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 a huge spike in orders, it became apparent that to grow their business, they needed to streamline the process. Off-the-shelf apps and solutions found in the Shopify App Store either solved only part of the problem, were bloated and offered unneeded functionality, or had recurring monthly fees.
Wodu developed and delivered a custom API integration between Shopify and EasyPost which automatically generates a metered shipping label and branded packing slip based on the order.
A custom portal was created for suppliers to log in and print off the days shipping labels, packing slips, and manifest to hand to USPS.
Multiple edge cases were anticipated, including reprinting shipping labels, automated EasyPost refund requests on canceled shipping labels, and deep linking throughout every stage with Shopify’s Fulfillment API.
When an order comes in (and it passes automated fraud checks), it is sent automatically to fulfillment. At that time a shipping label is created with USPS or UPS (dependent on the size of the order) and pushed into the supplier portal for download. Once the supplier prints off 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 the shipment is now in the pre-transit status. Customers are then kept up to date from in-transit, out for delivery, delivered, and deliver exceptions.
Wodu automated this company’s business process without sacrificing accuracy.
The client has no monthly software fees, maintains control over the shipping brand, the supplier has reduced work to get orders out the door, and the customer gets their product sooner.
As a result, the overall repeat purchase rate of the business has increased, and they are free to scale the business as much as possible without generating huge amounts of busywork on the backend.