payment method not imported and no info on defining custom fields for packing slips

[CAbalsamic]

We have a major issue with the shipstation woocommerce integration that may result in us cancelling the service before we even end our trial because we literally cannot use the service to conduct business in the workflow we have presently without the payment method being on the packing slip. We use a generated invoice as both our packing slip and our paper copy for data entry presently, since the shipstation service checks the orders off as we print postage and also generates a configurable packing slip it seemed like a natural fit to speed up our workflow by integrating the service that handles our orders with direct imports for shipping labels it seems like a natural fit. However, for whatever reason the payment method (which shipstation customer service has confirmed with screenshots they are receiving from the shipstation integration API) is not mappable to any data fields for the packing slip via html. I was told on that and other calls to resolve this that the way to do this would be either by sending the payment method via internal note, or by mapping it to a custom field. Then all support or explanation on what shipstation requires be done to do that ended, nobody I spoke to across four different support tickets seemed to be able to explain at all who needs to be contacted specifically to get adjustments made to the outgoing shipstation integration API. I was told once to contact woocommerce themselves since they are who the shipstation integration pulls from, but it is literally not possible as far as I can see to do so given that the woocommerce contact method is a form that will not submit unless it is regarding a purchased product and it is not taking the integration as a product. The form feeds me to a page saying to try again later, and that they only service premium plugins from woocommerce.

I find it hard to believe that we are the first company in over a decade to need the payment method on their packing slip, this has to have been resolved before.. Not having it on the packing slip would mean that every single order we input into our data entry service would have to have the order searched up and loaded in records, making the time savings from shipstation non-existent for us. Some clear direction on what specifically has to be done to get the cdata that is listed here in the cover photo attached given to me by the shipstation support member showing that shipstation is receiving the data into either the custom fields 2 box or applied as an internal note would be great. This has been a really frustrating first three days with the service, and if doing this is not possible then I will have to go with a competitor's service who can provide it. Seems wild to me that such a simple piece of data that I see on packing slips in orders I receive all the time isn't in the shipstation packing slip by default, but the inability of anyone to tell me specifically how to get that information into the custom fields or internal notes boxes (which the suport staff have told me are there specifically for that reason) to use them has compounded the frustration. 

[Moderator-Davis]

Hello there @CAbalsamic, 

Thanks so much for joining us here in the community! We are thrilled to have you with us 🙂 

I certainly understand the desire to have this information present on the ShipStation end of your orders. Currently, the way to get this done would be to map the desired information to either the Internal Note or Custom Field as you mentioned that support had described to you previously. Could you clarify for me why this was not an option? I want to help put this trouble behind you as best I can so I just want to make sure that I have a full understanding of the behavior that you are running into. When inspecting the raw data, screenshot here,  we can see that the information for Internal Notes and Custom fields are blank (blue boxes) but that we see the payment method (red box). While this information is sent to ShipStation, we do not have payment type displaying, so we would want to get that information into one of our displaying information fields (blue boxes) so that you could actively have it on the order/packing slips! 

I hope this helps! 🙂 

[CAbalsamic]

The problem with that method is that, frankly, nobody on either end can tell us who we need to speak to or pay to get this done. We were told by you that it’s out of the scope of your support and to contact this woocommerce shipstation integration team for directions, woocommerce’s shipstation integration support says that they don’t do any support for custom field mapping period, and nobody can give us who we should be reaching out to in order to get this done. Just a “not us” from all involved which doesn’t really help us as such a small business.

Outside of that though, we have been incredibly frustrated to find that the feature we needed done was completely doable just as recently as December via using an automation “if (payment method) then apply internal note (credit card)” series. In fact one of your admins did precisely this tutorial here : https://community.shipstation.com/t5/ShipStation-Features/Payment-methods-needs-to-be-a-field/m-p/97 . We have asked in at least one support ticket whether or not the clearly showing payment method automation option had been removed, when, and who made the decision to do so and not only did we not receive an answer but any reference at all to the payment method automation part of our message was ignored. All of this custom field mapping would not even be necessary had a feature that was already there not been disabled, we have not yet had a satisfactory explanation from anyone at shipstation for why that box was missing from the automation list now.

[Moderator-Davis]

Hey there @CAbalsamic! 

Thanks for getting back to me on this! Especially with the experience you described, I wanted to get to the bottom of this for you! 

I have confirmed with my product team that the decision was made to remove Payment Method as an automation rule criteria option in our new version intentionally. I have contacted the proper parties to have the knowledge base information updated to reflect this as to help avoid this type of confusion in the future. 

While I know that this is not the answer you were looking for, I did not want to leave you in a state of limbo on this matter. 

I wish I had better news in terms of bringing this information into the proper fields during the import process. I just don't want to mislead you about what I have found. In the spirit of still wanting to achieve this end goal, it would be my recommendation to see if there is any other way to flag/tag/mark/indicate those orders on the WooCommerce end prior to the import into ShipStation. Then we can change what those rule's criteria is looking for so you can continue to use those automations. 

I hope this can help! 

[zeph43]

We are also on our first day of the trial and have found this to be a major stumbling block - it is essential for this kind of information to be on the Packing Slip.

[CAbalsamic]

It's more than just a known issue, the developers have both privately and publically told me that the automation that had been made specifically to allow things like this was removed. None of the developers I have spoken to so far will give me a when or a why or who made the decision to do so, just that it was "intentionally' disabled in the new version. You can find confirmation that the automation to apply things based off of payment method existed until fairly recently in this article from their own moderators detailing exactly how to use the automation that they removed: https://community.shipstation.com/t5/ShipStation-Features/Payment-methods-needs-to-be-a-field/m-p/21...

[Moderator-Davis]

Hello there! 

I have received an update from the team that we have re-added "payment method" as a criteria option for the new layout! 

Thanks for your patience while we rolled this out 🙂

[CAbalsamic]

Thank you, this is such an imporant feature for our workflow and I really appreciate you guys bringing it back. Over the last seven months we have had to literally pull every single order in woocommerce orders and, one by one, hand-write credit or paypal on it to in the blank spot where this criteria would have placed it via custom field 1 to satisfy what we use our second copies for in our accounting workflow. It was a waste of roughly 20 minutes per day, 6 days a week, for the last 7 months that will be saved by the automation being returned.