How do I create a custom shipping workflow?

June 26, 2010 11:37 AM

Ecommerce, Shipping, Programming: I am setting up a warehouse for my burgeoning ecommerce business and am designing custom coded shipping workflow. I am also shipping orders from this warehouse for two or three other online stores in different shopping cart platforms, and need to streamline the orders together into an efficient packing and shipping operation. Here's an example shipping setup that I'm moving towards. Please refer me to resources or people to hire (more detail below).

I'm developing a custom order management system integrated with existing shopping cart that interfaces shipping software, local DB, and shopping cart. I am considering using VBA or Python as the main language and automation, and have not yet settled on who to purchase the shipping software from.

The shipping software I am considering (all have SDK/API interfaces which will allow me to push in data and output email notifications, labels, and status uploads):
ShipRush SDK
iAbol
ShipWorks
(note that I primarily ship using FedEx and USPS, and I am aware of Endicia and Stamps.com, however I want ONE app that will do both FedEx and USPS, which Endicia doesn't do.)

Question(s):
Can you please point me to any Order Management solutions (example: Stone Edge) that import orders from MULTIPLE DIFFERENT online shopping carts (Specifically Volusion and Magento) into a stream of orders that can then be fed into a database or directly connected to the above shipping software, or integrates with the shipping software directly?

Please direct me to a person or consulting business that can help me implement this. I am very tech savvy and willing to PM the work, but not a programming expert.

Please offer ANY resources that will help optimize, accelerate, or simplify this process. Maybe there is a solution out there that I have totally missed.

Thank you!!

posted by Merlin144 to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: Hi Merlin144,

I don't think there's anything you've missed - there seems to be a real gap in terms of order management software oriented towards the needs of e-commerce businesses. The installable packages seem expensive and don't seem to have much out-of-the-box support for standard e-comm packages like Magento, while the SaaS solutions like Erply and BrightPearl seem too basic/unextendable.

Having said that - it looks like ShipWorks directly imports from multiple different e-comm platforms - is that not suitable for your needs?

In any case, my company is now building an order management system for a set of three niche e-commerce businesses which we operate/are in the process of starting up; we're building it in PHP (prototype to be in CodeIgniter, next version will be in Symfony 2 when that comes out), although we considered Python too.

If you want to DM me, would be interesting to compare stories, maybe there's a way we can work together...

Alex
posted by runkelfinker at 4:07 PM on June 26, 2010

Response by poster: Great, thanks Runkelfinker. Will PM you.
posted by Merlin144 at 9:22 PM on June 27, 2010