Test Your Connection

It's always a good idea to test out your Pipe17 setup with a single order before turning everything on. Use this guide to test out your connection.

In this article

• Overview
• Route a specific order
• Disable 3PL integration
• Ingest a specific order
• Test fulfillments using the Pipe17 Mock 3PL

Overview

You're ready to go! Now that you've configured most of your settings, we recommend testing out your setup with a single order. The best way to test your Pipe17 setup is to create a new test order in your selling channel, then run through each processing step for that order only:

1. Configure your connector to ingest only one specific order from your selling channel - any other orders will not even be pulled in by Pipe17.
2. Disable your 3PL integration to ensure no orders actually get sent to the 3PL.
3. Configure your Order Routing rules to only route one specific order in Pipe17 - any other orders will just sit in Pipe17 until you allow them to be routed.

To test quickly, you could proceed with any single one of the 3 steps above and you would still be able to prevent orders from sending to your fulfillment service until you review them.

Disable 3PL integration

To be extra certain that your test orders do not ship, you can prevent the shipping request that is generated by the Order Routing Engine from actually sending to your fulfillment channel. To do this, either head into Integrations and disable your 3PL integration using the toggle. 

Or if you want to test order routing based on Inventory availability then instead of disabling the entire integration, turn off pushing shipping requests (but remember to turn it back on when you are ready to go-live).

If you're ready to go ahead and test sending the order to the fulfillment channel, you can leave this enabled and follow the other testing recommendations below.

Pull only a specific order

To only ingest a single order from your selling channel, head into your integration settings and look for an "Order tag filter" or "Order ID filter" field. Use one of these fields to specify one order that Pipe17 is allowed to ingest. For example in the "Shopify" connector, you'll want to add a specific order tag to your "Tag Filter List", save the integrations settings, and then place that specific tag on the order you want to pull into Pipe17.

Now that your testing settings are enabled, you can watch your test order run through the Pipe17 system!

1. Within a few minutes of placing it in your selling channel, you should see the new order in the Orders page of your Pipe17 portal.
2. A few minutes after that, the order will route according to the routing rules you configured. The shipping request will generate in the order page, and you will be able to see exactly where the order will be sent:
   
3. Now, the shipping request is generated but might not be sent yet if your 3PL integration is disabled. At this point, if you need to make any adjustments to your order routing rules, you can do so and then cancel and re-generate the shipping request on the same order. If your 3PL integration is already enabled, you should see the shipping request become "Sent for fulfillment" within a few minutes, indicating it is in the 3PL system.

You're all set! At this point you should see the order in your fulfillment channel, where you can quickly cancel it (if you do not want to actually ship it) or allow it to ship so you can test that fulfillment data will flow as expected.

Route a specific order

You can also leverage your order routing filters to allow only one order to be sent for fulfillment. This means that even if other orders are pulled into Pipe17, they will not send for fulfillment if they don't match the order routing filter.

1. Navigate to Organization > Order routing 
2. Click on "Add/Edit Filter" in your order routing card
3. In the filter window that pops up, add a new rule
4. Select "External Order ID" as the order field for this rule, and "Equals" as the operator
5. Set the value to the order ID of your test order

You'll end up with a filter similar to the one below, where the "Value" is the ID of your test order:

Testing fulfillments

The best way to test fulfillments is to actually ship out your test order and wait for fulfillment information to be added to your fulfillment service. At that point, the tracking information should sync back into Pipe17 (you will see it added in the order shipping request) and then back to your selling channel, assuming you have that setting enabled.

If you're not able to actually ship out a test order, you can also test fulfillments by connecting to a "fake" 3PL instead of your actual fulfillment service. Pipe17 has developed the Mock 3PL connector for exactly this reason - to use it, follow the steps below.

1. Head into your Integrations page and click "Add integration" to add the Mock 3PL. 
2. Find and click on the "Pipe17 Mock 3PL" connector. Click "Connect" then "Connect" again to finish adding it.
3. The Mock 3PL connector will add two fake fulfillment locations to your account, and you can change your Order Routing rules to temporarily send your test order(s) there. Navigate to Organization > Order routing and set it to:
   - Order destination: blank
   - Fulfillment location: Pipe17Test-Seattle
   Then save.
4. Now, follow the steps in Ingest a specific order to pull a test order into Pipe17. The order should automatically create a shipping request to the Pipe17Test-Seattle location.
5. Release the shipping request, and wait for the Mock 3PL connector to fulfill it. This can take up to 5 minutes. 
6. When the order is fulfilled, you will see fulfillment & tracking information added to the shipping request in the order page. 
   
7. Within a few minutes, this information should sync back to your selling channel.

Test Inventory

You should check that your selling channel has the correct inventory. We recommend you do this in two steps:

1. Open the inventory page in Pipe17 and select a few SKUs using the search box. Compare the onhand quantities in Pipe17 to those in your fulfillment portal. If they do not match consider doing an on-demand pull of inventory or testing again the next day once we've pulled inventory again.
2. Open your selling channel and look at the inventory for the same SKUs and see if they match. You may need to look at one location at a time if your selling channel has this concept. If you see any differences such as zero inventory in your selling channel, check whether the selling channel location in Pipe17 has been properly merged into the appropriate fulfillment channel that really holds its inventory.

Next step: Go live! >