eCommerce has left a remarkable footprint in the retail industry. The growing number of online stores shows that both store owners and customers benefit from the convenience of digital commerce. However, the ease that attracts people to open an online store is not what it seems in practice. Running a successful e-store on a platform like Shopify involves far more than simply listing products and taking payments.
Operating an e-retail business is as challenging as cracking a hard nut. From managing orders to organizing inventory, handling shipments, and finally delivering the product, the process is complex and time-consuming. Shipping itself is such a demanding task for e-retailers that many turn to dedicated shipping management software to keep it under control.
To work effectively with e-retailers, shipping solutions need access to store data - information about orders, customers, and products - pulled directly from the retailer's shopping platform. That is why shipping software providers must integrate their solutions with various shopping platforms such as Shopify.
Access to e-store data allows shipping management solutions to support operations such as picking, packing, transportation, order fulfillment, shipment tracking, and stock management, among others.
In this article, we explore how shipping software providers can integrate their solutions with Shopify to manage order and shipping information efficiently.
How to Integrate Your Shipping Software with Shopify?
Shopify integration is a must-have for shipping software vendors who want to serve e-retailers running their businesses on Shopify. There are two main ways to build this kind of integration:
- In-house Integration Development
- Third-party Solutions like API2Cart
Shopify integration can be developed in-house with a team of developers you hire specifically for the job. Integration is a complex process, and it's difficult to accomplish without experienced developers.
Beyond the added cost, building an integration in-house typically means investing weeks of development time.
There's more to consider: integrations require continuous upgrades as Shopify keeps updating its platform to improve services. Once you build an integration in-house, you need developers on an ongoing basis to keep it up to date, which adds further costs and delays.
These challenges around Shopify integration development can be resolved with third-party services like API2Cart. A third-party provider handles your integrations so you don't have to build and maintain them yourself. For a broader look at how such connections are maintained across different shopping carts, see how API2Cart handles store connectivity across different eCommerce platforms.
API2Cart is a unified API that connects your shipping system with dozens of eCommerce platforms and marketplaces through a single integration. You don't need to spend extra resources on upgrades, maintenance, or other ongoing operations.
A third-party solution like API2Cart can save time, money, and resources whether you need a single integration or connections to multiple platforms. It also removes the countless manual efforts involved in retrieving information from eCommerce platforms. For example, API2Cart provides hundreds of API methods that let you import, add, update, and delete Shopify store data with ease, so you can manage order and shipping info on Shopify without unnecessary difficulty.
How to Manage Orders on Shopify?
The primary purpose of Shopify integration is to gain access to a store's order data and other related information. API2Cart streamlines order management with a dedicated set of API methods that let a shipping system access order data and process it according to each retailer's needs.
Here are the API methods provided by API2Cart that enable order management on Shopify:
- order.add - adds orders to Shopify stores. You need to fill in all the required parameters, which you can find in the API2Cart docs along with examples for reference.
- order.list - retrieves a list of all orders placed on Shopify stores. By default, four orders are returned per call, and this method also requires the corresponding parameters to be filled in. When working with large order volumes, it's worth pairing this method with batch operations and pagination to keep data sync efficient.
- order.update - updates existing orders on Shopify stores placed by customers. Filling in the required parameters lets the method work exactly as needed.
- order.info - retrieves all information related to a specific order, including related details such as shipping address, payment method, and more.
Using these API methods to manage Shopify order data, you can offer your shipping software users the following capabilities:
- Sync product data across various sales channels
- Update order statuses
- Update tracking info
- Generate shipping labels
- Provide real-time shipment metrics
How to Manage Shipping Info on Shopify?
Now let's look at the crucial part of working with Shopify data - managing shipping information. API2Cart provides the following API methods that let shipping management software providers deliver the functionality retailers need:
- order.shipment.tracking.add - automatically inserts a shipment tracking URL and updates tracking information in Shopify stores.
- order.shipment.add and order.shipment.update - allow you to add tracking numbers to orders and create new shipments.
For a closer look at how to add shipment tracking to orders, see this guide on adding shipment tracking to orders via API2Cart.
With API2Cart as your third-party solution for integration development, establishing seamless connections and managing order and shipping information on Shopify no longer needs to be a headache. Get a free consultation from our experts to see how our service works and start your free trial.
