Currently, products identified by the ecommerce platform as digital products are not synced to ShipStation as line items.
While I understand that digital products do not require physical shipment, excluding them entirely from the ShipStation order creates a significant data-integrity problem.
When an order contains both physical and digital/non-shippable products:
- The digital products do not appear in the ShipStation order details.
- The order total displayed in ShipStation does not reflect the customer's actual order total.
- Packing slips and other ShipStation-generated documents do not show all products the customer purchased.
- Documents generated from ShipStation can therefore contain incomplete itemization and totals that do not match the originating ecommerce order.
- Other applications and automations that rely on ShipStation order data also receive incomplete or inaccurate information.
There is an important difference between not requiring shipment of a product and removing that product from the order record entirely.
Ideally, digital/non-shippable products should still sync to ShipStation and remain visible as order line items, while simply being identified as non-shippable or excluded from shipping calculations.
I have discussed this issue extensively with ShipStation Support and was advised that customers need to submit this as a feature request. Support also suggested manually monitoring incoming orders for digital products and then manually editing each affected ShipStation order to add the missing items and correct the order total.
For businesses processing a significant volume of orders, this is not a practical or scalable workaround. It would require staff to compare ShipStation orders against the originating ecommerce orders simply to verify that the imported data is accurate, and then manually correct any discrepancies. In addition to the administrative burden, this introduces another opportunity for human error. One of the primary purposes of an ecommerce integration is to eliminate this type of manual reconciliation.
Customers should not have to manually verify and reconstruct imported orders in order for ShipStation's order records and documents to match the ecommerce transaction.
I believe this goes beyond simply adding support for digital products. When ShipStation imports an ecommerce order, the resulting order record should accurately represent the transaction that occurred in the ecommerce platform. A customer purchasing four products should not appear in ShipStation as having purchased only three simply because one product does not require physical fulfillment.
Please consider allowing all order line items to sync to ShipStation, including digital/non-shippable products, while separately identifying which items require fulfillment. This would preserve accurate order totals, customer-facing documents, reporting, and downstream integrations without requiring digital products to be treated as shippable items.