New Feature: Shopify Instant Order Sync!

[Moderator-Davis]

Hello wonderful community members! 

We are pleased to announce that we are moving forward with the next steps on our new feature, Instant Order Sync! For now, we will be starting with Shopify only, but pending success could see this feature rolled out with other integrations down the road. 

With this feature, you should see Shopify orders sync right away once the order is in a shippable state. You will no longer need to wait for a manual refresh or periodical import process. 

Currently, we are activating this feature for accounts that qualify in waves. If you are interested in this feature, we have partnered with our product team to offer the community the opportunity to request access to this feature if it has not been enabled for your account yet. Please fill out this form to express that interest with our team, and your account will be activated by the next wave. 

You’ll know this activation has occurred with an in app notification that looks like the image below.

You can also confirm this by checking out your store import settings and see a description “imports whenever Shopify indicates orders are ready”.  

Outside of requesting access here, if you run into any technical issues you will reach out to support like you normally would for assistance. You can reach out to support by sending an email to Support@ShipStation.com or via chat widget. Once this has been enabled on your account, we want to hear from you. The team specifically in charge of this feature would love to hear your feedback after utilizing this feature. This is your post to tell us all about it! What did you like best? What did you not like? What is your use case and workflow for this feature? All of this type of information will be very appreciated as we move forward. 

Let’s Get Ship Done! 🙂

[corey2]

I believe this update is responsible for Shipstation importing UNPAID orders from Shopify as "Awaiting Shipment". 

More specifically, orders in the authorized status from Shopify are being imported as if they were paid. My Shopify settings are properly configured so that should not be happening. I've been begging support for assistance on this for weeks via multiple tickets and the issue persists. 

Perhaps today is the day that the right person sees this and the issue is resolved?

[Moderator-Davis]

Hey there @corey2, 

I'm glad to see that you've started a support ticket around this behavior. That is the right thing to do for sure. I would keep an eye on your most recent ticket to get this behavior escalated. 

This feature was not yet rolled out when you made this report. However, we certainly want to leave no stones unturned when getting to the bottom of this. 

Thank you for your patience and we will be in touch soon to continue the investigation 🙂 

[corey2]

Thanks for the quick attention to this. We beta tested this feature on our account and it has been active for some time on our account. I am hopeful that a resolution is not far away. 

[andrew9]

"With this feature, you should see Shopify orders sync right away once the order is in a shippable state. You will no longer need to wait for a manual refresh or periodical import process."

I've had the Instant Order Sync on my account for several weeks now, what is the expected order import time? On my account it seems like nothing has changed in regards to the frequency at which orders are imported/synched with our Shopify stores. Without manually prompting, we often go several hours without an automatic import.

[Manager-Erin]

Hello @andrew9 and @corey2 , 

Thank you both for reaching out to us and for being a part of our community. We have alerted the team working on this feature and someone should be in touch with both of you shortly to gather additional info. 

-Erin: Your Friendly Neighborhood ShipStation Community Manager 

[Manager-Erin]

Hello @andrew9, 

I was able to talk with the team working on this project about your comments. 

We appreciate you reaching out to us.  We have been constantly fine tuning this process, which did entail disabling this new beta functionality when we identified an issue that needed to be addressed.  During the times where this was disabled, (such as the week you made this post) the order import process would be following the standard order processing/import logic.

  I will let you know that as of Thursday, April 27th, the Instant Order Sync feature has been reenabled and has not been disabled since.  If you are still seeing delays in import times, please let us know.Also, in relation to your screenshots, the Instant Order Sync process does not update the timestamps shown in the store refresh dropdown, but this is feedback that has been passed on to the appropriate product teams so that we can better communicate the frequency of these imports.

Hopefully this information helps you out, 

-Erin: Your Friendly Neighborhood ShipStation Community Manager 

[Manager-Erin]

Hi @corey2, 

Sorry for the delayed response in getting back to you, but I was able to talk to the team working on this functionality and have some information to share. 

We do see that you reached out to our support team about this issue.  In this support case, it does appear that our Senior Support team was able to identify the issue and correct it.  If you are still seeing this occur, please let us know here so the appropriate teams can be informed.

-Erin: Your Friendly Neighborhood ShipStation Community Manager 

 

[andrew9]

@Manager-Erin 
We are still seeing errors on both of our active Shopify stores. In addition, our customer service team is reporting that changes to orders within Shopify are not being received by Shipstation, and every time we try to manually sync the stores we receive an error.

This is an ongoing and escalating problem for us.

[corey2]

@Manager-Erin 

Unfortunately I can confirm that we are still seeing this issue. The level of occurrence does seem to be significantly reduced which I do appreciate, but there are still underlying issues that need to be addressed. I am hopeful that someone from the technical team will reach out to me so that we can get this resolved ASAP.

[MXOG]

Does this affect the sync back to Shopify (i.e. shopify changing to Fulfilled, etc. based on actions in Shipstation)?

[andrew9]

@MXOG We have seen a number of instances when shipment information is not received by Shopify. The order is not marked as fulfilled, the tracking number is not sent, and the customer receives no communication, even though the order has been shipped.

I am not sure if this is related.

[MXOG]

@andrew9 we experienced a good amount of issues like that when we switched away from "Shipping label is created" to "The first of these conditions is met: This shipment first hits the mail stream" (found in Settings > Selling Channels > Store Setup > "..." next to store in question > Edit Store Details > Emails > Send email and marketplace notification when...).

Do you know how your email notifications settings are configured?

[andrew9]

@MXOG Ours are set to "Shipping label is created"

[mrosenthal]

I would appreciate the ability to delay the sync, even for just a few moments. Or go back to the old periodical importing with the options to manually refresh at any time.

We use Shopify Flow to apply tags to orders as they are created, and those tags were previously used to trigger Shipstation automations. These tags include what day of the week the order was placed and how many transit days it takes to get to the destination. We ship highly perishable products, so these Shopify tags and Shipstation rules and filters helped to hold and release orders and sort orders in a way that ensured nothing is in transit over the weekend.

We also use a shopify app to split certain items that do not need to be shipped with refrigerant into separate orders. With the new instant sync, Shipstation seems to be importing the orders before the Shopify flow and our apps are finished running so few if any of the Shipstation automations we set up are running correctly.

I'd be the first person to say I would sometimes get annoyed by the lag before instant import, but knowing the alternative I actually greatly prefer it as it allows even the few seconds it takes for our orders to be edited by flows and apps.

[andrew9]

Has anyone else experienced a recent regression with Instant Order Sync? 

For a while it seemed to almost function as intended, but within the past couple of weeks none of our orders import unless we manually select to update stores, and when we do it takes a minimum of 20 minutes for orders to import, and then an additional ~5 minutes before automation rules are applied, orders are tagged, and things like customs information autofills.

[corey2]

@andrew9 I have noticed the same

[Manager-Erin]

Hello @corey2 @andrew9 

Thank you both for being a part of our community and for reaching out. If you are both having issues with the instant order sync, I would recommend reaching out to our support team directly. They will be able to help troubleshoot with you and escalate if needed. 

-Erin: Your Friendly Neighborhood ShipStation Community Manager 

[srwilliamsjr]

Is this still an active feature?

[CaraAdmin]

Hello @srwilliamsjr!

Thank you for your post in the community. Yes, this is still an active feature. If you are running into any issues with the Instant Order Sync, you can contact support@shipstation.com, and they will be happy to assist with any questions you may have. 

-Cara