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Start Here: Download the guide

Your Guide to Integrating

This guide covers all you need to know about how to get the best experience when connecting your store to another Sales Channel via IDA Connect .


Be sure to read it through and act where needed.

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Getting Started - Basics

IDA Connect is an app that forms a ‘bridge’ between your marketplace (eg. The Iconic Seller Centre) and your Shopify to automate the sync of inventory levels, new orders and fulfilment statuses.

No!

We have built IDA Connect to make it easy for you. You do not need a developer. There is a simple 4 step setup that will allow you to create an IDA Connect account, connect your Shopify and Seller Centre stores and start the integration.

Click here to download our integration guide .  It contains step by step instructions on how to get started.

The setup process is simple takes about 5 minutes.

The integration guide includes details on each of the options available for the integration and will help you get set up.

IDA Connect is built for self-serve but we are here to help if you get stuck.

We have 3 plans, Start, Grow and Scale.

Start Plan

  • Best value if you are just starting out or if you have low order volumes
  • Costs $1 per order processed by IDA Connect (plus GST)
  • No connection fees
  • No other ongoing fees
  • Billed per month based on the number of orders processed in the previous month
  • The sync processes run every 60 mins
  • Completely risk-free; if you sell nothing, you pay nothing!
  • No lock-in contract, leave any time.

 

Grow Plan

  • Best value for moderate order volumes or lower order values
  • Costs 1% of total order value processed by IDA Connect
  • Billed per month with a minimum of $79 (plus GST)
  • Sync runs every 30 mins
  • No lock-in contract, leave any time.

 

Scale Plan

  • Best value for high volumes
  • Connect multiple brands and Shopify stores
  • Costs 1% of total order value processed by IDA Connect per month
  • Billed per month with a minimum of $199 (plus GST)
  • Sync runs every 5 mins
  • No lock-in contract, leave any time.

 

 

When you start a free trial, you will begin on the Scale Plan for the trial period.  Your account switches automatically to the Start plan after the trial period.

You can change plans at any time; just go to the billing section in your IDA Connect dashboard.

Getting Started

A Shopify store.

An account at one of our connected marketplaces, such as The Iconic or Hard to Find.

An email address. 

That’s it!

You don’t even need to add your credit card to get started, you can add it later if you want.

Note that IDA Connect is not a mobile app, you will need a laptop to view your dashboard easily.

Simply follow the steps in our integration guide  to start your free trial.

  • At the end of your trial period, we will start counting your orders. This is your start date.

    Each month, on the anniversary of your start date, your credit card will be charged automatically.

    If you haven’t added a credit card during your trial period, we will remind you.

  • Each month, on the anniversary of your start date, your credit card will be charged automatically.

    The account owner receives an email with a link to the invoice/receipt each month.  Other email addresses can be added for receipt of invoices.

    You can also find your invoices inside the billing page on the app dashboard.

If you have just started at a business that has IDA Connect, or just purchased a business that is running IDA Connect it’s super easy to get started.

You might want to update your billing details or reset the account password, but should not need to do anything else.

To get started, log into IDA connect and have a look around. You can do so by going to https://app.idaconnect.com/login.

Note that if you are changing products, be sure to read our handy integration guide, to make sure your SKUs remain properly matched between your Shopify store and your marketplace.

The integration guide explains how IDA Connect works and what to expect.

  • Yes!

    If you want to connect 2 or more Shopify stores, our Scale plan is what you need. Talk to our support team to get started.  You will get a separate IDA Connect account for each brand but just one billing account.

At the moment we only connect to The Iconic and Hard To Find. Coming soon: Catch Of The Day.

IDA Connect is designed to help businesses keep track of inventory in more than one place.  If you don’t keep track of your quantity of stock in Shopify, then you probably don’t need IDA Connect.

After you have finished the setup steps in the Integration Guide, orders will start being created in your Shopify store as soon as they arrive in The Iconic.

Please allow at least 2 hours for your products to be matched and your inventory levels to be synced the first time.  After the first time, your sync will run every 5, 30 or 60 minutes, depending on your IDA Connect plan.  

You should do a daily check of orders just to make sure everything is running smoothly.

And that’s it, there is nothing more to do! 

The best way to test the integration is to wait for an order to be placed in the marketplace.  Then check that it is created in your Shopify store (being aware of your sync cycle, which is either 5, 30 or 60 minutes, depending on your plan). 

After you have marked the order as fulfilled in Shopify, and following your next sync cycle, check the fulfilment status in your marketplace. 

