chapter 4: Shopify Points of Integration

Points of Integration

One of the most important aspects to a backend operations management system is its points of integration into the platform it is intended to work with. Some OMS or Shopify apps may only handle inventory count or order management. With RetailOps, retailers get the full scope of a complete operation suite integrated into Shopify.

Product Management

By integrating RetailOps with Shopify, retailers can easily create or update products in RetailOps and push it to any number of Shopify sites in real time. This removes the need for doubling up on work or effort. RetailOps simply tells Shopify about the product, its attributes (size, color, images, and so on), and anything else you feel is important to your customer.

Another useful feature that our customers often take advantage of is our rules set. With rules you can create any number of products, titles, descriptions and more from one product SKU.

To illustrate this with an example, let’s say ABC Company has two Shopify sites. Their first Shopify site is an outdoor apparel shop (let’s call this OA.com). The other Shopify site is an everyday apparel shop (let’s call this EA.com). ABC Company now has a red t-shirt they want to list on both sites, but they want the titles to be different to resonate with the audiences of these shops.

ABC Company therefore creates a rule set in RetailOps, which would - in essence - result in different titles. For example, for OA, the title could be set to {{tag1}} {{tag2}} {{style}} {{type}} and for EA it could be set to {{style}} {{color}} {{type}}.

This would output “Breathable sweat-resistant fitted shirt” and “Fitted red shirt” respectively.

Of course, this a very basic visual example and in practice our customers are creating unique and interesting rules that include imagery and descriptions, and even take different languages into account. The possibilities are endless.

Order Management

If there is one thing that RetailOps is best known for, it’s our Order Management and Warehouse Management product. Our Shopify integration is no different! Once an order has been transacted in Shopify, RetailOps will begin its magic and start processing that order, deciding how best to ship that order to your customer’s door in the fastest way possible. Just like our Product Management rules, you can also create rules for orders and shipping. These rules could be based on shipping distance and/or cost, warehouse locations, Dropshippers vs. Just-in-Time, and many more.

Inventory Management

With RetailOps, your Shopify stores will never have incorrect inventory levels again. RetailOps knows where all your inventory lives at all times, across any number of physical stores, warehouses, and even virtual warehouses. When an inventory level changes anywhere along your chain – including other sales channels, such as Amazon – it will instantly update all of your sales channels, including any number of Shopify sites. This helps avoid the dreaded oversell, keeping customers happy.

Order Tracking

Customers love to know exactly where their order is at any given time – and so do we. This is why we have built in order tracking capabilities with the most popular shipping carriers, ensuring the tracking number is pushed back to your customer the moment it leaves your doors. It may be a small factor in the grand scheme of shipping, but it is a major piece of a great customer experience.

Returns

Our final point of integration that is unique to RetailOps – and one that many other full OMS are not able to offer – is seamless returns for Shopify. This means that your employees can process a return through RetailOps, then RetailOps will notify Shopify of this return. This will result in Shopify processing the return payment to your customer. The takeaway here is that, while RetailOps is acting as the source of truth and processing everything, Shopify handles the return payment back to the customer since they were the original source of payment.

Shopify + RetailOps Limitations

Of course, nothing is perfect (no, not even RetailOps!). In fact, we’d be lying if we said pairing RetailOps with Shopify was without limitations. While we know it’s pretty great, there are certainly some things to consider. In the spirit of transparency, let’s take a look at the following potential pitfalls.

Store Credit

Our first limitation is store credit. While RetailOps can issue and manage store credit within the RO platform, Shopify has an API limitation on receiving store credit. We do have a couple of methods to work around this, with one of the best ways currently being to manually add store credit to a customer on a Shopify site.

Order-Level Discounts, Not Item-Level

RetailOps can create and push discount codes to Shopify on an order-level basis. This means that you can confidently offer order-level discounts such as ‘30% off your whole order by using discount code XXX’. However, RetailOps currently doesn’t support item-level discounts for Shopify (for example, ‘30% off your red t-shirt by using discount code XXX’).

Order Cancelation

If a customer wishes to cancel an order before it is even shipped to them then RetailOps can quickly and easily process the cancelation. However, RetailOps is currently unable to push that cancelation request back to Shopify. The user/admin will have to go into Shopify and manually process the cancelation as well.

Order Writebacks

Our final limitation has to do with order writebacks. In the instance that your customer needs to change or edit their order – perhaps amend the shipping address or the size of the item – then RetailOps can process that change operationally and the customer won’t know any difference. However, RetailOps is currently unable to push that updated change back to Shopify for its records. If this is critical to your operation, the user/admin will need to update Shopify manually as well.