In a nutshell, Mechanic enables me to do heaps of great server-side things on Shopify. The best part about it is that it's my portal to getting under Shopify's hood and into my store's data without having to develop and provision resources to run my own Shopify private app.
I originally tried to use Shopify Flow, but was really saddened that I couldn't write custom flows -- but then I found Mechanic! I gravitate to building my own tasks, but there are plenty of pre-built tasks that don't require coding (and you can use them as templates to then make your own custom modifications).
Mechanic tasks are written using an extended version of Shopify's liquid, so it's pretty easy to pick up if you've ever developed Shopify themes, or even used other projects that use liquid as a templating language (jekyll, Salesforce Desk, Zendesk, etc.).
It gives me the ability to write and run automations across my Shopify data (e.g. generate PDFs, regularly email customers for outstanding payments, etc.). Often I also use it for utility methods like to correct some data entry issues, or for things like out of stock/back in stock notifications for my colleagues. I have a number of tasks which also access various third-party APIs (even some custom APIs I built myself). It supports features like using Shopify bulk GraphQL queries which make querying 1000s of data entries pretty easy if I need to run something across all my orders or customers in Shopify.
Since Mechanic works based on webhook triggers, you can basically write a task for any kind of Shopify webhook (as well as other Mechanic or custom webhooks -- or "topics", to use Mechanic parlance).
An example of something basic but important: our 3PL doesn't give us the DHL AWB number when an order is fulfilled (we get one or many piece IDs -- really annoying), so I have a task that retrieves the AWB via DHL API and replaces the tracking number when the order has a fulfillment. Fixed! This then unlocks DHL order tracking status within Shopify backoffice.
Probably the most ambitious/crazy thing I've done so far is create a customer account spam detection task which can automatically tag and/or delete customers who fit the spam account criteria when customers are created/updated. I can even have Mechanic send me notification emails when an account is tagged or deleted 🌈
In terms of the Mechanic platform, it's pretty reliable and the Mechanic team are always interested and engaged when there's help needed or new ideas to be hashed out. It's a very cool community to be involved in! I'm glad to have been using it for the last 2 years and it really forms a backbone to our e-commerce operations to ensure colleagues' work is easier, data quality is improved, and that custom third-party integrations with Shopify can easily be achieved, even if there's no official Shopify app for the third-party.
My background was using things like Magento and WordPress for e-commerce, where it is much easier to build something custom and have full access to the data, so using a platform like Shopify required a paradigm shift. Mechanic does bring me back a little closer to "self-hosted" without the pitfalls of needing to fuss about PHP and crashing my website!
