Lyfe

Lifecycle marketing automation for Craft Commerce 5 — a trigger → condition → action engine that runs on your own server.

Post-purchase follow-ups. Review requests. Replenishment reminders. Win-backs. Abandoned carts. VIP tagging. First-order-versus-repeat copy. SMS. All of it driven by rules you write in the control panel, against data that never leaves your database.

Why this exists

Craft Commerce has a real gap here.

What's out there	What it does	What it doesn't
verbb/abandoned-cart	One job, done well: email people who left a cart	No other triggers, no conditions, no multi-step sequences
Klaviyo Connect, Omnisend and friends	Ship your customer data to a SaaS	Your data leaves your stack, and you pay per contact forever
Commerce's status emails	One email per status change	No delays, no conditions, no segments

Nobody ships a self-hosted rules engine over Commerce events. AutomateWoo ($99/yr) is the reference implementation on the WooCommerce side; Lyfe is the Craft answer, and it fits the "own your stack" position that made you choose Craft in the first place.

Requirements

• Craft CMS 5.3+
• Craft Commerce 5.0+
• PHP 8.2+

Installation

composer require justinholtweb/craft-lyfe
php craft plugin/install lyfe

Then give it something to run on a schedule:

* * * * * /path/to/project/craft lyfe/run/due

That single command advances due steps, sweeps abandoned carts and runs scheduled contact scans. If you have no cron, turn on Also process during web requests in the settings — it pushes a throttled queue job instead, never inline. The one thing that does run inside the customer's request is a workflow's first step when it has no delay; it can't fail the checkout, but it does take time, so give customer-facing first steps a delay of a minute or more.

How a workflow works

Three parts, in the order the editor asks for them.

1. When — a trigger. An order was placed. An order moved into "shipped". Somebody registered. A cart went quiet. A contact got tagged. Or nothing at all: a scheduled scan that walks your contacts on a timer, which is the only way to catch a customer who has simply stopped buying.

2. Only if — conditions. Order total, items, products, SKUs, coupon, gateway, shipping country, status. Lifetime spend, order count, days since last order, tags, user groups, consent. Day of week, hour of day. Rules in a group must all be true; any one group being true is enough.

3. Then — an ordered list of actions, each with its own delay before it happens. Send an email. Send an SMS. Tag the contact. Note it on the order. Change the order status. Generate a one-off discount code. Call a webhook. Stop the run if they have already bought.

Which reads, top to bottom, as a timeline:

When   an order is placed
Only if it is the customer's first order
Then   immediately   tag them "first-time-buyer"
       after 2 days  email "Welcome — a few things worth knowing"
       after 12 days email "How did we do?"

What it will not do to you

These are design decisions, not omissions.

• Nothing fires twice. Every run carries a deduplication key, enforced by a unique database index. A retried webhook, a Commerce event that fires twice, an overlapping sweep — all collide there and are dropped.
• A queue outage does not deliver nine days of mail at once. A step more than staleAfterHours overdue is abandoned and recorded, not sent late.
• Conditions are re-checked before every step. In the nine days between "order placed" and "how did we do", the customer may have unsubscribed, refunded, or bought again. Lyfe looks again before it sends.
• Unsubscribed contacts are never marketed to. The refusal is recorded rather than silent — "why did this customer not get the email" is the question the message log exists to answer.
• An automation cannot break checkout. Every listener on a customer's request is wrapped separately; a failure is logged, not raised. (Before release this had a hole: a site whose address layout had no phone field failed every checkout. A phone is now read only when the field exists.)
• Dry run means dry run. Per workflow or globally. Everything runs and is recorded; nothing is sent.

The simulator

Pick a real order or contact and Lyfe tells you, rule by rule, which workflows would run and why the rest would not:

✗ Win back a lapsed customer
    · The conditions do not match.
    ✓ Subscribed to marketing email (yes) is yes
    ✗ Days since last order (12) is at least 120

It shares its code path with the engine — Conditions::explain() and Runs::executeStep() are the same methods a live run uses, with a simulate flag — so what it shows you is what actually happens. There is a console version too: php craft lyfe/workflows/simulate <orderId>.

The library

Fourteen presets, each installing disabled with placeholder copy plainly marked EDIT ME:

Preset
Post-purchase thank you	An hour after checkout
Review request	Two weeks after completion
Replenishment reminder	45 days after a chosen product
New account welcome	Plus a nudge if they haven't ordered
First-time buyer follow-up	Only fires on order one
Repeat customer follow-up	The other half of the split
Abandoned cart recovery	Two emails, each stopping once they buy
Stop chasing recovered carts	Cancels the chase when the order lands
Win back a lapsed customer	Daily scan, 120 days quiet
Clear the lapsed tag	When they come back
Tag VIP customers	Weekly scan on lifetime spend
Text the customer when an order ships	SMS on status change
Alert the team to a large order	Internal, transactional
Follow up on a refund	The cheapest customer research there is

Editions

Lite — $99. The whole engine: every order and account trigger, every condition, multi-step workflows with delays, email, tagging, order notes, webhooks, the simulator, run and message logs, the console commands, and every preset it can run.

