Well hello!
There’s another holiday season in the books.
We hope you pulled through the holiday rush (and that cringeworthy Super Bowl if you’re a fan of US pro football) and are ready to see what this new year brings us.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve made a lot of Rule Builder updates. In case you missed it, we totally revamped the Rule Builder at the end of last year. You can take action on items with rules. This completely changes the possibilities for what your store can do automatically. If you can think it up, it’s probably possible.
Also, you know how it was scary and reeeeally easy to mess up sending an email to someone other than the customer? Now there’s a new rule action you can use that lets you put the email address in the rule instead of in the email template, so you don’t have to worry about sending emails to customers by mistake:
Other Rule Builder updates from January:
- We sped up email delivery.
- Put the folders in Rule Builder dropdowns in the same order as they are in the left sidebar.
- Wrote out condition operators, so if you didn’t know that != means does not equal, now it’ll just say that and you won’t have to scratch your head at all the codey stuff.
- Gave the Rule Builder a red pen. If you make a mistake in the syntax of a rule, the Rule Builder will tell you, so you don’t have to guess and wonder. If you get an error you don’t know how to fix let us know, and we’ll help you out!
PHEW.
New Integrations
- Teamwork Athletic (guide) – a new print on demand provider for athletic apparel
- Deposco (guide) – a new supported WMS solution
- ShipCentral (guide) – a new warehouse based out of the Salt Lake City area
- EasyBill (guide) – download your EasyBill.de invoices as orders into Order Desk
New Features
- We know you use folders. Did you know you can customize the columns in your folders? (It’s true; click that customize button on the top right of the page when looking at any folder.) Well, now it’s even better. If you like the way one folder is set up, copy that format to all folders with the click of a button, which you can now find in the customize page.
- Someone gave us a really good idea recently. Why not add a filter to the dashboard so you can exclude orders you don’t want to show up in your totals? Why didn’t we think of that!? Click the cog icon in the top right of the dashboard, and you can add folders you want excluded (like Canceled, for example.) Folder IDs can be found by looking at the URL of the folder—it’s that number at the end. Separate multiple folder IDs with commas.
- Quickview links are now clickable! Don’t know what quickview is? Open up one of your folders and in the top right you’ll see a little “i” icon. Click it to see more information about each order. Or just click somewhere on the order line to pop down details on a specific order. It’s a great way to get a quick view of the orders in that folder. Anyway, all of that to say: the links in the order details can now be clicked from this view!
- Have you ever wanted to search based on the total order quantity? Wish granted! Check it out in Advanced Search. You’ll find Order Quantity as one of the filters in the dropdown. You can do >1 to search for all orders with more than 1 item in the order.
- Order Desk + Handheld Scanners = Best Friends Forever! Fair warning, you’ll have to be familiar with code to set this up (friendships can be complex, amiright?), but we’ve got some more info here to help you out.
- Two new export template options were added. If you add {date1} to your export template file name, the date will be exported as yyyymmdd. Use a delimiter different from the standard options (comma, tab, pipe, semicolon)? This is no longer going to be a roadblock. Set the new CUSTOM-DELIMITER:* custom parameter to tell Order Desk what it is (don’t forget to replace the * with your custom delimiter, unless it’s *, in which case…)
- Two new carriers were added so tracking links will automatically be created if you use PostNL or B2CEurope for your shipments.
Integration Upgrades/Fixes
- Magento now pulls in gift messages. You can also now set up a filter so only certain SKUs will be imported in orders. Details here.
- Magento2 also got a checkup this month—order importing and shipment reporting should be working a little better.
- ShipStation Import now supports filtering orders by tag. Details can be found here.
- We’ve made some updates to our regular ShipStation integration (the one where you can send orders to ShipStation). You can now change stores for ShipStation orders, which will cancel the order in your current store and then send it to the new store. We also now offer the option to do an Internal Notes Override, and created a rule action that allows you to set the destination store with the rule builder.
- Okay, so… sometimes you have a quantity of 1 for an item in an order, but what you really need is a different quantity to be shipped instead. Since you can’t change the quantity in the order without confusing your shopping cart, we came up with a neat trick. Now, for some integrations, you can add a new item metadata field to the item that will change the quantity without changing the quantity in the order itself. We’ll tell your fulfillment service to use this new quantity but we we won’t tell your shopping cart about it so they don’t get confused when we tell them you shipped a different number than they think you should have. This currently works for FedEx Supply Chain (use fedexsupplychain_quantity), Gooten (use gooten_quantity), PDR (use pdr_quantity) and 3PL Central (use threeplcentral_quantity). This will be added to more fulfillment integrations as needed.
But seriously, if you didn’t get that and you think it might apply to you, respond to this email and we’ll show you how it works in your own store. - If you use Amazon Marketplace for custom orders, we cooked up a summoning potion and can now pull in customization details with orders—both images and text. Less work for you! ✨
- Turns out that some fulfillment services in Shopify will trigger the fulfillment when they receive an order rather than waiting until they shipped the order. This would mark orders as fulfilled in Order Desk but not in Shopify, and then when the order was actually fulfilled, we couldn’t get the notification for it. We added a fix to look for (and ignore) this kind of open fulfillment.
- Do you like stability? Do you use ConvertKit? Oh good, because we’ve made some quality of life improvements to our ConvertKit integration! (By the way, shout out! We ❤️ConvertKit like seriously.)
- BrightStores can now pull in coupons that were used with your orders.
- BigCommerce will now pull in the customer custom field values and product availability description field. Make sure to have Download Customer Information and Download Extra Item Details enabled in your BigCommerce integration settings for this to work.
- Ecwid got a little lighter this month seeing as we’ll be importing weight as ounces instead of pounds.
- OIA Global now has more DHL International options to work with. If you want to use these or any of their other available shipping options use the Shipping Class Match to let them know.
- Hey Foxy.io merchants, you can now export your active subscriptions. Give it a try! Go to FC Subscriptions (under Custom Tools in the left sidebar) and at the bottom of the page you’ll see a button to export a file of just your active subs.
- We were sometimes letting orders get through to DecoPlate with invalid SKUs (whoops), but we put a stop to it by improving the validation process and hardcoding their SKUs into Order Desk. No More Mr. Nice App.
- Authorize.net can now retrieve the last four digits of the card number if needed.
And that about wraps things up! We’ll see you again next month with more updates, announcements, and maybe even some pizza!
The Order Desk Team
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