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Hello,
We have a 3PL fulfilling our orders. We recently went through a rebrand and for some of our products people are still getting the old branded packaging. We have created a card that we want to go into the box ONLY if they ordered one of the items that is still old branding. The 3PL is telling me that I need to do this somehow in Shopify so that it puts the item's ID on the order directly. I'd prefer that it not show up in the cart to confuse the buyer, but that isn't a deal breaker.
For instance, someone buys product A, which we are currently using old branding for, automatically the insert item is added to the purchase order so that the 3PL sees it as an item to pack.
Thanks in advance for help.
mel
Hey Mel!
Hope you're doing well 🙂 I'd like to know a bunch more the main being how your store is communicating with your 3PL. I'll make some assumptions to hopefully get you an answer!
Assuming your 3PL is using variant IDs to identify the product in question you could create a variant that to the customer looks newly branded on the website but is physically the previous branding with the note. That way customers would follow your normal purchase flow and your 3PL would follow their normal flow. Depending on how you choose who gets branded products A or B on the storefront you could also put in some rules on the site that auto adds the appropriate variant into the cart.
Let me know if that helps!
Mike,
The flow the user sees is all new product. If you are new to us, you won't see the old branding.... until you get your shipment (but only some of the products). So purchasers are all following normal purchase flow. On the 3pl end, they have UPC codes and are using the old bottle upc codes until those are used up and then ship the newer stuff. They are telling me that Shopify needs to generate the ID for the postcard to tell their system to pull the branding explanation postcard. I don't want users to see any of that, except getting the postcard in their box. So on my end, I want purchasing product A to also put a free postcard on the order. I don't mind if it is on the PO in the box. I'd rather not have it on their cart, but that is livable.
At this point, I am also happy to just set up an email if a customer orders a certain product, they get an email explanation of the branding, but emails don't get seen/read so often that this is not my first choice.
Thanks for your help.
Hey Melissa,
Gotcha, thank you for the clarification! My big question is how are you integrated to your 3PL? There are two options popping up in my head:
Option 1:
While I see this isn't ideal. I think this is the cheapest/fastest/easiest. Add an additional product for the 3PL to ingest. Using an app like CartBot you could automatically add the postcard as a free product to cart when someone purchases "product a" and title it something cleaver to avoid confusion. Something like "information sheet" or "thank you note". From there your 3PL would see both the product and note and know to pick/pack it.
Option 2:
This is a bit more complicated to setup and depends on how your store is communicating with your 3PL. Dig in and figure out the fields and mapping the 3PL is using to create their pick list. From there you can use order note attributes and have the 3PL integration use those to populate the 3PLs pick list based on your desired conditions. Once the old product is all shipped, you can remove it from the front end.
I hope this helps, let me know!
Cheers,
Mike
Hey Melissa,
I used to work for a 3PL and built an app exactly for this! Based on rules we add line items to the order after it's created and before it's imported by your 3PL. One caveat, I would ask your 3PL if they could configure a 1 or 2 minute import delay to make sure we're able to add the item before they import it.
You can an item to be added based on product, variant, or even tag so it should fit the bill!
Link to app: https://apps.shopify.com/pls-smart-pack-ship
Let me know if you have any questions: Tom@PackLabelShip.com
A quick video demoing how I would setup the rule for your use case:
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