Using version 9.0.4

On Friday, we exported multiple orders to ship station without a problem, and we were able to synchronize them back with the tracking number. Today we did only one order, but there was no synchronization back from ship station.

I believe today we went into the shipping of the Order in Ablecommerce Admin area and marked the order as fully shipped.

So, we are curious, if an order is marked as fully shipped when we export to ship station, it doesn't appear in the synchronize section?

Is this a correct observation?

Thank you

This is where a nice and thick manual would help. There is such little information regarding this, so we are learning this on the fly.

Export - Going out to ship station
Synchronize - From ship station to Ablecommerce

First of all, all order triggers with the exception of new order have been turned off. We prefer to process order status manually.

What we know so far.

We have an order status called "Ship-Full" which means this order is ready to ship out today with everything on the order, we have another one called "Ship-Partial" that is self-explanatory.

When it's time to export to ship station, it is effortless to round up all, the order where order status is set to "Ship-Full". First thing is we capture the money, probably most important as well. If you at this stage we could to go into the order and process the shipping in Ablecommerce, the synchronization for this order is no longer available. This is not a good idea for the following reason.

You may wish to process a big order in Ablecommerce, like we have today, that consist of 6 packages. This way, when you export to ship station, 6 different entries are created, for this order. This way you don't have to keep hitting the "Create new order" in ship station. The problem is, because you process the shipment inside Able, there is no way to synchronize back, remember you don't have tracking numbers in Able at this time, because Able sees the order as fully shipped. Which it is, it just lacks tracking numbers.

If you don't break up the big order into six different packages, and you do it at ship station, when you synchronize back, it only will bring back the first tracking number which is thrown on top of the one big package in Able.

The order today consisted of 40 2way radios. Each box had seven radios except for the last one that only have five. When we synchronize back, only one tracking number was returned.

So, there can be some enhancements regarding synchronizing back to Able. Synchronizing back to able should not solely depend on whether it is marked as fully shipped in Ablecommerce, but you may want to check for the existence of tracking numbers as well. This doesn't matter if you're shipping everything in one box or multiple boxes.

This is an area that can definitely benefit from some improvement, I hope I have not confused you and was able to explain what we have witnessed so far.

Thank you,
-Ray

Thank you for your response. Yes, I read the documentation. The problem with order triggers is that we have database triggers set up as well. And having the system automatically change statuses, would activate those database triggers.

Here's an example, nowhere on your system is there an order completed date. This is essential to us for many reasons, one of the primary reasons is that we lock orders based on this date to prevent modifications in the event we are ever audited by either state or federal agencies.

When an order is saved with a complete status, it automatically triggers the database trigger to timestamp a completed date on the order. The database trigger, in question, also does a few other things which are important for us to properly process orders. So, we must manually control order statuses.

I guess we're just going to have to click create new order at ship station. Since ship station emails the customer with all tracking numbers, It is not necessary to have all tracking numbers populate the order.

The only suggestion that I will make today based on what I have experienced is synchronization back to Ablecommerce should not be based solely on whether the order in Ablecommerce has shipped or not. It should also check for a missing tracking number, this of course will only apply to a single package, which is okay.

I hope this helps,
-Ray