Your IDA Connect dashboard shows you when your next sync is due to run.

That’s it!

For more complex test cases, it is possible to connect IDA connect to your PreProd (testing) environment and then swap between live and test environments for testing purposes.  Note that each time you swap between the live and test environment, you will need to do a product reset. This simply refreshes the internal product information in IDA Connect. You can reset products by clicking on the Reset Products button on the IDA Connect dashboard.

IDA Connect does not work with Shopify Sales Channels.

Some sellers use a second password protected (private) Shopify store purely for their The Iconic sales to make things like reporting and inventory easier. You can simply add the Shopify connector in IDA Connect to your password-protected store. The password will not cause any issues as the process is connected to the Shopify admin and not the store-front.

Yes, many of our sellers use a password protected (private) Shopify store purely for their The Iconic sales to make things like reporting and inventory easier. You can simply add the Shopify connector in IDA Connect to your password-protected store. The password will not cause any issues as the process is connected to the Shopify admin and not the store

Hi Jenny,

Thank you for that.

I’d like to provide some feedback that both times I have reached out to IDA Connect for help recently, the response has been extremely prompt and the issue rectified the same day. Much appreciated 🙂

Regards,

Director

Fashion brand, Myaree, WA 6960

General

Each sync cycle, IDA Connect checks and aligns information between your Shopify store and your connected sales channels (eg. The Iconic)

 

Information that is checked and synced:

        Stock levels

        Orders

        Optional extras, if you have configured them

 

1)     Stock level sync

 

Every sync cycle, IDA Connect checks each matched SKU in turn.  It compares the master stock levels in your Shopify store with the stock levels in your connected sales channel (such as The Iconic).

 

A matched SKU is a product variant that has exactly the same SKU in your Shopify store and your sales channel.  If the SKUs are not identical, the stock levels cannot be synced.

 

 

2)     Order sync

 

Every sync cycle, IDA Connect checks for new orders on your connected sales channels (eg. The Iconic).  If it finds a new order, it sends the order to your Shopify store.

 

After the order has been fulfilled in your Shopify store, IDA Connect pushes the details of the fulfilled order back to your sales channel. This includes information such as the name/ID of the carrier and the carrier tracking code.

 

3)     Optional other actions during sync process

 

 

Some account owners have configured IDA Connect to do more during a sync.  Examples include adding an extra line item to an order to identify the sales channel, or setting a shipping method based on which country the product was purchased in. These are optional configurations, available on all plans, check the integration guide. 

Your sync cycle depends on your IDA Connect billing plan.  To check which plan you are on, find the user menu at the top right of your IDA Connect Dashboard and click on ‘Billing’.

 

·        Starter Plan: Every 60 minutes

·        Grow Plan: Every 30 minutes

·        Scale Plan: Every 5 minutes

Get Your SKUs aligned

When it comes to integrating, you need a way to match items on any system you want to connect. You are in luck because any system you want to connect through, IDA already has a way for you to do this.

 

The Stock Keeping Unit or the SKU is used for this purpose. This single identifier has been used by companies globally for a long time to identify every single variation of the item available. Nearly all modern systems will use the SKU as a way of identifying each unique variation. This SKU is then used to match items across each system and is why it’s a critical piece to get right.

 

To make sure you get a quick and easy integration, you should make sure that each of your variants have a unique SKU. You can use the Unmatched screen in the IDA Dashboard to make sure you have matched all items.

 

Some issues we see with matching SKUs include having spaces in the SKU or using an underscore instead of a dash or vice versa. The SKU needs to be identical to be automatically matched. If you are having problems getting your SKUs aligned, it might be worth using an app like Microsoft Excel to analyze your products and SKUs. You can export your lists from your systems and plug them into Excel to see what is happening.

It’s sometimes worth trying to open your exported file in a plain text editor as well like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on a Mac. This helps identify when there are extra characters in your SKU.

Disable Old/Unused Products

With IDA, you will only sync those items that match and those that are active. This helps maintain near real-time sync to allow you to sell using one stock pool. If you have a large number of historical products or you maintain a seasonal catalogue, we suggest you deactivate any products not selling instead of relying on a zero stock count to make the product unavailable. The best thing is to go through your sales channels and make sure you deactivate any products that are not selling now.
 
We only sync stock levels for matched products so if you have 2000 products in your manager system and only 100 active on your Sales channel, we will only sync the 100 products, so this will keep things moving fast and reduce the risk of delayed stock level updates.
 

