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How to Automate Your Order Process with Order Desk

As any business owner knows, receiving and fulfilling orders requires you to keep track of a lot of moving parts in your order workflow—it’s almost like herding cats! 

Not only do you have to handle the orders coming in through your shopping cart, but depending on which products you’re offering, you’re also communicating with your fulfillment center or print on demand provider to make sure the order details get passed along successfully. Thinking about adding even more layers to it, like mailing address verification? You can almost forget about it. 

Thankfully we all live in the future now, and you can rely on Order Desk to automate all of this for you, allowing you to focus on other aspects of your business or just giving you time to kick back and relax. 

So how does it work? 

One of the most important aspects of Order Desk is the variety of options you have. You can integrate with shopping carts, print-on-demand providers, fulfillment centers, and other services. 

Do you have a shop on BigCommerce and want certain orders going to Fulfillrite? The Order Desk app can tell the order where to go. It can even split the order if some of the items are fulfilled through different services. No need to worry about manually updating the shipment details either, as the order will automatically be updated in your store once it’s fulfilled. 

Selling phone cases on Shopify and using Printful as your printer? Order Desk can pull the order from Shopify with all the necessary print details. Then it can send them over to Printful. Once Printful fulfills the orders, the shipment details will automatically be sent into Shopify. 

There are over 200 integrations to choose from, along with options for communicating with services that aren’t integrated, such as via email, FTP, or CSV files. So even if Order Desk doesn’t have a direct integration with a service you’re using, the app is still capable of automating the lifecycle of your orders. 

But integrations are just part of the Order Desk magic, the app also features a very robust rule builder where you can control how the orders are automated. The essential structure of a rule works like this:

Event

This is what triggers the rule. For example, a commonly used trigger is “Order is Imported”, which means the rule will run whenever this occurs.

Filter

To add another layer of when you want the rule to run, the filter can establish certain conditions that the event has to meet before the rule can completely execute. For example, let’s say you want the rule to only target orders containing certain items. Alternatively, imagine you want to target only orders being sent to certain regions. The rule will ignore all your orders except for those that contain (or don’t contain) the qualifications that you specify. 

Action

You’ve established when and how you want to target your orders. Now you just need to tell the order what to do once it has been identified. There are a variety of actions to choose from. You can move orders into a different folder in Order Desk. Alternatively, you can add items to orders. In both cases, it can really help you out with general housekeeping and completing menial tasks.

The possibilities are endless

The Order Desk app exists to make your life easier. It gives you the ability to let your orders fulfill themselves and offers countless options to manage them with the rule builder. What’s more, with new integrations and features being added each month, you have so many ways to work smarter, not harder. 

If you’re in learning more or trying it out for yourself, head on over to orderdesk.com and start a free trial! 

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