Shopify & Virtualstock Supplier

Overview

The Shopify & Virtualstock Supplier blueprint includes everything you need to sync orders, fulfillments, and inventory between Virtualstock Supplier and Shopify. The high-level architecture is illustrated below:

Orders are pulled from Virtualstock Supplier and created in Shopify with a paid and unfulfilled status. When a fulfilment partner ships an order in Shopify, Patchworks pulls shipment information and sends this (together with a tracking number) to Virtualstock Supplier. Finally, inventory is synced from Shopify to Virtualstock Supplier.

Prerequisites

Item

Notes

Virtualstock & Shopify staging/sandbox credentials

Virtualstock Supplier credentials are provided by the associated Virtualstock merchant- e.g. John Lewis.

Virtualstock & Shopify live/production credentials

Virtualstock Supplier credentials are provided by the associated Virtualstock merchant- e.g. John Lewis.

List of all Shopify SKUs and corresponding Virtualstock Supplier part numbers

This will usually be in the form of a spreadsheet that's issued by the Virtualstock Supplier merchant. For example, John Lewis provide a spreadsheet named Smartsheet or JL SKUs. Note: for testing, you only require enough SKUs/part numbers to fulfill required tests.

List of Shopify carriers that will be used for Virtualstock Supplier orders

The Slug for these carriers is usually provided by the Virtualstock Supplier merchant (e.g. John Lewis).

Test scenarios

Some Virtualstock merchants mandate specific test scenarios - for example, John Lewis require three test orders to be processed before live/production credentials are released.

Confirmation of predefined values to be used for acknowledgement back to Virtualstock Supplier.

Supplier_delivery_date. This is usually orderdate plus 5-7 days

Fulfillment_route. This is usually set to Direct to customer.

Operations summary

In Patchworks, an operation is counted whenever a request is made to send or receive a payload to/from an endpoint. The operations count for installed process flows is shown below:

Process flow

Operations count

Default run frequency*

Orders

4 per order

Every 10 minutes

Fulfillments

2 per fulfillment

Hourly

Inventory

3 per sync

2 x daily