Project - Drop Ship FTP Integration

The problem the client was having was that she had to spend around an hour every night to collect all the day’s order information, format it into a CSV and then send it over to her drop shipment company. Since she wasn’t familiar with SQL nor did she have a reasonable administration view to her data, she was collecting all of this information through emails. In the end, I was able to automate this process for her along with sending out an extra notification for her.

Now every night, the system runs a check to see if there are any new orders waiting to be sent over to the drop shipment company. If there are, it collects the order information, products, and shipping information and creates the CSV. The system will then upload that CSV to the drop shipment’s FTP server where they will take the file, parse it and import it into their own system so they can fulfill the order.

Later on in the day, the drop shipment company will collect the tracking numbers of all the orders they sent out that day. They will format it into a CSV and upload it to their FTP server. Then the client’s application will make a request to the drop shipment’s server requesting that file. The application will look through the file, updating the database with the tracking number for the order. Then it sends out an email to the customer letting them know that their order has shipped and provides them with the tracking number.

This is actually a simple integration that’s quite common with larger businesses. However, for small businesses it’s something that’s not added until it’s absolutely needed. And in this case, at the expense of an hour every night, it was absolutely needed.

If you’d like to do something similar or just want to know if it’s possible, please let me know. I’d love to help you improve your business!