Past a certain daily order volume, passing orders to your fulfillment provider by hand stops being a small chore and becomes a steady source of errors: a missed order, a mistyped address, a stock level in your store that no longer matches what is physically in the warehouse. Integration solves this by letting the store and the warehouse talk to each other directly.
This guide covers how integration works in practice, what changes in your day afterwards, and what to get right before switching it on.
What integration actually does
It is not one switch — it is four information channels running in both directions:
- Orders (store → warehouse): a completed order in Salla or Zid moves into the warehouse system and enters the picking queue with no manual entry.
- Stock (warehouse → store): every unit picked or received updates the quantity shown in your store, so you do not sell what you do not have.
- Status and tracking (warehouse → store): when the parcel ships, the waybill number flows back onto the order and the customer is notified automatically.
- Returns: logging the returned order and restoring good units to sellable stock.
The practical result: you stop being the link between your store and your warehouse, and your job becomes watching exceptions.
From setup to go-live
Step 1: Clean the product catalogue
This is the step everyone skips and the one that causes most later problems. Before connecting, make sure every product and every variant (size, colour) has a unique, stable SKU. Integration matches on SKU, not on name. Duplicate SKUs, missing SKUs, or SKUs containing stray spaces and symbols all produce stock errors that are painful to trace after go-live.
Step 2: Connect the two systems
On Salla and Zid this is normally an app or an API key you grant to the fulfillment provider with defined permissions: read orders, update their status, adjust stock. No developer is needed in the standard case. Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento follow the same logic with a different authorisation flow.
Step 3: Map the products
Once connected, your store products are matched to the items registered in the warehouse. Review this list yourself: an unmapped product will either show as unavailable or cause the wrong item to be picked. Time spent here is far cheaper than correcting it later.
Step 4: Set the opening stock
Your goods arrive, are counted, inspected, and put away, and the opening balance is fixed. Treat that balance as the source of truth from then on, and avoid editing stock manually in the store afterwards — manual edits post-integration are the single biggest cause of balances drifting apart.
Step 5: Test with real orders
Before cutting over fully, push a limited set of real orders through the whole path: a simple order, a multi-item order, a cash-on-delivery order, and one cancelled after creation. What matters is not that the easy order works, but that the system behaves correctly in the non-standard cases.
Step 6: Go live and monitor
For the first two weeks watch three numbers daily: orders received by the warehouse versus orders in your store, orders stuck in the picking queue, and any SKU where store stock and warehouse stock disagree. A gap caught early takes minutes to fix; one found a month later takes a full stock count.
Common mistakes after go-live
Overselling through unconnected channels. If you also sell via Instagram or a physical showroom, those orders never touch the store and never decrement stock. Agree on how to record them, or ring-fence stock for them.
Renaming or re-coding products after go-live. Changing the SKU of a mapped product breaks the match. If you must, coordinate the change with the warehouse before making it.
Bundles and promotions. A "buy 2 get 3" offer needs a clear definition: is it its own SKU with its own stock, or a composite that decrements components? Settle this before launching the offer, not after.
Assuming everything is real-time. Some channels sync on an interval rather than instantly. Ask what the refresh cadence is per channel so you know what to expect at peak.
What stays manual
Integration does not remove every human decision, and nobody should tell you otherwise. You will still make calls on suspicious or duplicate orders, orders with incomplete addresses, edits after an order is placed, and partial returns. The difference is that these become exceptions handled in tens, not daily tasks handled in hundreds.
How long does it take?
Timing depends on catalogue readiness far more than on technology. A store with a clean catalogue and disciplined SKUs can be connected and tested within days. A store with hundreds of products and no consistent coding may need longer in cleanup and mapping before integration can even start. That cleanup is not a delay — it is what makes the integration quiet afterwards.
Once integration is stable, the next step is usually tightening inventory policy itself — see our inventory management guide.
Connect your store and automate fulfillment
We integrate with Salla, Zid, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento: orders reach the warehouse automatically, and stock and tracking flow back to your store.
See our integrations