Our client, an emerging seller of personal protective equipment, was manually creating shipping labels and packing slips from their Shopify orders. To further complicate matters, they had multiple suppliers to manage and also needed to maintain white-label brand control over shipments.
With the arrival of a huge spike in orders, it became apparent that streamlining the process was going to be essential to growing their business. The off-the-shelf apps and other solutions found in the Shopify App Store solved only part of the problem, were bloated with unneeded functionality, or came with recurring monthly fees.
Wodu developed and delivered a custom API integration between Shopify and EasyPost. This integration powered the automatic generation of a metered shipping label and branded packing slip for each Shopify order.
We also created a custom portal where suppliers could log in and print out the day’s shipping labels, packing slips, and manifests ready to hand over to the shipper (USPS or UPS).
Multiple edge cases were anticipated and provided for, including the need for reprinting shipping labels and automating EasyPost refund requests on canceled shipping labels. We also built a structure of deep linking throughout every stage with Shopify’s Fulfillment API.
Now, when an order comes in and passes automated fraud checks, it is automatically sent to fulfillment. At that time, a shipping label is created with USPS or UPS (depending on the size of the order) and pushed into the supplier portal for download. Once the supplier prints the shipping label and packing slip, they mark the order as complete.
At this point, our system communicates back to Shopify and the customer is informed that their shipment is now in the pre-transit status. The system then keeps the customer up to date through the in-transit, out for delivery, delivered, and deliver exceptions stages.
Wodu automated one of this company’s critical business processes without sacrificing accuracy.
The client benefits from reduced time and labor investment in each processed order along with more efficient management of their supplier links. Along with streamlining order fulfillment, the client maintains control over the shipping brand and does not have to pay recurring software fees. The suppliers get orders out the door with less work and fewer misshipments, and customers get their orders fulfilled sooner.
As a result, the client’s overall customer repeat purchase rate has increased, and they are free to scale the business as much as they want without facing impossible workloads on the backend.