first time poster here. Currently I am inthe process of opening my webshop.
i have a problem that is a bit specific and I am searching for the best solution.
I will be using dropshipping, but the supplier doesn’t offer shopify integration with live stock monitoring. But, I can always login on their page and check the availability for a certain product.
In other words, I cannot let my customers know whether something is on stock until they place an order and I manually go check the availability.
What would be the smartest solution here?
Does Shopify offer an option at the checkout to postpone payment until you check the availability?
Ryder here, from the Social Care Team at Shopify. Welcome to the Shopify Community, and thanks for posting! I can understand how important managing inventory is, and I’d be happy to suggest a couple of solutions for your business model.
You mentioned that the supplier doesn’t offer a Shopify integration with live inventory level monitoring, have you checked with them as to whether they have a private app? In my own drop shipping experience, I’ve come across suppliers that do not promote the integration but have private apps that can in fact integrate this data.
If you’ve already confirmed this with them, then you may be better off setting up manual capture of credit card payments. All credit card payment providers have an authorization process that checks that the credit card is valid and that there are sufficient funds in the account. The authorization period will end after a certain time, and payment will need to be captured during that time to receive the payout. With automatic capture, payment will be captured automatically after authorization. With manual capture, you can capture the payment after having confirmed stock with your supplier. Shopify Payments has an authorization period of 7 days, but if you’re using a third-party payment gateway, I recommend confirming the authorization period through their documentation or by contacting their support team.
Depending on how your fulfillment process is with this supplier, it may also help to add them as a custom fulfillment service. This will automatically send them an email of the order to begin fulfillment after you’ve marked the order as ‘Fulfilled’.
I hope this helps! Please let me know if there’s anything I can clarify.