For anyone considering using
ShipStation
with HikaShop, I wanted to share that Nicolas and his team have been working closely with us to greatly improve the integration, and now it's awesome! (Nicolas, you should ask them to list HikaShop here on their partners page:
www.shipstation.com/partners/
)
ShipStation now pulls over:
- Order id
- Customer Name (not user name)
- Customer Email address (so it can be used in ShipStation for customer email notifications)
- Customer Shipping Address (which it can automatically verify and correct prior to printing the shipping label)
- Total number of products on the order
- Total amount of the order and a breakout of product vs. shipping costs
- An itemized list of all products on the order, including product codes (SKU in most cases)
- The shipping method of the order, which can then be automatically mapped to the right shipping service in ShipStation
Upon shipment, ShipStation will also auto-update the order status in HikaShop to "Shipped" and add a tracking number note in the internal notes area for the order that admins can see in the Joomla backend.
Once you have ShipStation integration working, the features ShipStation offers include branded labels with your logo, a branded tracking page (USA only), automatic emails to your customers with tracking numbers, and delivery confirmation emails once the carrier reports back that the item has been delivered. Our client is maximizing the value of ShipStation's features for her business (with help from the HikaShop team). It's quite impressive what ShipStation can do compared to other shipping integrations we've seen over the years.
Next we'll be customizing the ShipStation plugin a bit more for our client so it better connects with the Order Management System we are developing using HikaShop Business. Order tags (for example "Rush") and the targeted Ship By Date from her HikaShop custom fields will also be sent to ShipStation. That way the view of the order will be consistent across HikaShop and ShipStation for the whole production lifecycle.
Thanks again to Nicolas and his team for helping make the HikaShop ShipStation integration more powerful!