Introduction

Once you have your order routing finalized, you may want to check to see if your dropship or in-house items are being handled correctly by Onport. In this article, we'll show you how you can raise a test order in Shopify without incurring costs.

Import unpaid orders

By default, Onport only imports paid orders. This is so your dropship providers or in-house teams don't ship items not yet paid for. If needed, you can disable this within the order processing tab under the Integrations section:

If you are using a live store, you likely don't want to enable this setting. So, you'll need to create a paid order. To avoid paying for orders at checkout and incurring a charge on your credit card, you can instead create a draft order.

Creating a test order in Shopify

To create an order in Shopify, you need to do the following:

1. Navigate to Orders on your Shopify store, and click "Create Order"
2. You need to select a product and add a customer, including their billing address. This step is crucial as some dropship providers don't accept orders without the customer's name and address.

3. Create the order, and mark it as paid for Onport to import it (you don't actually need to make a payment, just tell Shopify it is paid). With Shopify draft orders, you don't need to enter any customer details.

Handling test orders with vendors

In the case that you want to test an order with an existing vendor in Onport, you can do so by placing an order with a dropship provider and seeing if it gets correctly routed to Onport. Do keep in mind that these tests will be reflected in the vendor’s store as real orders, and should therefore be canceled afterwards.

Here are some tips on testing orders with existing vendors:

• Notify your vendors that they will receive orders in their store that shouldn't be shipped.
• You can disable the notifications under dropship provider settings to avoid emails being sent to vendors. Do keep in mind that the orders will still appear in their portal.
• Once you are done, cancel the order. To do this, click into the order, select the line items and click the cancel button.

Syncing orders as "paid" to the vendor's store

Onport will mark the orders as unpaid when syncing the order into the store of the dropship provider. However, this may cause issues. For example, the vendors may need the orders to be marked as paid, for it to appear in their shipping app or for accounting purposes. 

You can change this at a vendor level under the "Orders" tab of the dropship provider settings:

❗️This is supported on a number of platforms, such as Shopify and WooCommerce vendors. If it does not show, then the feature is currently not available for that integration.