Order fulfilment, checkout to tracking emailA direct to consumer store shipping into three customs regions
30+ orders a weekand every one of them carried by hand.
- 3+Systems taking the same order details, per order
- 1+ hrEvery Monday morning, pasting tracking numbers one at a time
- 3Customs regions, EU, UK and US, each handled on its own terms
- Under 1 weekHow long the whole build took
The challenge.
Only one person ever saw the orders.
Every order email went to the owner's inbox and nowhere else, so he forwarded each one to the team by hand. There was no shared record and no order history. The people doing the work were operating blind.
Shipping ran on a weekly cycle held together by people. Through the week, the operations team registered each order with the postal carrier by hand. On Sunday night, someone compiled the full list of tracking numbers and emailed it to the owner. On Monday morning, the owner spent an hour or more pasting those numbers into the store, one at a time, because that was the only way the store would send a tracking email.
Which meant customers waited days to find out their parcel had gone.
Meanwhile the accounting connection dropped fields, so invoices were corrected by hand. Orders going to the EU, the UK and the US each need different customs paperwork, and that was manual too. Shipping documents lived wherever they happened to land.
Thirty or more orders a week, each one touching three systems and several people. Volume was not a growth problem for this business. It was a threat.
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Start with the free consultationWhat we built.
Four fixes, in the order that unblocks the next one.
First, the notifications. The reason only one person saw the orders was an email suppression issue, so it was diagnosed and repaired rather than routed around. The store now notifies the whole team at once, and the forwarding simply stopped existing.
Second, a central order database. Every order lands in it the moment it is placed, with customer details, order details, a region tag for EU, UK and US customs, current status and full history, and the whole team can see it.
Third, the shipping path joined end to end. Order data goes to the postal carrier through their API. The carrier issues the tracking number. The number comes straight back to the store. The store emails the customer immediately. And the operations team gets the shipping document already generated, ready to print.
Fourth, the accounting connection fixed properly, so invoices generate complete, carry the right customs documentation for the region, and arrive at finance organised instead of scattered.
Built on Make.com, wired across the store, the postal carrier and the accounting platform. In under a week.
The results.
The Monday morning hour is gone, and the Sunday night list with it.
Nobody forwards an order email. Nobody registers a shipment by hand. Nobody compiles a tracking list. Nobody pastes a number anywhere. Nobody corrects an invoice after the fact.
The error classes went with those steps. Tracking numbers missed. Invoices sent incomplete. Orders forwarded to the wrong person, or not at all. The copy paste slip that sends one customer another customer's parcel number.
The customer side changed most, and that is the part the business is judged on. Tracking used to arrive days after the parcel was registered, because it was waiting for a person to be at a laptop on a Monday. Now it goes the moment the carrier issues the number.
The first order to arrive after the system took over processed end to end, with nobody touching it.
And volume stopped being a threat. A busy week now costs the same human attention as a quiet one, which is none.
Tell us what yours looks like.
Bring us the part of your business that runs on someone remembering. We will tell you what it would take to build it out.