Have A Manual Process

Due to the nature of integrated systems, we cannot guarantee 100% delivery of orders or stock level updates. Because we don’t manage the systems we connect, and we have no control of the Internet, which is how we talk to each of the system, we don’t have enough control to make sure the sync is completed error free. In the cases where syncs could not be completed, you will receive a notification letting you know and, in some cases, you may need to complete a process manually. Having a manual process to ship an or-der or update stock levels will help in this situation.
 
We do run the sync regularly as well as use real-time notifications where systems allow for this to make sure we get the sync completed as error free as possible. And the regular sync means that for issues like time-outs, the process will normally run on the next scheduled event.

In any case, it would be very beneficial for you to have a manual pro-cess in place for times when things out of our control stop us from automating the process for you.

How and When to Do a Product Reset

What is a product reset?

When you click the product reset button, IDA Connect runs a process to re-match your products. 

In this process, IDA Connect goes through every product in your store and attempts to match these with your listings on The Iconic Seller Center.  The matching process relies on the SKU codes being exactly the same in Shopify and The Iconic. 

Orders and inventory updates are put on hold during a product reset.  The process can take up to one hour.  When the reset is complete you receive a notification by email.  

How to do a product reset

To perform a reset, simply press the product reset button towards the bottom of your IDA Connect dashboard. 

After a product reset, do the following:

– check the Unmatched SKU list which you can find to the left of the Product Reset button.  This list contains all the SKUs that are currently active on Seller Center but could not be matched to your Shopify store by IDA Connect.  Ideally there will be no unmatched SKUs on your list.

– If you have unmatched SKUs after running the product reset, you will need to check the product information for those products.  Most of the time, an unmatched product will have slightly different SKU codes in The Iconic and Shopify.  Check for spaces, underscores or other minor differences. If the SKUs are identical, consult our help article ‘Other Matching Errors’ for less common problems in product matching and resets.

When to do a product reset

You should perform a product reset…

1) If you are experiencing problems and a product reset is indicated in the IDA Connect Troubleshooting Checklist.

2) If you have been advised by the IDA Connect help team to perform a product reset.

3) If you have made changes to your product listings that include SKU updates.  

Please note: it is best practice to not change SKUs in Shopify.  It is better to archive the old product, duplicate it and create a new product listing with a new, unique SKU in Shopify.  However, if changing SKUs is absolutely unavoidable, you can use the Product Reset function to make sure everything is lined up correctly after your changes.

4) Some stores will need to run regular product resets.  If this affects you, you will be advised by the IDA Connect help team. 

Troubleshooting

If you run into problems, go through this checklist:

  • Are your product SKU codes unique (no duplicates) and properly matched? Check that SKUs haven’t been changed in one place but not the other (this will cause errors).
  • Run a product reset by clicking the button near the bottom of your IDA Connect dashboard.  This will attempt to re-match products between your Shopify store and The Iconic. Note that a product reset can take up to one hour and will temporarily pause all other IDA Connect processes. 
  • Have you checked when your sync cycle will run?  The sync is not instantaneous.  
  • Are you, your staff or your 3PL changing orders in Shopify AFTER it has been received from the sales channel (this will cause errors).
  • Have there been any changes to the affected order in your sales channel after IDA Connect has sent it to Shopify?
  • Is the carrier information properly matched (are the carrier codes correct in both channels?).  Note that Shopify and The Iconic use different codes for the same carrier. 
  • Have you checked there are no spaces or other dis-allowed characters in tracking numbers?
  • Is the email address on your IDA Connect account correct?
  • Check that any products you have deleted from Shopify have also been removed from Seller Center.
  • Order value discrepancies? Check section 3.7 of the User Guide

Other errors:

Accidentally creating 2 IDA Connect accounts that integrate the same stores (this causes duplicate orders to be created).

Unusual matching errors. Matching errors are usually caused by differences in SKU codes. However, occasionally matching errors can be caused by an independent Shopify app making changes to Shopify product IDs. This can affect order creation and inventory level updates. If you have checked your SKUs and run a product reset and you are still getting problems, contact support desk so we can investigate.

 See also: Oversells, Fulfilment Errors, Negative Stock Levels and Product Resets. 

An oversell occurs when a product is sold on a sales channel, but you have no stock available.

 

Oversells can happen for a number of reasons:

        The product has been purchased at the same time on two different sales channels. 

        The sales channel (eg. The Iconic) has instigated a manual payment review on an order.  When this happens the order goes through hours or days later and in the mean time you have sold out.

