Christmas is fast approaching and our retailers are facing the huge task of shipping their customers’ orders in time for the occasion. Thanks to our recent ShipWorks integration, we hope to help alleviate that process. In this post, we will walk you through our integration.
The post starts by describing the prerequisites that your store has to meet, then it is followed by its actual configuration and some closing notes. Screenshots are provided in each step to minimize any potential ambiguity that may arise along the way.
Prerequisites
To avail of this integration, your store will have to meet the following conditions:
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At the time of writing this post, your store will have to be running on the Beta channel;
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Your NSc Sync should have the Mail Integration enabled. For more on this feature, please visit Please Sign In - WebSell Portal
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You have to run ShipWorks version 3.9.8 or later;
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All the items being submitted to ShipWorks must have a valid weight with them, 0 is not an acceptable value.
Configuration
Configuring your store to use this feature is done at two levels: the first in your WebStore Manager and the second in ShipWorks. We will cover both in this section.
- WebStore Manager
The only thing you need to do is to enable the relevant option in your WebStore Manager which can be found in your WebStore Configuration under Shipping and Enable ShipWorks Integration. This is shown in the following screenshot:
This completes the first part of the configuration. Next, it is time to configure ShipWorks as well.
2.ShipWorks
Our integration works by leveraging the Generic Module offered by ShipWorks. The first thing to do would be to head to the Manage Menu in ShipWorks then click on Stores and Add Store. Select the Generic Module in the dropdown and the next window should be displayed like in the next figure:
The credentials being asked are the same that you used in NSc Sync configuration.
In the module URL field, please enter the following address:
https://api.nitrosell.com/WEBSTORE_URL/v1/shippingorder.json
where WEBSTORE_URL is a placeholder for your WebStore domain name, that the hostname without the ‘www’ prefix. For instance, if for a given webstore, if the domain name is www.mystore.com then the full URL to be entered in the module URL would be https://api.nitrosell.com/mystore.com/v1/shippingorder.json
The next set of information that ShipWorks will ask you is some geographical data about your store. This is used to compute the approximate shipping cost that would be applicable to your customers’ orders.
The last part of the configuration involves the creation an action in ShipWorks whose goal is to send back to us any shipping information associated to a particular order. This information can then be made available to your customers in their order history page, among others, as explained in this post: Providing Shipping Information in the Order History Page
For our Amazon customers, this shipping information is used to build the order fulfilment feed which will be uploaded to them so that they can mark your orders as shipped.
The creation of the action is illustrated in the below screenshot.
In simplest terms, it states that when a shipment is processed by the retailer then upload shipment details. And upload tracking number of the shipment.
Congratulations you are now set to start to download the orders in ShipWorks. Before starting to do so, you should have a good grasp of the workflow of the whole process as this may improve your user experience.
Workflow of the Integration
Having enabled the relevant option in your WebStore Manager, you should process it at the Point Of Sales (POS) to complete any payment. Please note that ShipWorks doesn’t offer any payment interface and as such, you won’t be able to collect any extra cost incurred by the shipping from your customer once you have completed the order at the POS.
It’s worth bearing in mind that only orders fulfilled at the POS will be uploaded to ShipWorks. When you processed an order in ShipWorks, it automatically sends any shipping information to us. We can therefore make it available to your customers or to Amazon.
When click on the Download button in ShipWorks, a typical order downloading window may look like this:
For each order that we sent to ShipWorks, we include some notes. ShipWorks deals with two types of notes: public and private. The former are seen by both the retailer and the customer and are printed on invoices. The NitroSell order number for instance is passed as a public note as can be seen in the previous figure. The latter are only viewable by the retailer or store staff and are considered internal in nature. An example of these notes are the comments entered by your customers when they placed the order at the checkout.
When this feature is enabled, we no longer send the order ready to be shipped email to your customers. You should therefore ensure that ShipWorks does that instead.
For Amazon orders, their corresponding Amazon order numbers are passed public notes with the order. This allows retailer to clearly differentiate between regular and Amazon orders.
Notes for those using our Amazon Integration
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All the orders that we sent to ShipWorks already include those that you got from Amazon and there is no need to configure a separate Store in ShipWorks for these orders;
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Remember to have the order fulfilment at the POS enabled in your WebStore Manager. This will instruct us to upload the feed to Amazon on your behalf. ShipWorks can also do that for you but because it is not advisable to have two stores to handle your Amazon orders, it is highly preferable to rely solely on your NitroSell Store;
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Your item inventory is updated when you fulfil an order at the POS and not when you print its shipment invoice in ShipWorks.
We hope you found this feature useful. Should you have any question, please feel free to let us know.
Merry Christmas and a happy new year in advance!