Integrations: getting orders in without retyping them

What retyping orders actually costs

Copying one order takes a minute or two: open the store notification, read the name, the phone number, the city and the item, then write them somewhere else. At thirty orders a day that is an hour of work producing nothing — an hour not spent calling a customer, settling a return or chasing a stuck parcel.

The second cost is sneakier. A phone number copied by hand is occasionally wrong: a transposed digit, a missing zero, a row misaligned in the spreadsheet. The lead looks perfect, the agent calls, nobody answers, and the order is marked unreachable while the customer was waiting for the parcel. The same thing happens with the address and the total: a mistyped total becomes an argument with the courier, then a refusal.

That is the point of an integration. It does not make the work faster as a matter of principle; it removes a source of errors that leaves no trace. A number handed over by the store is the number the customer typed himself. If it is wrong, it is wrong at source — and that, at least, can be fixed on the confirmation call.

The four ways an order can come in

The four routes are not ranked from worst to best: they answer different situations. The useful test is simple — where do your orders actually come from today, and is there anyone on your side who writes code.

Field mapping, the step that cannot be skipped

An order arriving from somewhere else has no reason to use the same field names as the platform. One store calls "full_name" what another calls "nom_client" and a spreadsheet calls "Client". Before it can become a lead, the order has to be read: each incoming field is matched once to the corresponding platform field, and that setting is then reused for every order after it.

The platform proposes the mapping by itself, comparing the incoming names against a list of known words in both French and English, and rejecting false friends — "Product name" must not become the customer's name, "Total quantity" must not become the total price. The proposal can be corrected with one click. Five fields have to be linked; the rest are optional.

• Customer name — Required. Without a name the agent does not know who is being called.
• Phone number — Required, and checked: anything that is not a valid Moroccan mobile number holds the lead back.
• Product SKU — Required. It is the only link between the item in your store and the product in the catalogue.
• Total charged to the customer — Required: it is the amount the courier has to collect.
• City and address — Optional at import, but a missing or unrecognised city will be settled during the confirmation call.

Duplicates, damaged leads and orders that arrive nowhere

Three incidents turn up for every seller who connects an order source. Knowing them in advance saves you from blaming the integration for losing a sale it has in fact set aside.

• The same order received twice — A store retrying a delivery, a safety re-read passing over an order already seen: the original order identifier is remembered, and a second pass creates nothing. A spreadsheet row is recognised by the content of its linked columns, with the same effect.
• Two orders from the same customer — Same phone number and same product a few hours apart: this is not one delivery received twice, it may be a genuine second order, or a customer who clicked twice. The lead is flagged as a probable duplicate and waits for a human decision rather than being deleted.
• The damaged lead — Unknown SKU, unrecognised city, incoherent total, invalid phone number: the order still comes in, into a separate list, with the exact reason. It is corrected and becomes an ordinary lead. This is the mechanism that guarantees an integration never makes an order vanish.
• The order left waiting — It exists, but the field mapping had not been saved yet. The connection screen says how many orders are waiting, and simply linking the columns releases them.

The verification order, to place on connection day

An integration that seems to work proves nothing until an order has travelled through it end to end. The check takes five minutes and is done once, on the day you connect.

1. Place a real order — From the store, the form or the sheet, using your own phone number and an address you know.
2. Look at the connection screen — It should show the last order received, with the time. If it shows nothing, the problem is upstream: the webhook address, the key, or the sharing settings of the sheet.
3. Open the lead — Check the four fields that cost money when they are wrong: the phone number, the city, the total to collect, and the right item.
4. Check the SKU — If the lead landed in damaged leads with an unknown SKU, your store reference is not the catalogue reference. A SKU is fixed in the store, not in the order.
5. Cancel the test lead — Then let the first real order through and repeat the same check on it: that is the one that counts.