        Duplicate SKUs in your Shopify store

 

What to do:

1)     If the product has been purchased at the same time on two different sales channels. 

There is a time lag between a sale being made and the stock level being updated by IDA Connect.  The time depends on your IDA Connect sync cycle.  IDA Connect Starter Plan accounts sync every 60 mintues.  Scale Plan accounts sync every 5 minutes.

 

If too many products have been sold before the sync cycle has run, then you might get an oversell.

To find out if this has happened, check the inventory history for the SKU (variant) in your Shopify store.  You will be able to check the time that the stock level went to zero. 

If the stock level went to zero after the IDA Connect sync, then two products were sold at (approximately) the same time.

In this case, it is best to cancel one of the customer orders.

You can prevent this from happening by setting reserve stock levels.  To do this, go to your sales channel connector settings page on the IDA Connect Dashboard.  The reserve stock level is a number subtracted from the master stock level to reduce the risk of oversells.

If the stock level went to zero before the order was synced then you should log the oversell with us.  We can check our logs to see if the sales channel sold the product despite its stock level being zero (see reason (2)).

 

2)     The sales channel has instigated a manual payment review on an order

Sometimes, a sales channel will delay an order.  This can happen if they place an order on hold to do a manual payment review or for other reasons.  When this happens, the order goes through hours or days later and in the meantime you have sold out. 

 

3)     Duplicate SKUs or ‘recycled’ products listings in your Shopify store

If you have the same SKU attached to more than one product variant in your Shopify store, this can cause problems.  Duplicate SKUs cause inventory levels for the affected product variants to flip flop between different numbers each sync cycle.  “Recycled” product listings, where you use an old product listing for a new product, can cause problems if you don’t make the same changes in your sales channel. 

 

If you think this is happening, check for duplicate SKUs in your Shopify store. 

If your sales channel runs into a problem with fulfilment, it sends an error message to IDA Connect.  You will receive an email from IDA connect, titled ‘Fulfilment Error’.

Common fulfilment errors:

        the sales channel does not recognise the carrier or

        the tracking ID has been used before.

What causes this problem?

A common cause of fulfilment update errors is changing carriers or setting up a new carrier.  Shopify and the sales channel have different internal codes for the same carriers, which can sometimes create problems.

How to fix fulfillment update problems

1)     Within your sales channel dashboard (eg. The Iconic Seller Centre) find the order and update the tracking details manually.

2)     Review your carrier’s configuration instructions for the sales channel to check that the carrier is set up properly in your sales channel.

3)     In your sales channel (eg. The Iconic Seller Centre) make sure the carrier is set as ‘active’ and ‘available’. 

 

If you change your carrier, IDA Connect cannot always automatically match the identity of the carrier between your Shopify store and your connected sales channel(s). This might happen with less well-known carrier or a new carrier.  In this case, you can use the Carrier Matching feature in The Iconic Settings to match the carrier yourself. 

The Iconic Seller Centre reserves stock for pending orders.

This means that when IDA connect syncs a product’s stock level to zero, The Iconic immediately and automatically adjusts it to a negative value until the order is fulfilled.

You can safely ignore these negative numbers. You can also check that the item’s stock level returns to ‘0 available’ after you have fulfilled the order.

More details

Let’s take a look at Item 1 that has a stock level of 1 and see how it progresses through the order lifecycle.

ActionIconic StockShopify Stock
Last inventory syncQuantity: 1
Available: 1
1
Order for 1 Item1Quantity: 1
Available: 0
1
Order created in ShopifyQuantity: 1
Available: 0
0
Stock level sync to Iconic of 0 quantity
1 item still reserved due to pending order
Quantity: 0
Available: -1
0
Order mark as sent in Seller centerQuantity: 0
Available: 0
0

Hope this helps clarify why you see negative stock levels in Seller Center. It is a symptom of the combination of having your stock levels in sync and The Iconic wishing to reserve stock for pending orders.

 

Toggle ContentThere can sometimes be an issue in The Iconic seller centre software that causes some orders to get stuck in ‘pending’ status in The Iconic seller centre.

So far this has affected approximately 3% of our customers, and less than 1% of orders.

