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OrderFlow’s flexible integration templating and product/order attributes makes it simple for customers to enable bespoke business processes using Shopify tags functionality.
Shopify tags are becoming an increasingly popular way for e-tailers to add additional, bespoke metadata to their products and orders.
Over the last six months we’ve seen a growing number of customers take an interest in the benefits of shopping tags, a facility within Shopify that enables users to add an extra level of logic-based processing to orders.
“The main benefit is that you attach custom data to orders, products or customers,” says Realtime Despatch developer Zac, “meaning you’re not confined to the main Shopify fields. Tags allow you to assign whatever data you want in a meaningful way, adding contextual information to a product.”
We pull all the additional information into our OrderFlow warehouse management system (WMS), making it visible across all warehouse processes. With OrderFlow’s flexible integration templating and product/order attributes it’s simple to retrieve and reference this additional data, enabling customers to use it in a variety of ways.
This can be anything from identifying repeat customers, modifying orders or holding them back until a specific date, through to flagging which packaging should be used or which shipping paperwork to generate.
To optimise the benefits of Shopify tags, our development team has enhanced our support for Shopify. This included streamlining our product fetch logic to enable better management of import setups, speed up new integrations and reduce the number of requests required to collect pertinent information from Shopify.
We already have several customers taking advantage of the features Shopify tags enable, including long-term client Green Snow.
“On one occasion Green Snow was dealing with a client’s subscription orders and needed to put to identify if an order was the first from a new customer or a repeat order from an existing one,” says Zac. “We used a tag against the order to denote which it was. This data was then saved against the order within our WMS, allowing the client to apply business logic to their courier selection.”
On another occasion, a client needed a third party system to process and make changes to a Shopify order before it was received by OrderFlow.
“Normally this kind of processing would be handled with Shopify states, however they couldn’t in this situation because the states were already managed by their payment gateway,” explains Zac. “Instead a ‘ReadyForDispatch’ tag was added to orders once they were ready to be processed.”
These are just a couple of examples that highlight how the flexibility of Shopify tags is complemented by the flexibility of the OrderFlow WMS. If you’re a Shopify user and your current fulfilment processes are struggling to meet the demands of your Shopify site, then please get in touch!