Etsy Order Import

At Foote and Flame, we had our website for accepting orders, but we also had a storefront on Etsy.

The extra sales channel was amazing - but it created more work: how do we manage orders from Etsy alongside our main website?

Enter the automation

This one was specific to Foote and Flame, but can be adapted to your business.

In our case, the website was the "source of truth" for all customer orders, but we still needed to update Etsy on shipping status.

So, we built the following:

• A "bookmarklet" that can run on Etsy, that can capture the order details from an order confirmation page.
• An input on the website that could accept this metadata, and populate an order from it, linking the Etsy order ID.
• Orders on the website that were from Etsy did not send emails directly to the customers - we instead used official Etsy messages to ensure auditability for Etsy and safety for our customers.
• Using the Etsy API, when the order was marked as shipped on the website, it automatically marked it as shipped on Etsy - giving an amazing experience to the customers - they didn't know their order was managed by our central system.

But automations like this are not set and forget!

Sometimes, the Etsy API would fail to mark the item as shipped. Sometimes this was a data issue (missing tracking number) or sometimes the API wasn't available.

Automations are all about what you do when something goes wrong:

• If the API was down, the system would try again every 10 minutes until it succeeded.
• Each failure sent us a notification so we could determine if it was an Etsy fault or something we had done wrong.