The problem
The store sells its own products from one warehouse and a long tail of dropship items from two national distributors. Every dropship order was typed into a supplier portal by hand: find the item, pick the pack size, paste the address, wait for the confirmation email, then paste the tracking number back into Shopify. That works at a few orders a day. At thousands of orders a month it meant a queue that grew over weekends, a median of more than three days from order to shipment, and nobody knowing which orders were stuck where.
Two more wrinkles. The distributors sell the same item under different codes and pack sizes, and prices move, so the cheaper supplier changes line by line. And a supplier can reject a line after the order is placed, which a person then has to notice.
Role and constraints
Bart Grudka designed, built and ran the system as the store's Head of E-commerce, and operated it day to day. CANDEV applies the same approach for clients.
- Live store, no downtime, no change to the customer-facing checkout.
- Two supplier APIs with different authentication, item codes, units and error semantics.
- Orders can split across suppliers and across the store's own warehouse.
- Every failure needs a state a person can act on, not a log line.
- Everything ships behind switches, so each capability can be turned on, watched, and turned off without a deploy.