I need to add a fulfillment dropship company to my store and they need access to my orders and need to be able to complete the orders and ship them. Should I add them as an admin, or as a collaborator? I think I should add them as an admin with restrictions, but I’m not sure. Is this correct?
Thanks for the help.
Hi there @LorrisSmith
I understand that you would like to work with a fulfillment company for orders on your store and that they have expressed the need for store access - I’d be happy to help steer you in the right direction here.
Using a third party fulfillment service is a great way to reduce the time you spend on organizing things like shipping, or even if you’ have outgrown your current system to the point where you can’t ship items manually anymore as it is too time consuming.
Have the company in question given any indication that they are Shopify Partners? If they are, then they should be able to request collaborator access to your store right from their own partner dashboard. We have more information on this here that you can send to them.
If they are not a Shopify Partner and are a completely external company, then there are a couple of ways you could approach this:
You can utilize custom fulfillment services on Shopify, provided that they can process orders by email. How this works is you add the custom fulfillment service in the Shipping & Delivery section of your admin. After doing this, every time you mark an item or complete an order as fulfilled in your Shopify admin, the fulfillment service is automatically sent an email with all the order information so that they can fulfill it for you - this is the most straight forward and common way to use services such as this.
The other way would be to add the fulfillment service as a staff member on your store and only give them permission to view/edit orders. However, having to create a staff account for a fulfillment service wouldn’t be very common, as they usually always have some sort of integration such as the method explained above or a custom app you can install. Some permissions will allow them to see private store and customer data, so do take care when setting up the staff permissions.
We actually have tips for working with fulfillment services and forecasting orders here. This is especially important during times like holiday seasons. Have you heard of the Shopify Fulfillment Network? It might be worth looking into if your business sells in the US or Canada and meets the other eligibility criteria.