Shipstation Integration

Subbly has an integration with ShipStation that makes handling shipping easier. This article explains how the integration works.

What is ShipStation?

ShipStation helps you generate shipping labels and connect with shipping carriers. You can use it to get shipping rates, choose a carrier, and manage fulfillment.

ShipStation can also connect your Subbly store with a third-party fulfillment center.

You can also use the Orders API to build a custom fulfillment workflow. Contact our support team if you need more information.

ShipStation charges a monthly fee based on shipment volume. See ShipStation's current pricing.

How does the integration work?

After you connect Subbly and ShipStation, the process works as follows:

ShipStation fetches Subbly orders when their status is Awaiting Delivery. The shipping date does not control whether an order is fetched. Orders in Future Shipment status are not fetched until their status changes to Awaiting Delivery.
Order slips show customer and product information, including applicable customizations.
When you are ready to ship, select the orders and generate shipping labels using your connected carriers.
After labels are generated, ShipStation notifies Subbly that the order has shipped.
Subbly marks the relevant order as Shipped.
Subbly emails the customer that the order is on its way and includes tracking information when available.

Important: An order can contain both items with an inventory SKU and items without one. External fulfillment integrations may include only the SKU-linked lines. Review the complete order slip in Subbly and manually account for every product line before shipping.

Survey preferences and upcoming orders

Two settings under Settings → Advanced control how survey preferences are used and updated:

Use survey answers from subscriptions instead of product controls the source used during renewal processing. When enabled, Subbly uses the answers stored on the subscription, including after a customer switches to a product with a different survey. When disabled, Subbly uses the preferences associated with the product.

Imagine that you've changed the subscription product customer is subscribed to from product A to product B. In order to retain the survey preferences that the customer had for the product A even after the switch, you'd want to keep the toggle above enabled so that the system continuos to send preferences associated with product A going forward, regardless of the fact customer is now subscribed to product B.

Update upcoming orders when subscription preferences change controls whether changed preferences are applied to upcoming orders that already exist. When enabled, the updated preferences are applied to those orders. When disabled, existing upcoming orders keep the preferences they had when created, and the updated preferences apply from the next renewal or order creation.

This toggle is useful in situations where you're dealing with a lot of Future Shipment orders for the customer. This toggle controls whether the survey preferences will be updated for the orders that have already been created for the customer or if the changes are going to take into effect only starting with the customer's next renewal.

These settings are especially relevant to prepaid or incoherent subscriptions. If an affected order has already been fetched into ShipStation, refresh the integration feed so the updated preferences can be retrieved.

Troubleshooting orders not fetching to Shipstation

if you're not seeing the orders in your Shipstation admin it might be due to one of the following reasons:

Make sure that Shipstation is properly connected

First of all, make sure that you've connected Shipstation properly to your Subbly account. You can see a detailed guide in the first part of this article.

You can test the connection from inside your Shipstation admin by clicking on the Test Connection button. If you have it set up correctly, you should be able to see Subbly added as a custom store.

Make sure that the shipping date has been reached

One important consideration is that Shipstation will only fetch orders from Subbly when the actual shipping date for the order has been reached.

Orders with future shipping dates will not appear in your Shipstation admin before the actual shipping date so please be patient.

Try to manually refresh the feed on Shipstation

If the shipping date for orders has been reached but the orders are still not appearing in your Shipstation admin it could be that Shipstation is struggling to process webhooks that are being sent from Subbly. If you want to expedite the process, you can try to manually refresh the order list on your Shipstation by clicking on the Update button at the top right corner of your Shipstation admin as presented in the image below.

FAQs

Do I need SKUs for all my products?

If none of your products has an inventory SKU, Subbly sends product information from the product setup. If some products have SKUs and others do not, an order can contain lines that are not represented in ShipStation. To avoid missed items, use clear SKUs consistently or review the full Subbly order slip before fulfillment. The order slip displays the SKU rather than the inventory item name, so use readable SKU values.

Are coupons sent to ShipStation?

Coupons are not added as separate order lines in ShipStation, but the order total should still reflect the correct amount.

Can I change shipping items in Subbly after they are sent to ShipStation?

You can change shipping items in Subbly after an order is marked as shipped, but those changes are not updated in ShipStation.