Fulfill orders automatically based on channel after 30 minutes

[justmat]

Hi friends,

I have a bit of a weird one. We run a retail and online store with a pretty diverse inventory, so we have a large collection of products that are product builds. These builds are made up from other SKU's lumped together to make the final product. We use an app to manage our inventory with these bundles but the app takes a few minutes to calculate the inventory and make the changes after we create an order through shopify POS. If we have "auto-fulfil orders" turned on in the shopify POS app then it fulfils the orders before our app can edit the order and adjust the inventory. It's a huge pain to manually fulfill POS orders at the end of a day/week and we're wanting to automate it using flow but we cant seem to find a solution. Is there any way to do this with flow or do we need to use an API request.

We essentially want shopify flows to: detect new order at POS -> wait 30 mins -> fulfil order.

When we set this up it was fulfilling random orders that weren't placed through POS and it completely messed up our online orders, we d

[JoesIdeas]

I wonder if adjusting the identifier for how it detects POS would work?

For example, the "source_name" data field in the order json data will show "pos" for POS orders. Maybe setting that will fix it.

[justmat]

I don't think its the flow trigger that's the issue, we have no problem getting the flow to run but when it gets to the "wait" step the flow forgets which order was used for the flow trigger. Then when you go to run the fulfilment step it starts fulfilling random orders that weren't linked to the order that triggered the flow. Essentially a POS order is triggering another random order to get fulfilled. 

[RPiii]

Do you have a condition that checks if the order originated on a POS device? There are some examples in the Flow template library that show how to check if order.app.name = "Point of Sale".

You might be able to use an Order created trigger, followed by a condition to check if it's a POS order, followed by a Hold fulfillment step, followed by a Wait step (to give your inventory management app time to function), followed by a Release fulfillment hold step.

[justmat]

Unfortunately this doesn't work, after using the wait step it seems like the shopify flow forgets the reference trigger so when you go to release the fulfilment hold it releases it for an order that's unrelated to the order that triggered the flow. We had this setup and it started fulfilling online orders that we needed to ship and we ended up missing orders and the whole thing turned into an absolute nightmare. Its there any other way we could do this?

[abhishekshop]

Take a look at the Amazon MCF by WebBee app—it offers the functionality you're looking for.

[justmat]

I really don't want to download another app that charges a monthly subscription - I feel like to do anything in shopify the answer is always, shopify doesn't support this function, use an app. I appreciate you commenting though!

[justmat · Accepted solution]

Managed to workout a solution that didn't require an app. If anyone else is having this issue the flow we are using is below! Thanks guys!