Streamline your operations with our new Customers and Shipments apps.

Once you click into a customer, you can see all of their key info such as:

• Order history, status, and relevant customer groups
• Any custom metadata attached to the customer object (like first and last names)
• The payment information in their wallet
• The addresses they’ve saved to their wallet
• A timeline of the customer’s actions as well as notes left by support agents

The Shipments App

Ensuring your customers get what they paid for is another pillar of ensuring a delightful customer experience. The last mile of ecommerce can often be the trickiest, no matter how automated or streamlined the entire fulfillment process is. This is why it’s crucial for operational teams to have the ability to manage the packaging and shipping process to keep the machine running.

The Shipments app can be found in the same Order Management section of the Apps Hub. Once you click into it, you’ll see four different sections that represent all pending shipments:

• Picking (the line items are being picked out in the stock location)
• Packing (the line items are being put into parcels)
• Ready to ship (the parcels are ready to be shipped out)
• On hold (self-explanatory)

The lifecycle of the shipment always starts at “Picking” and ends with it being “Shipped”. Let’s start by viewing an example shipment from the beginning.

Here, you can see all of the key shipment details such as the shipment status, the shipping method, picking list, ship-to and ship-from addresses, and a comprehensive timeline with room for agents to leave notes. Once the item is ready to be picked, you click on the “Start Picking” button to begin that process.

Once all of your line items have been picked out and they’re ready to be packed, you can move it onto the Packing phase by clicking “Start Packing”. Or if needed, you can put the shipment on hold if there are any issues.

In this phase, you select how you decide to package the items. This view pulls from the available Package objects that are assigned to the stock location. You can then select items from the picking list and assign them to a package. You also have the option to input the weight of the SKUs as you pack them.

Once all line items are in packages and they’re ready to be shipped out, you have the option to print out shipping labels for courier pick-up. Click on the "Purchase labels" button to select the shipping label you want to attach to your packages. Once you've selected the label, you can print it directly from the application.

After you've printed the label, click "Ready to ship" to mark the shipment as "shipped". After the courier picks up the packages and you can send out tracking information to your customer. You can even set up an automated flow using Commerce Layer webhooks to signal services such as Sendgrid to trigger email notifications to your customers (which you can read more about here)

If you'd like to see an example flow of our Shipments app, click the video below for a demonstration:

Fulfilling Amazing Customer Experiences

Making memorable experiences is what sets the great ecommerce businesses from the good ones. As we continue to build out our Dashboard, we want to continue providing merchants with intuitive and powerful tools to ensure they can continue delighting their customers. With our new Customers and Shipments applications, your teams are empowered to do just that.

We hope you enjoy our new Dashboard improvements and we’d love to hear what you think. If you’d like to join the conversation, join us on our Slack channel!