I ship feed supplements to the USA. Alot of classes of goods require a Prior Notice…it would be great to have that integrated with Shopify. There is ALOT of redundant information that has to be manually entered for every shipment!
I would separate this into two steps before trying to automate the FDA submission itself. FDA allows Prior Notice through PNSI or through a broker’s ACE workflow, and the safe automation boundary depends on which route you use.
For one recent shipment, I would map each required field to one of three sources: Shopify order data, a fixed product/manufacturer record, or a value that still needs human confirmation. Shopify can reliably supply the recipient, line items and tracking data; production facility, FDA registration details, country of production and certain arrival/refusal fields should not be guessed from the order.
That map can still remove most repetitive entry: generate a per-order filing packet, leave only the genuinely variable compliance fields for review, and write the FDA confirmation number back to the fulfillment record. It also avoids silently submitting a technically complete but inaccurate notice.
Are you filing through PNSI yourself or through a carrier/broker, and do most products ship from the same registered facility? Those two answers determine whether this is a small data-mapping workflow or a larger integration.
I am a very small ranch based business, and I do it myself. Brokerage fees are out of the question at this time I have a small range of products which were covered under ad minimus. They are also CUSMA. All of the HS codes are entered into Shopify already and preferred carriers for shipping are chosen. I package and ship from the ranch and all of my products are made by the same manufacturer also in Canada that manufacturer has both CIA and FDA approval.
That narrows it down. With a small product range, HS codes already in Shopify, one manufacturer, and you filing PNSI yourself, I would test a lightweight filing-packet workflow before considering a direct FDA integration.
For one recent shipment, the output would separate:
- reusable product/manufacturer fields,
- order-specific fields pulled from Shopify,
- arrival or compliance fields that still require your confirmation.
That should show exactly how much duplicate entry can safely be removed without guessing any filing data.
Roughly how many U.S. shipments per week need Prior Notice, and when do you normally know the expected arrival port/date—before buying the label, or only after? A count and workflow description are enough; please don’t post FDA registration numbers or customer details.
Hi there @Sosunny
For shipments destined for the US with products regulated by the FDA, the prior notice data repeatedly can become quite tedious. There’s a pragmatic way to do this, which is to standardize on what you need to ship/fill out about products in Shopify via using Metafields and consistent product data. Then leverage Shopify Flow or a custom workflow to process that data and generate the needed information for each order, automatically. This can greatly reduce double entry whilst still allowing you to keep the final submission process under your control.
Right now, the shipment rate is very very low. Like a lot of small businesses I am having trouble recovering from the pandemic and now all the terror of BS between Canada and the US thanks to our idiotic liberal elbows up government. I am in a rebuilding phase and I’m hopeful that things will change out. Is this the last time I filled out a prior notice it’s quite time-consuming and because I don’t do them every week. I have to relearn the process constantly.
That changes my recommendation. At very low shipment volume, I would not build a Shopify-to-FDA integration yet; the setup and maintenance would likely cost more than the time it saves.
The low-cost fix is a one-page filing SOP kept beside PNSI:
- reusable product/manufacturer fields,
- order-specific recipient and item fields,
- shipment-specific arrival/transport fields,
- a final check to save the PNSI confirmation number before fulfillment.
FDA’s current PNSI guide also includes Managing Favorite Entities, so reusable facility/party records can be kept there where appropriate instead of being re-entered each time. I would link the SOP to the current FDA guide and re-check it before each filing because the screens and requirements can change.
This would be a process aid, not legal advice or an automated submission. If useful, I can outline a blank one-page checklist structure here; no registration numbers or customer details needed.
I’ve done that already but thank you. I just put that suggestion out there because if there’s enough requests, apparently Shopify will integrate something into their platform. That’s what I was hoping for. Best wishes.