Quick Start: How Customizable is Order Desk Really?

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Overview

How customizable is Order Desk really? Well, in short, it's really, really customizable! With Order Desk, you have the tools to think up and create ways to manage your workflow and the movement of your orders through separate channels, to and from integrations, and to dropship orders to third party fulfillment services, among many other possible scenarios.

Once your integrations are set up, you've had time to manually move orders through Order Desk and you've found and tweaked any little areas that are causing errors, it's time to automate the process, customize your store and provide optional or additional details to your vendors and customers. This is where Order Desk becomes a powerful tool, taking over a lot of work that would otherwise be tedious and prone to human error.

Let's look at some common areas of Order Desk where customization can be useful.

Using Custom Code in Order Desk

It helps to know some HTML/CSS while working in certain areas of the Order Desk app, but knowing code is not necessary for successfully setting up an account to run smoothly and automatically. The code comes in when you want to personalize your customizations - add your logo to an email template, completely customize the layout of the email or receipt template that is sent out to customers or vendors, or change the color scheme or permissions on an Order Desk store, to name a few examples.

For more information on coding in Order Desk, see these guides:

How to Work with Email Templates - If you will be using email templates in Order Desk, this guide goes over how to create them and gives some code examples for customizing your templates.

How to Build Custom Templates - Customizing email templates that you send to vendors or customers requires some knowledge of code. Order Desk uses a template language called Twig. See this guide for links to more information.

Order Desk Field Names Reference Guide - When building your custom templates, you may want to pull in information from your orders that aren't in any of our sample templates. Use this reference guide to find the internal field names and structure of the most important data in the orders. If you need the name of something you don't see in this guide, contact Order Desk Support.

Sample Email Templates - Examples of a few email templates that can be used. No code knowledge or customizations are necessary if using the sample templates, however feel free to edit them to create a custom template for your store.

Adding a Packing Slip/Receipt to a Dropship Template - If you want to add a link for the receipt template into the sample dropship template.

How to Split and Dropship Orders for Separate Vendors - For a detailed walkthrough on how to create a dropship email template, read this guide. This is good for anyone who isn't comfortable with code but still wants to work with the email templates.

The Order Desk Rule Builder

The Rule Builder in Order Desk is necessary for automating a lot of the movement and fulfillment of orders, among other available actions. If your particular integration settings don't move orders between folders, you may need to set up a rule to do this. The Rule Builder does more than just move orders, however. It is the foundation of what makes Order Desk unique and customizable. If you need to add data to an order, add a date or timestamp, flag the order for fraud risk, or create a PDF of the order details, set a shipping method, you can do all of this and more with the Rule Builder.

A rule in Order Desk is an action that takes place on an order for a specific event based on specific filters. With the number of events, filters and actions the Rule Builder has, the different possibilities are endless. You may want to create a rule that tags any order that is imported as red if the shipping address is to a specific country. That rule would look something like this:

Event: Order is Imported
Filter: If Shipping Country equals FR
Action: Tag Order Red

Or perhaps you want to automatically submit all orders for a specific third party vendor not integrated with Order Desk. That rule might look like this:

Event: When Order is Imported
Filter: If Item Metadata Location equals Vendor X
Action: Send Vendor X Dropship Email to Vendor

You can add more than one filter or action to a rule as well. For instance with the last example, you could also add an Action to move the order after the dropship email is sent.

Event: When Order is Imported
Filter: If Item Metadata Location equals Vendor X
Action: Send Vendor X Dropship Email to Vendor
Action: Move Order to "At Vendor X Folder"

Or how about:

Event: When Order is Imported
Filter: If Order Source equals Etsy
AND Filter: If Shipping Country equals FR
Action: Tag Order Red
Action: Submit Order to ABC Integration
Action: Move Order to At ABC Folder

There are many actions that can be taken on orders with a rule. Some of these are Change Folder, Delete Order, Split Order, and Create a PDF. There are also specific actions available that show up depending on which integrations you have enabled. 

For a complete list of events and actions available in your Rule Builder, navigate to the Rule Builder page from the left sidebar:

Choose the Rule Type—if you want the rule to take action on an entire order or on certain items within an order—and in the Event tab, you can see what events are available:

In the Filters & Actions tab, you will see what actions are available:

For a detailed walkthrough of creating and using rules, read the How to Work with Rules guide.

For more information on working with the Rule Builder, see these guides:

How to Work with Rules - Everything you need to know about creating and working with rules.

Rules Reference: Events, Filters and Actions - References and explains all of the events, filters and actions in the Rule Builder.

How to Split and Dropship Orders for Separate Vendors - Create a rule that sends a dropship email to a third party vendor.

How to Send Shipment/Tracking Info to Customers - Create a rule that sends a shipment notification email to customers when tracking info is added to an order.

How to Work with Timestamps - Create rules that run based on a timestamp on the order.

How to Use Custom Events - Use the Rule Builder to create custom events that will scan the orders in a specific folder on a schedule.

How to Use Custom Buttons - Run rules on orders at the click of a button.