Pro — $179. Everything that needs standing infrastructure:

• abandoned cart tracking, the cart.abandoned trigger and recovery links
• scheduled contact scans — win-backs and VIP tagging on a timer
• SMS, through Twilio or your own HTTP gateway
• unique discount code generation
• order status and user group actions, and the unsubscribe action
• send windows, per-contact run limits and cooldowns
• the contact.tagged chaining trigger, so one workflow can hand off to the next
• cancelling another workflow's pending runs

A licence downgrade is handled honestly: a Pro workflow refuses to start rather than running with its Pro steps quietly skipped, and the reason is written to the log.

Contacts

Lyfe keeps its own contact record, because most Commerce customers never register an account and consent has to live somewhere. Contacts are created automatically from orders and registrations, identified by lowercased email, and carry tags, a phone number, and per-channel subscription flags.

To build them from your existing orders:

php craft lyfe/contacts/backfill

Email templates

Subjects and bodies are Twig, rendered against the payload:

Hi {{ contact.firstName ?? 'there' }},

Your order {{ order.reference }} for {{ order.totalPrice|commerceCurrency(order.currency) }}
is on its way.

{% if stats.orderCount > 1 %}Thanks for coming back.{% endif %}

<a href="{{ unsubscribeUrl }}">Unsubscribe</a>

Available: contact, order, user, workflow, stats, data, unsubscribeUrl and cartRestoreUrl — for abandoned carts, a link that puts the cart back in the customer's session. Set an email layout template in the settings to wrap every body in your own HTML.

Who can write what

Twig in a step can reach everything Twig can — craft.app.config.db.password included — and an email or a webhook is a way to send what it prints to yourself. So a step remembers whether an admin last wrote it:

• An admin's step renders as written, with the real elements: {{ order.getShortNumber() }}, craft.*, any filter.
• Anyone else's step (a marketer with Create, edit and delete workflows) renders inside Craft's Twig sandbox, when it's on (enableTwigSandbox, Craft 5.9+). It gets the same variable names as plain data — order.reference, order.totalPriceAsCurrency, order.lineItems, contact.firstName, cartRestoreUrl and so on — but no objects or craft.*. Use order.totalPriceAsCurrency rather than |commerceCurrency, which the sandbox doesn't allow.
• Without the sandbox, a marketer can save plain text but not Twig, and a step with Twig that an admin didn't write fails rather than runs.
• Webhook steps are an admin's — the server makes that request, so it reaches whatever the server can — and $ENV_VAR header values resolve only in an admin's step.

Trust follows whoever last wrote the step. A marketer can still reorder, retime, pause or enable an admin's workflow: a step they leave exactly as it was stays trusted. Anything they write or rewrite runs under their rules, and saving the workflow doesn't change that, not even when an admin saves it. Such a step carries a Written by someone who isn't an admin badge in the editor, and an admin trusts it by ticking Approve on that step, after reading it. Steps from before 5.0.0 start untrusted and are approved the same way.

SMS

Two transports ship with Lyfe:

• Twilio — account SID, auth token and from-number, called directly over HTTP. No SDK: it is one authenticated form POST, and a plugin that adds a large dependency tree to every install it touches is a bad neighbour.
• Generic HTTP — post to any URL. {{to}} and {{body}} are substituted into it, and a POST also sends {"to": …, "body": …} as JSON. Vonage, MessageBird, Sinch and a self-hosted gateway all work without Lyfe pretending to know their APIs.

Add your own with Sms::EVENT_REGISTER_TRANSPORTS.

Console commands

php craft lyfe/run/due                     # the cron entry point
php craft lyfe/run/status                  # what's waiting
php craft lyfe/run/cancel <runId>
php craft lyfe/run/prune [days]            # trim run, message and log history

php craft lyfe/workflows                   # list, with run counts
php craft lyfe/workflows/library           # the presets
php craft lyfe/workflows/install <preset>
php craft lyfe/workflows/simulate <orderId>
php craft lyfe/workflows/run-for-tag <workflow> <tag>

php craft lyfe/contacts/backfill
php craft lyfe/contacts/sync-stats
php craft lyfe/contacts/unsubscribe <email>

Extending it

Triggers, conditions, actions and SMS transports are all registries keyed by a stable handle, so your own classes are first-class:

use justinholtweb\lyfe\services\Types;
use justinholtweb\lyfe\events\RegisterTypesEvent;

Event::on(Types::class, Types::EVENT_REGISTER_ACTIONS, function(RegisterTypesEvent $event) {
    $event->types[] = MyAction::class;
});

Extend BaseAction, implement handle(), displayName(), settingsFields() and run(). Handles are what get stored, so your class can move without a migration.

Support

justin@justinholt.com