If you use Shipstation for shipping and Shopify or WooCommerce for online sales, it is easy to manage order fulfillment using a Katana-Shipstation-eCommerce combination.
Although Katana doesn't currently have a direct integration with Shipstation, by enabling sales order fulfillment status sync between these 3 systems, managing order fulfillment can be a breeze.
TIP: If you are interested in building a custom integration to a shipping platform, learn more about API and integration options.
Workflow
Note: We are using the Shopify e-commerce platform in the example below, but the workflow is similar for WooCommerce.
If you are using Katana, Shopify, and Shipstation, you can integrate Katana with Shopify, and Shopify with Shipstation. In general, you should manage the following processes in each system:
Shopify - sales, product descriptions
Katana - inventory for finished goods and raw materials, product recipes, production operations and schedule, purchasing
Shipstation - shipping
To make the process more automatic, make sure you switch ON the sales order status sync between Katana-Shopify and Shopify-Shipstation. This enables you to mark the sales order as fulfilled in any of those systems and automatically mark the order as fulfilled in the other systems.
How a typical workflow looks:
The customer places an order in Shopify. A Sales Order (SO) is created in Shopify with an Unfulfilled status.
The SO is automatically synced from Shopify to Katana and Shipstation.
In Katana, the sales order appears in the Sell screen → Open table. Check the Sales items availability status to see if the required products are in stock. If not, schedule production for the required products, manage raw material requirements, purchasing and complete the production.
When the Sales items availability on Katana's Sell screen shows a green In stock status for the SO, all the required items are available, and you can proceed with shipping.
(Optional) To make it clear which Sales Orders have moved to the shipping process, you can mark the SO delivery status as Packed. This will remove the items from your stock but will keep the SO on the Open table. It will not change the fulfillment status of the SO in Shopify or Shipstation.
Go to Shipstation and find the order. Manage the shipping process in Shipstation and when the order has shipped, mark the order completed in Shipstation.
This will trigger an automatic sales order fulfillment status sync (if you have switched it ON), marking the SO as Fulfilled in Shopify and Delivered in Katana.
The sales order is automatically moved to the Done table of the Sell screen in Katana, and the stock for the shipped products is reduced.
That's it! You have successfully fulfilled the order.
You can also keep your stock levels automatically updated in Shopify by syncing stock from Katana to Shopify.