Flexport (was Deliverr) Setup Guide

Flexport (was Deliverr) is a logistics platform for fulfilling orders. Pipe17 can sync Shipping Requests, Fulfillments, Products and Inventory with Flexport.

In this article

• Recommendations
• Basic setup
• Connector notes
• Troubleshooting

Recommendations

• You should already have a Pipe17 Plan so that you can add a new 3PL to your Pipe17 account. If you do not yet have a Pipe17 account, book a demo with a Pipe17 team member to get started.
• You should already have a Flexport account that you are able to login to. 
• This setup guide will instruct you how to send your orders from Pipe17 to Flexport, and sync your inventory from Flexport to Pipe17. Before following these steps, you should ensure you are ready to begin routing orders to Flexport. If you had a previous fulfillment service or other fulfillment processing occurring directly in your selling channel, make sure it is turned off otherwise you may be at risk of double-fulfilling orders.

Basic setup

New Pipe17 account

If you are setting up your Pipe17 account for the first time, you will be presented with the general onboarding wizard for your account after signing up.

Here, you can fill out the company information and click "Next" to proceed to the fulfillment channel selection screen, and find the Flexport integration. Click Connect. You can now proceed with the Basic configuration section of this guide.

Existing Pipe17 account

If you already have a Pipe17 account, add the Flexport integration by navigating to Integrations on the left-hand side of the portal. 

Click on "Add Integration" then find the Flexport connector and click on it, then click Connect. Follow the prompts on the setup dialog, clicking Next or Connect to proceed with each step.

Basic configuration

To complete your Flexport connection after adding the integration in Pipe17, do the following:

1. In Pipe17, go to Integrations > Flexport and copy the full apiKey you see here.
   
2. Log in to Flexport, and navigate to Integrations. Make sure the Pipe17 integration is added here, and paste the apiKey you copied into the corresponding field in Flexport.
3. Done!

The Flexport connector does not have additional settings, so once it is connected, inventory and orders will flow by default. To prevent Pipe17 from sending orders/shipping requests to Flexport, turn off the following setting:

• Send Shipping Requests to Flexport

Within a few minutes to an hour of enabling your Flexport connector in Pipe17, you should see the following:

• A location called "Flexport" will be created in Pipe17, under Inventory > Locations.
• Products that exist in Pipe17, if they do not exist in Flexport, will be synced over to the Flexport portal.
• Products that exist in Pipe17, if they do exist in Flexport, will now display a "Pipe17 Alias" on the Flexport product page.
• Inventory records will be created in the Inventory section of Pipe17, for SKUs that contain inventory in Flexport.

Connector notes

• The Flexport connector is different from most other Pipe17 connectors, in that it only supports a pull model. Even though entities like Orders and Products in Pipe17 seem to be "sent" from Pipe17 to Flexport, in fact they are periodically pulled from Pipe17 by the Flexport system:
  • Products are pulled by Flexport every 4 hours. 
  • Orders are pulled every 15-30 minutes.
• Flexport pulls all products from Pipe17. If you only need a subset of products to sync between Pipe17 and Flexport, avoid creating them in Pipe17 - you can use a product CSV upload in Pipe17 to create only the products you need synced to Deliverr.
• Shipping method mappings must be set up on the Flexport side, with the use of their Shipping Method Mapping functionality.
• Flexport's portal shows inventory by fulfillment center / location. But Flexport only pushes out total inventory to the Flexport integration, so Pipe17 will just show the aggregate inventory.

Fast Tags

To use Flexport Fast Tags with Pipe17, make sure of the following:

• The source order channel name (e.g. Shopify) and source order ID must be passed into Flexport. If you pull orders from another system (like NetSuite), you'll need to make sure the original source channel name exists somewhere on the order and is mapped to orderSource in Pipe17.
• You will also need to make two connections in Flexport - one to Pipe17 for Orders, Fulfillments, etc and another Flexport Fast Tag connection to the order source channel. The first is the connection you have set up with the help of this guide, and the second can be configured with the help of Flexport Support.

If you use multiple fulfillment services, you might need to make sure that all your Flexport Fast-Tagged orders get routed to Deliverr, regardless of your other usual routing rules. There are two recommended methods of doing this:

1. Route all fulfillable orders to Deliverr. This is the surest way to ensure all fast-tagged orders go to Deliverr as opposed to another fulfillment channel; or
2. Route based on shipping method. Since there are a limited number of shipping method names that Deliverr applies to fast-tagged orders, you can configure your Pipe17 Order Routing rules to check if one of these shipping methods is present on an order. If it is, route to Deliverr. Read more about configuring your routing rules in our Order Routing guide. 
   
   The eligible fast tag shipping methods from Deliverr are: Free NextDay Delivery, Free 2-Day Delivery, Free 3-Day Delivery, NextDay Delivery, 2-Day Delivery, 3-Day Delivery. Once configured, your order routing card would look like below. Make sure it is the first card in your Routing setup, so that it gets checked before anything else.
   
   And the "Contains Fast Tag Shipping Method" filter would be:
   
   

Troubleshooting