Having all their orders fulfilled correctly and delivered on time are some of the main concerns our sellers can have, but even though we do our best to make the process as “error-free” as possible, unexpected things can still happen along the way. We’ve created this article to help you recognize possible errors and the easiest way to solve them.
As a seller, the most common mistakes you should avoid are the following:
- Creating an order without Fuel products. An order that does not contain any products created with the Fuel app will be ignored and canceled by the system. Always make sure your order has at least one Fuel product before sending it to Fuel for fulfillment.
- Not selecting Fuel as the vendor of the order. Our system will automatically ignore these orders, which will result in the order not showing up in our system, even though you can see it in your Shopify orders.
- Not updating your payment information. If payment fails, a common cause of delays, new orders won’t move to production. You can reach out to PayPal or your bank institution to see if everything is fine with your account; our system will retry the payment every 24 hours. See how payments work here.
- Deleting a product from your product catalog once the order is in production. Deleting a product that is part of a processing Fuel order will result in an error. Without an existing product from the Fuel catalog, the order will remain on hold.
- Duplicating products. When duplicating a Fuel product through Shopify, the process will create a problem similar to the previous one. Fuel automatically assigns a unique ID for each item it creates. When using Shopify to duplicate the item, it will not have the unique Fuel ID. If you want to create a new product or edit an existing product, it’s best to follow this article’s steps.
- Pausing or closing your Shopify store if you have pending orders in Fuel. Suppose you decide to take a break from your Shopify store, pause it to make improvements, or close it. Suspending your store will also suspend payment processing, which will delay your orders.
- Invalid shipping addresses. This error is not easy to avoid since it depends on the buyer to enter their address correctly. Some orders with errors in the shipping address are put on hold until they are corrected; other times, they are shipped to the given address, which results in delivery issues. If you commonly experience this problem, you can check the address of US orders through UPS' Address Validator. International orders are a bit more complicated, but you can use Google Maps as a reference. If you need to update the shipping address of your orders, follow the steps in this article.
- Editing products in an existing order without checking if the order is already in production in Fuel. You must use the Fuel app to make any changes to your order. Before making any changes, the order must not be in production. If so, our system will ignore the changes. Click here for more information.
- Not setting your orders to process automatically. This can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, manual order processing allows you to review each order before sending it to production. You can verify that everything is correct. On the other hand, you can forget to process your order. In case you fail to process an order, our system will automatically cancel the order 45 days after its creation. Check this article for more information.
- Not checking on hold orders(with error messages). Any order with an error message will not be processed until you or a Fuel agent corrects the error. Our agents are always ready to help if an order has an error message and will do their best to fix the problem and process the order in no time. Click for more details about on-hold orders.
If you avoid the errors mentioned above, it will be much easier for your orders to be processed correctly and delivered as soon as possible to your customers.
The Fuel Support team is always ready and happy to help should you require assistance in any situation that arises. You can reach out to them at support@getfuelpod.com or through the chat box in our app.
