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ShipStation

Overview

ShipStation is a web-based platform offering ecommerce merchants in the United States and Canada an incredibly flexible service to improve their shipping management routines. It is an easy-to-follow interface that supports majority of leading shipping vendors and is designed to save online retailers both order fulfillment time and money. ShipStation provides handy tools to customize fulfillment rules and automate shipping process.

Integration provides the ability to:

Export Linnworks orders to ShipStation;
Get orders shipping and tracking information from ShipStation;
Have Bin Rack per item ordered exported to ShipStation;
Export order notes to ShipStation;
Process orders in Linnworks once these are shipped in ShipStation;
Automatically process orders by location directly on ShipStation (optional);
Export composite child SKUs to ShipStation (optional);
Import ShipStation shipping costs to order extended properties in Linnworks.

Integration is only available with our new web based platform Linnworks.net

For automatically processing an order on ShipStation to work, the warehouse location for orders to be processed from must be selected in the ShipStation configuration on Linnworks. These orders will be imported back to Linnworks under 'Processed Orders'.

Order life cycle and data flow

Below is a detailed explanation of order life cycle and data flows between Linnworks and ShipStation:

Linnworks

Order is downloaded from the selling channel into Linnworks.
Order information is passed to ShipStation.

ShipStation

Order is processed in ShipStation, shipping label is printed. Shipping and tracking information is assigned to the order by ShipStation.
Shipping, tracking information, ShipStation specific shipping cost and order status is passed back to the order in Linnworks.

Linnworks

Linnworks receives Order ID, Carrier, Shipping Service, Tracking Number, saves them against the specified order and marks the order as ‘Shipping Label Printed’.
Order is processed by user.
Order is moved to Processed Orders where 'auto process' was selected in config.

How to track Order Lifecycle

When order is exported to ShipStation, an audit trail entry is added saying 'Order was successfully synchronized'. Once Linnworks receives shipping and tracking information from ShipStation, two more entries containing label creation and order fulfillment dates are added to order audit trail.

ShipStation dates and times are stored in Pacific Standard Time or Pacific Daylight Time depending on whether or not Daylight Savings Time is in effect. Linnworks dates and times are stored in UTC. As audit trail entries are added by Linnworks, these will display timestamps in UTC and 'SHipStation label created' note will contain PST/PDT timestamp.

Synchronisation

It is possible to submit all Linnworks orders to ShipStation, or select the specific orders to be submitted by moving them to a folder, pre-defined in ShipStation endpoint configuration. To automate the folder allocation process, there’s an option to set up an automation rule in Rules Engine which will automatically assign orders to desired folder.

If the auto-Update feature is enabled in ShipStation, Linnworks will synchronise orders with ShipStation every 2 hours by default. Linnworks is unable to submit the orders with more frequent intervals, as this is ShipStation who picks the orders up from Linnworks.

Shipping and tracking information is immediately passed back to Linnworks every time an order is processed in ShipStation.

If order is processed in Linnworks before processing in ShipStation, it will be moved to Shipped in ShipStation on the next synchronization.

Make sure orders have correct shipping countries assigned to them. Orders with ‘UNKNOWN’ shipping countries will not get picked up by ShipStation.

Canceling orders

It is strongly advised to perform order cancellations in Linnworks. Cancellation note will be passed to ShipStation and an order will be moved to Cancelled. In case an order gets cancelled in ShipStation, Linnworks will not update order status leaving it open and ready to process.

Splitting / merging orders

Order splitting and merging routines can be performed in Linnworks at any time before order is processed in ShipStation. If an order is split/merged in ShipStation shipping information may not get correctly passed back to Linnworks.

Split and merged orders do not inherit the folder assigned to the original order. Once an order is split or merged it should be assigned to a folder once again (if needed).

Order Dimensions

Sending dimensions to ShipStation is not supported at this time. However, the product dimensions can be configured once the products are imported into ShipStation with orders, by going to the Products page at the top of the application and double-clicking a product. Please note, that these settings only apply to single item orders.