check it is on the list rather than assuming the category implies it. What the platform runs on is on the features page.
2. The channel has to reach your customers. This is the number that caps all the others and the one demos never show, because a demo always has a test contact in it. Customer Contact Coverage is the share of your last-12-months Shopify customers you can actually message: most shops start at 35–55% and pass 85% in roughly 60 days once the coverage levers run. If you also connect Klaviyo, Marketing Contact Coverage — the share of your email subscribers reachable on WhatsApp — moves from 15–30% to 50–70%.
3. Attribution has to work per flow. Give every flow its own discount code and the question "did it work" has an answer in week one instead of an argument in month three. Per-channel revenue is not enough to judge a replacement by.

The cheapest of the three to start on is reach, and you can start before you have chosen anything. Phone capture at checkout runs around 22% when the field is quiet and 65–70% when it is actively asked for, with a line of explanation beside it — walked through in phone number at checkout. To price your own gap in euros rather than in percentages, run the revenue forecast on your Shopify numbers.

One thing, and it is worth a paragraph of its own because it is the only item on this page that cannot be fixed afterwards: permission belongs to a channel, not to a vendor.

Shopify's own data model says it plainly. A customer profile carries email marketing, SMS marketing and WhatsApp marketing as three separate subscription states, editable — and bulk-editable — independently of each other (Shopify Help Center, retrieved 2026-10-01). Someone who ticked the newsletter box consented to email. The tick says nothing about any other channel.

The legal shape matches. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), consent must be freely given, specific, informed and as easy to withdraw as it was to give — and "specific" is the word doing the work. So an imported list starts at zero on a new channel however long it took to build on the old one. Keaz records this as an opt-in level on the contact, and any marketing flow can require a minimum level before someone enters it.

The practical bridge is to let your existing subscribers start the conversation themselves, usually with a link or QR code in an email you were sending anyway — that works with whatever email tool you already use. For customers dormant beyond twelve months, Smart Activation asks once rather than sending, and is capped at twice a year on purpose. The collection methods and their capture rates are in our guide to collecting WhatsApp opt-ins.

Roughly in order of how much they cost.

• Shopping before auditing. A shortlist written from vendor pages scores breadth. A shortlist written from your own automation revenue scores the two or three messages you actually depend on.
• Judging on channel totals. If one message is 40% of the revenue, a channel-level number is an average over something that is not average. It cannot settle a comparison.
• Rebuilding the old diagram. Flow logic built inside another tool encodes that tool's triggers and delays. Rebuild from the events instead, starting with the one flow that earns.
• Treating a contact list as a consent list. The data moves; the permission does not follow it. Re-check opt-in before the first send, not after the first complaint.
• Switching off email to save a subscription. Across Keaz shops about 24% of customers are reachable by email only and 34% on WhatsApp only. Dropping the channel that reaches a quarter of your customers is the most expensive saving available.
• Migrating in the fourth quarter. Moving a programme during your highest-revenue weeks turns small mistakes into lost revenue. Move in a quiet month or wait.