A good handover that stopped halfway
Starshipit already updated fulfilment in Shopify when a parcel was dispatched. Retail Express did not know. For every courier order, someone had to tell the retail system by hand that the order had left.
At the volume the business was doing, more than a thousand courier orders a month, that second entry was a daily job, and every manual entry is a place where a record can be missed. The brief was to extend the handover so the dispatch the team already records reaches the Retail Express order as well, without anyone learning a new process.
The integration underneath
Our integration work for Bicycle Superstore began in April 2021, with separate flows for orders, stock and fulfilment between Shopify and Retail Express. Online orders are prepared for Retail Express in the shape the shop works with. Product and stock updates flow the other way, so the website reflects what the shop floor holds. Each flow has one job, and the connection keeps a relationship between the records in each system, which is what lets a fulfilment update find the right order later.
Fulfilment turned out to be two jobs
Bicycle Superstore fulfils in two places. Courier orders are dispatched in Starshipit, which fulfils the order in Shopify. Click and collect orders are fulfilled at the counter in Retail Express when the customer picks them up. So we built separate connectors for the two directions: collections recorded in Retail Express update Shopify, and courier dispatches from Shopify flow back to Retail Express. The dispatch connector went into production on 15 November 2022.
Proven on real orders
When Starshipit dispatches an order and fulfils it in Shopify, the connector matches that fulfilment to its Retail Express order and updates the relevant items. Before handover we followed real orders through all three systems, and recorded test examples give any change to the order mapping a repeatable set of checks. Ongoing support covered platform API updates and changes to the commerce workflows along the way.
The results
Between 15 November 2022 and 31 May 2023 the connector carried 7,391 courier fulfilments from Shopify into Retail Express. Across the six full months from December to May that was 6,300 orders, an average of 1,050 a month or about 242 a week, for the seven shops in the mapping: Mornington, Fountain Gate, Geelong, Highpoint, Mentone, Nunawading and Carnegie, plus the warehouse and web location.
We did not measure the minutes each second entry used to take, so we do not claim a saving. The arithmetic is simple, though: at 242 orders a week, every minute removed from the second entry is about four staff hours a week.
One dispatch, three systems
For orders covered by this flow, the team dispatches in Starshipit and the second fulfilment entry became the connector's job. Underneath, online orders reach Retail Express in the shape the shop works with, website stock follows the shop floor, and collections and dispatches each find their way home.
Every one of those jobs can be checked and fixed on its own, which is what keeps an integration like this cheap to run as the platforms change.