It’s been another productive month at Order Desk, though you may have noticed that our last few newsletters have been a little shorter than usual.
There’s a good reason for that; we’re in the midst of a hiring push, and while our developers are still hard at work on the app, our operations team—the folks who usually put the newsletter together for you every month—has been working around the clock looking for our next few team members.
You’ll be seeing some new faces around here in a few weeks, and the newsletter will be more thorough again, too!
New Features & Updates
For the shopping cart integrations that have an Inventory Location Filter, you can now set multiple locations separated by a comma.
The Rule Builder has two new actions:
- Set Processor Balance allows you to add or change the processor balance in the order details.
- Add Order History can be used if you would like to add your own custom comment or information to the order’s history when a specific event happens.
Twig can be used to set the data for both rule actions.
Shopping Carts
The Shopify integration has a setting called Item Name Style which lets you tell Order Desk if you want your Shopify products in your orders to show the variant information in the title or not. Details here.
Print on Demand
Printed Mint has a new API that is still in beta. They are currently only adding new customers to their new API, while current customers are continuing to use the existing API. This update is entirely behind the scenes and will not change your options or experience with using the Printed Mint integration in Order Desk. To help support both APIs, we have added a setting to the Printed Mint integration called Use Printed Mint API version 2.0. Do not enable this setting until Printed Mint instructs you to do so.
Additional order level options that can be set as checkout data or order metadata were included for:
- Spoke Custom: print_description, anything set in this field will be sent to the CaseDescription field at Spoke Custom. If nothing is set, the product name will be sent instead. Details here.
- HP Site Flow: ShipmentCarrierCode, set the carrier code for the shipping carrier that your printer will be using for the order. When the shipment details are sent back to Order Desk from HP Site Flow, this carrier code will be used to create the tracking URL for the shipment. This helps reduce any confusion where the ShippingAlias being used on your account may not have an obvious carrier code associated with it. Details here.
Additional item level options that can be set as variations or item metadata were included for:
- BDLinx: Value Added Service (VAS) fields can now be included with your items. Details and a list of all the fields are here.
Shipping
To have ShipStation tag your orders when Order Desk submits them, set TagID or TagIDs as checkout data or order metadata, and add the ShipStation tag IDs as the value. More details here.
New Integrations
Shopping Cart: RevCascade
Print on Demand: Digital On Demand, Printforia, Drop Simples
SKU Review
A hot topic that’s been coming up a lot in our support emails lately is how SKUs work with Order Desk, so we want to share a brief overview of what SKUs are and how Order Desk uses them.
A SKU is a stock keeping unit—it’s your own internal identification for a specific product. Order Desk uses the SKU to tell your products apart in cases where you are syncing extra inventory details into your orders.
The biggest roadblock we see to successfully setting up inventory in Order Desk is when a product has multiple variants that share the same SKU. If your SKU for red shirt is 1234 and your SKU for blue shirt is also 1234, Order Desk won’t know if you’re talking about the red shirt or the blue shirt, and this can cause some unexpected problems.
The Order Desk app can’t distinguish between two items with the same SKU and will assume they are the exact same item. In such cases, you’ll want to add something unique to each SKU to differentiate them from one another, say 1234-R and 1234-B. This way, if Order Desk sees 1234-R, it will know you mean the red shirt and proceed to take action on the order or the item based on that information.
Let us know if you found this helpful or not, or if there are any topics that you would like to see us cover in more detail in future newsletters!
See you next month,
The Order Desk Team
