Shipping Integrations
Sending orders to a fulfilment service, getting tracking back, and what to check when a number does not arrive.
Settings, Shipping, Shipping Integrations. A shipping service sits between your shop and the carriers, buying labels and handling the warehouse side.
What Is Supported
ShippingEasy, ShipStation, Shippo, EasyPost, ShipRush and ShipBob.
They do broadly the same job: rate shopping across carriers, buying and printing labels, and sending tracking numbers back. Which one suits you is usually decided by what your warehouse already uses.
How It Works
Orders are sent across as they are placed. Somebody picks and packs them in the service, buys the label there, and the tracking number comes back to the shop.
When it does, the order is marked shipped and the customer is emailed, exactly as if you had typed the number in by hand.
You do not have to choose between this and carriers
Connecting a service does not stop live carrier rates working at checkout. Many shops quote at checkout through a carrier and fulfil through a service, because the two are different jobs.
What Gets Sent
The order number, the delivery address, the items with quantities and weights, and the totals.
The order number sent across is the one your customer sees, without any internal prefix, so the number on a label matches the number in an email to you about it.
Tracking Coming Back
Two ways, and a shop can use both.
A webhook, where the service tells the shop as soon as a shipment is created. Immediate, and it needs a URL configured at the service's end.
A scheduled pull, where the shop asks periodically for shipments it has not seen. Slower, and it works even if the webhook was never set up or quietly stopped.
When a Tracking Number Does Not Arrive
Check in this order.
Did the order reach the service? If not, the connection or the credentials are the problem rather than anything to do with tracking.
Was a label actually bought? A picked order with no label has no tracking to send.
Does the order number match? The service matches on the number it was given. A number changed by hand at either end breaks the link, and the shipment sits there with nothing to attach to.
Is the webhook configured? If it never was, the scheduled pull will still find it, but hours later rather than immediately.
Addresses
The address is sent as separate fields rather than one block. An address typed into the wrong field at checkout arrives in the wrong field at the service, and labels print wrong rather than failing, which is harder to notice.
Before You Rely On It
Push one real order through end to end: placed in the shop, picked in the service, label bought, tracking back, customer emailed. Watch each step rather than checking the result, because a break in the middle produces the same symptom as a break at the start.