Connect ShipStation for Shipping
When running a marketplace, it’s important to prioritize your buyer’s shipping experience. Trying to build shipping infrastructure from scratch alongside running a marketplace can be difficult.
Nautical Commerce’s integration with ShipStation lets you focus on running your marketplace while delivering a seamless shipping experience regardless of scale. With this integration, you can:
- View orders from your marketplace awaiting shipment.
- Assign orders to different teams within your marketplace.
- Schedule orders to go out as shipments on a particular date and time.
In this guide, you'll learn how to integrate ShipStation into your Nautical Commerce marketplace.
Requirements
To integrate ShipStation, you will need the following:
- A Nautical Commerce account: Nautical Commerce is a marketplace commerce platform that enables businesses to build and scale online marketplaces.
- A ShipStation account: ShipStation handles shipping and fulfillment on scale for small and large businesses.
- An operational marketplace with Nautical Commerce. You can learn more about setting this up via the Nautical Operator guide.
Setting up ShipStation in the Dashboard
Once your Nautical Commerce marketplace is set up, you can view integrated apps and plugins in the Dashboard. To view the list of apps accessible to you, navigate to Settings -> Apps -> App Marketplace. You should have a view similar to the following image:
The core setup of integrating apps and plugins into your marketplace is done by a Nautical Commerce representative.
Once ShipStation is integrated and appears in the App Marketplace section of the Dashboard, you can activate it via the following steps:
- In your Dashboard, navigate to Settings -> Apps -> App Marketplace.
- Select the ShipStation app and input the following information:
- Your private API key and secret with ShipStation. You can learn how to get these here.
- Your Nautical tenant type. This can either be Staging when you’re testing things out or Production when your marketplace is live.
- Your Nautical tenant ID. This is also a part of your marketplace’s dashboard URL - https://[tenantid].mpconsole.com (Production mode).
- Your Bearer Token. This is generated for every app or plugin integrated into your marketplace. You can create one by navigating to Settings -> Apps -> Custom Apps in your dashboard.
Your dashboard URL appears as https://[tenantid].mpconsole.dev when in Staging mode. Learn more about this here.
The video snippet below shows how you can generate a Bearer Token when integrating an app or plugin:
The Bearer Token displayed here is only for informative purposes. You should always keep your tokens private.
Once you have generated a bearer token, navigate to Settings -> Apps -> App Marketplace in the Dashboard. The following image shows how you should input the information needed to activate ShipStation:
The keys and tokens displayed here are only for informative purposes. You should always keep your tokens private.
Once you finish the configuration, the ShipStation app will be active in the Dashboard. The following image shows a custom integrated app that tracks orders made by customers in your Nautical Commerce marketplace and uploads these orders to your ShipStation account for shipping.
Viewing Orders in ShipStation
Once you’re done integrating ShipStation to your dashboard, you’re good to go. When a buyer visits your Storefront and places an order, the details of this order will be sent to your ShipStation account.
The following video shows a buyer placing an order on a Nautical Commerce storefront that has ShipStation integrated:
Once the order is placed, it will appear in your ShipStation account. The following image shows details of the order in ShipStation:
Summary
Shipping is a key piece of the marketplace ecosystem that must be gotten right. With the integration to ShipStation, you can handle this part of your marketplace operations seamlessly thus increasing seller trust in your marketplace. Should you have any questions, reach out to support@nauticalcommerce.com.