September 2019

Grab your monogrammed backpacks and shirts printed with your kids’ names and grades on them—it’s our second favorite season in ecommerce: Back to School! ?

But, there are some things you can’t buy from a store, like the brand new ability to add an XML file as an attachment to emails sent from Order Desk. Gone are the days when PDF was your only option. If your supplier needs an XML file, now you can create and attach this automatically with a template and a rule. Want to be schooled in how to do this? Learn more about that here.

September is also the time when we start thinking about the most magical time of the year… Black Friday and the December holidays. If we can do anything to help you set up your store to get ready for your busy season, reach out to us soon with your thoughts. If you wait too long to ask for help, we’ll be as busy as you, meaning we may not be able to help as quickly as you might expect!

New Integrations

Fulfillment

Links Warehousing
Falcon Fulfillment

Print On Demand

PrintDropper
Perfect Etch
StickersAndPosters.com

Shopping Cart

Houzz
Foundry Commerce
Google Express
Sellbrite
PinnacleCart

Improvements and Updates

• Have you been wondering why some of your Amazon orders have some generic “No Name” customer information? There’s a good reason for that, but it’s not something we’re able to fix; Amazon recently made a change to their data security policy requiring certain connected services to anonymize their customer data. What this means for Order Desk is that Amazon Marketplace orders will have the customer info removed after 30 days. Also, all FBA/AFN orders that are imported directly into Order Desk will no longer show this information at all.
• Amazon Marketplace orders will no longer have tax added to them for states where Amazon is the Marketplace Facilitator. Not sure what that means? This info from Amazon explains it better than we can in three lines.
• New UK carrier alert! Whistl tracking URLs will now be created automatically in Order Desk if the carrier code used is Whistl.
• If you use EasyPost to create shipping labels in Order Desk, there’s a new option to add endorsements by setting EASYPOST_ENDORSEMENT as checkout data. See the EasyPost guide for your options.
• Moving on to EasyPost Fulfillment (fun fact: did you know this isn’t the same integration as EasyPost? It’s not! Same company, different services), the customized EasyPost tracking link will be downloaded with shipment details if one is there. We’ve also polished up how we pull in inventory so that barcodes are ending up where they’re meant to be.
• We’ve become even more persistent with BigCommerce and will make sure line item data gets added no matter what. ? If there’s a connection error, then we’ll try again because we don’t give up. We also smashed a bug that prevented us from updating the status change when the updated status didn’t match the download settings in the integration.
• Data imports through the Zakeke integration are more reliable.
• The CommerceHub integration now includes Macy’s and Bluestream. Additionally, we made a few more updates to it so you can sync your inventory counts back to CommerceHub, which also includes a whitelist filter where you can tell Order Desk which products should be sent back to which vendors, if not all. Find more details about using these features in the CommerceHub guide.
• RU ready for this? 3PL Central totally wasn’t ready for it, so we fixed a problem with sending the RU country code in orders sent to them.
  
• If there’s an error when you try to send an order to Just Vision It, the message will be more clear now letting you know what the problem is. Not sure if you’re getting an error or not? The admin on your account should receive an email with the error information, but you can always look at the Order History down near the bottom of the page on any order in Order Desk to see what’s going on with it. Check out those messages so you know what’s going on with your orders! Oh yeah, we’re also limiting file sizes that are sent to JVI to 75MB. Files over 75MB will cause an error, and the order won’t be submitted. If you do a better job of sizing your files than we are doing of sizing this update, you won’t have any trouble.
• Sometimes having a longer email address is unavoidable, but sometimes that’s a problem. We discovered that Catalyst can’t accept an order if the email address is longer than 40 characters, so we’ll start omitting the email address from the order details if it’s too long.
• When Ecwid sends a file with an order item, we’ll grab it for you and make sure the link to the file is displayed in the item metadata.
• The shipment check process for Clothes2Order received some improvements2help make things more reliable.
• The eBay integration now lets you choose the order number format you want to display in Order Desk. You can see your options in the eBay guide.
• We’re getting ready to upgrade to Walmart’s new v3 API with some required inventory feed updates. It’s almost time to remove v2.
• Grouped submissions can now be done with 4over, so your submissions will never have to be alone again.
  
• Standard shipping is now supported by the PhotoUSA integration. We also fixed a mistake with how we were sending packing slips to them.
• There’s a new custom setting for OIA Global and MINC. If you have items that you don’t want sent to them but splitting orders or using Product Code Skip won’t work, you can apply a new item metadata field called oiagloba_skip|1 or minc_skip|1 to those items and Order Desk will know not to include them in orders that are submitted. See the OIA Global guide or the MINC guide for specifics.
• Did you notice any shipment errors coming back from Shopify in the last few weeks that didn’t seem quite right? Yeah, we did too! That shouldn’t happen anymore. Oh, and btw, if you import your products from Shopify, barcodes will now be included.
• If Jondo Global gives you a custom shipping type, you can now set that on your orders with the ShippingMethodOverride value as checkout data or order metadata.
• Spoke Custom got a Shipping Class Match upgrade complete with more options for you. If you’re reading this and you still don’t know what Shipping Class Match is or how it works, it’s time to learn! Here’s your Shipping Class Match 101 lesson for today, which applies to all integrations with a shipping class match feature.
• The Cimpress integration now supports embroidery.
• SmartyStreets will now retain residential information if you have the Save Extra Metadata option enabled. So smarty! ?
• Magento2 now accepts more than a single shipment on an order.
• We’ve added a couple of wildcard values to the app:
  • Use % in your email search to find partial matches:
  • Use the * symbol in Product Code Skip to skip SKUs that contain the wildcard SKU. Details here.
• If you’re all about that Twig, you can now use the random function. Here’s how that works.
• Many of the alerts and confirmations around the app should be looking a lot nicer now.

Have a great Back to School season, make lots of new friends, and most importantly, have fun. Your Order Desk parents are very proud of you!

The Order Desk team