E-commerce — order-to-cash automation
DTC brand, 35 staff · E-commerce & retail
A growing DTC brand sold on Shopify, fulfilled from a third-party warehouse, and reconciled in Xero — but order status, inventory, and invoices were maintained by hand. Support staff used public ChatGPT for customer replies with no brand guardrails.
The problem
Orders duplicated between Shopify and warehouse spreadsheets. Finance re-keyed shipments into Xero every Tuesday. Customer service copied tracking numbers from three systems. Peak season meant overtime just to keep data aligned — and one wrong SKU mapping caused a week of refund chaos.
Constraints
- — Shopify and Xero stay — integrate, don't replace
- — Warehouse API rate limits — batch sync, not real-time flood
- — Customer-facing AI must have human approval before send
- — Live before Black Friday — eight-week hard deadline
Approach
Step 1
Order-to-cash map
Documented order → pick → ship → invoice → reconcile loop. Identified four manual handoffs with highest error rate and time cost.
Step 2
Integration build
Power Automate and Logic Apps flows — Shopify order webhook to warehouse, shipment confirmation to Xero invoice draft, inventory sync with exception alerting to Teams.
Step 3
Governed support AI
Azure OpenAI drafts customer replies from order context and brand tone guide — agent reviews and sends from helpdesk. No public AI; full audit log per interaction.
Step 4
Peak-season hardening
Load-tested sync volumes, documented replay procedures, and trained ops lead on monitoring dashboard before campaign launch.
Deliverables
- Shopify → warehouse → Xero integration — production
- Inventory sync with exception alerts
- Governed AI reply drafts in helpdesk workflow
- Ops monitoring dashboard and failure runbook
- Peak-season replay and escalation procedures
Results
- Reconciliation
- Finance re-keying eliminated — invoice drafts from shipment events
- Support time
- Estimated 10–12 hrs/week saved on status and tracking replies
- Peak season
- Zero order-sync incidents through Black Friday weekend
- Stack
- Power Automate · Logic Apps · Shopify · Xero · Azure OpenAI · Teams
“We stopped being the glue between Shopify, the warehouse, and Xero — and support finally sounds like us.”
Facing something similar?
Similar outcome: Job-to-Cash Integration Sprint — $5,500–$7,500 · 2 weeks.