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How a Branded-Merchandise Company Automated Self-Serve Store Onboarding with Make and Pipedrive
How a branded-merchandise company used Make and Pipedrive to automate self-serve store onboarding: next-step emails, 24-hour reminders and a 48-hour drip.
TL;DR: A mid-sized branded-merchandise company turned a seven-step store setup into automated onboarding built on Make and Pipedrive. Anywhere from a handful to a dozen new sign-ups a day now get the right next-step email, a reminder after 24 hours, and a drip after 48 idle hours, without anyone on the team tracking who stalled where.
The situation
The client is a mid-sized branded-merchandise company with 17 years in B2B e-commerce. Besides bulk orders, it runs a free self-serve platform where businesses build a private online store so their employees can order company apparel.
When the project started, about 100 businesses were on that platform and roughly 5,000 existing customers sat in Shopify. The client relations lead said around 70% of new store sign-ups were brand-new to the company, so the first few days of onboarding were the whole relationship.
The stack: Shopify for the main store, the platform's own app server, an email tool for behavioral flows, ZoomInfo for leads, and a CRM.
The problem
Getting a store live takes seven steps: sign up, upload a logo, add products, set shipping preferences, add a payment method, pick a go-live date and add the employee list. Plenty of sign-ups stopped partway, and nothing told the team who was stuck or where.
The data didn't line up either. Shopify knew about the first sign-up. The app server knew about every step after that. The email tool and the CRM didn't hear from either one in time to act. On top of that, the ZoomInfo native integration was creating a separate deal for every contact at the same company. The CRM vendor's advice was to merge them by hand or switch the integration off. In the client's words: "that means we would manually need to do that, and I don't really want to do that."
What they'd already tried
The client relations lead had already mapped the flows himself in Miro and had his tools picked out. What he didn't have was the plumbing between them. He also had a list of free-email domains (Gmail, Yahoo and so on) he wanted kept out of B2B flows, but no way to apply it automatically. And he was paying, by his own figure, about $2,000 a month for a two-seat HubSpot plan.
What we built: automated onboarding in Make and Pipedrive
Over about 20 ZoomFlow working sessions between April and September 2025, a Connex consultant built the onboarding engine in Make, with the client present for the decisions.
- One event stream. Shopify handles the first sign-up. After that, the client's developer added webhooks to the app server for each setup step, all sent to a single Make endpoint and keyed on email and customer ID so one business stays one record in every system.
- A progress log. Each event updates a Make data store with that user's completed steps and a last-activity timestamp.
- Next-step emails. Finishing a step triggers the email for the next one (logo, then products, then shipping, and so on). Adding employees was filtered out so it didn't fire false progress.
- Timed nudges. A scheduled scenario runs every hour. Anyone with no progress in 24 hours gets a reminder. After 48 hours idle, they move to a slow informational drip of about ten emails, and they come out of it automatically if they pick setup back up. A status flag stops anyone from entering the drip twice.
- Clean segments. Existing Shopify customers with $3,000+ in lifetime spend are tagged and routed into their own flow. Free-email domains are checked against a lookup list and kept out.
- One CRM. Partway through, the client moved onboarding out of the separate email tool and into Pipedrive. New sign-ups now create a person, organization and deal. Deal status drives the campaign emails, and ZoomInfo contacts from the same company roll up into a single deal instead of a pile of duplicates.
Problems got fixed as they came up. When a duplicate trigger started producing "duplicate key" errors in Make, the consultant added parameter checks and simplified the scenarios rather than piling on more modules.
The results
- Onboarding runs itself. Every new store gets a welcome email, a next-step email after each completed step, a 24-hour reminder and a 48-hour drip, with no one on the team keeping a list.
- One source of truth. Sign-up, setup progress and deal stage now sit in the same CRM record, so sales can see exactly where each new store stands.
- No manual merging. Contacts from one company land on one deal.
- Lower software cost (estimate). On the sales call, the client put HubSpot at about $2,000 a month for two seats. Connex recommended Pipedrive, whose plans run $14 to $79 per seat per month billed annually (as of October 2026, check current pricing). Even on the $39 Growth plan, two seats come to under $80 a month, or roughly $23,000 a year in subscription cost avoided.
Estimated impact, based on the client's HubSpot figure from the sales call and Pipedrive's published pricing. It assumes the HubSpot plan wasn't kept alongside Pipedrive and doesn't count labor time.
Client voice
In sessions, the client relations lead said "a handful, maybe a dozen" sign-ups a day was normal, so the system didn't need to be built for big batches. It needed to be right for every single account. Most sessions were rated "Happy" in post-session feedback. (Paraphrased from session transcripts and feedback records.)
FAQ
Will this work if our app isn't on Shopify?
Yes. Here, Shopify only caught the first sign-up. Every later step came from the client's own app through webhooks. If your platform can send an event when something happens, Make can act on it.
Did they have to replace their email tool?
No. The first version ran on their existing email platform. They chose to move the sequences into Pipedrive later to cut down on tools, and the Make logic stayed mostly the same.
How much did the client have to be involved?
They joined to make decisions (step order, timing, which emails to send) and to supply email templates. The build and testing happened in recorded sessions, with a written summary after each one.
Have a setup flow people keep abandoning?
If sign-ups stall partway through and nobody knows until it's too late, we can map it and automate the follow-up with you. Book a call.
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