Here’s what you need to do:

  1. Keep doing your daily check of The Iconic seller centre (as per our integration guide)
  2. Keep an eye out for notification emails* from help@idaconnect.com. We are checking for the problem and will notify you if you are affected.
  3. If one of your orders gets stuck, or if you get a notification from us, follow steps 4 – 5.
  4. For the affected order, you must manage that order manually. For example, you may need to manually fulfill the order in your Shopify store and update the inventory/stock levels or you may need to coordinate with your other automations and integrations such as 3PL providers. IDA Connect cannot fulfill or sync orders that have been affected by this issue.
  5. Contact The Iconic Seller Centre help desk to log the issue for each affected order. The Iconic technical support personnel are aware of the issue. They can investigate your affected order and remove any late penalty notice associated with that order.

What happens next?

If you don’t manually mange any affected order, The Iconic purchasers may not receive everything they purchased. You may get a late fulfillment penalty from The Iconic. Your stock levels (inventory) in Shopify and/or The Iconic may be inaccurate.

More details about the problem

The issue in The Iconic Seller Centre software is causing a small proportion of orders with multiple line items to be created in two stages. The order is first created with just one item. It is then sent to IDA Connect. Some time later The Iconic edits the order and adds the remaining items. At this point, the order has more items than when it was processed by IDA Connect.  

IDA Connect sees and processes the order as soon as its available in Seller Centre. When line items are added later, these changes cannot be processed by IDA Connect.

How we are helping

IDA Connect notifies you by email if any of your orders have been edited in this way by The Iconic. We have also been in touch with the senior developer at The Iconic who is aware of the problem and is working to fix it.

IDA Connect checks the number of items in all of your pending orders every sync cycle (every 5 minutes for Scale Plan customers, every 30 minutes for Grow Plan customers and every 60 minutes for Starter Plan customers). If IDA Connect finds any pending orders that have been affected by this problem, it notifies you by email. The email is titled “Order Items has changed for Order number: 23456789. Please process manually”. The email tells you which order has been affected, so you can take the details to The Iconic Seller Centre Help Desk.

IDA Connect does not do any further processing of orders that have been affected, as this could cause you more problems with stock levels and fulfillment.

The notification emails have the subject line: “Order Items has changed for Order number: 123456789. Please process manually”

For newly set up accounts and new products, the “Product Sync” job needs to run to match product names/SKUs between the two systems. This job is fixed to run at a set time each hour.  For new products or new accounts please allow 2 hours for the new products to be fully synced.  

The product sync job is separate to the normal inventory/order sync cycle, as we have customers with tens of thousands of products that we need to check. After the product sync job is complete, your new products will be matched and on the next inventory sync cycle, the inventory will be updated.

If your orders are not being processed after first setting up,

  • Check that you have matched the SKUs properly (refer to the integration guide for SKU matching)
  • Check that there is enough inventory available in Shopify.

Orders will be ignored by IDA Connect if there is not enough inventory in Shopify or if the products are not linked/matched between Shopify and your marketplace.

Ready to end the frustration of copying orders and stock levels into multiple channels?  Talk to us and see how you can spend less time on admin, and more time selling.

Setup

When it comes to integrating, you need a way to match items on any system you want to connect. You are in luck because any system you want to connect through, IDA already has a way for you to do this.

 

The Stock Keeping Unit or the SKU is used for this purpose. This single identifier has been used by companies globally for a long time to identify every single variation of the item available. Nearly all modern systems will use the SKU as a way of identifying each unique variation. This SKU is then used to match items across each system and is why it’s a critical piece to get right.

 

To make sure you get a quick and easy integration, you should make sure that each of your variants has a unique SKU. You can use the Unmatched screen in the IDA Dashboard to make sure you have matched all items. Some issues we see with matching SKUs include having spaces in the SKU or using an underscore instead of a dash or vice versa. The SKU needs to be identical to be automatically matched.
 
If you are having problems getting your SKUs aligned, it might be worth using an app like Microsoft Excel to analyze your products and SKUs. You can export your lists from your systems and plug them into Excel to see what is happening. It’s sometimes worth trying to open your exported file in a plain text editor as well like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on a Mac. This helps identify when there are extra characters in your SKU.

Get Your SKUs aligned

When it comes to integrating, you need a way to match items on any system you want to connect. You are in luck because any system you want to connect through, IDA already has a way for you to do this.

 

The Stock Keeping Unit or the SKU is used for this purpose. This single identifier has been used by companies globally for a long time to identify every single variation of the item available. Nearly all modern systems will use the SKU as a way of identifying each unique variation. This SKU is then used to match items across each system and is why it’s a critical piece to get right.

 

To make sure you get a quick and easy integration, you should make sure that each of your variants have a unique SKU. You can use the Unmatched screen in the IDA Dashboard to make sure you have matched all items.

 

Some issues we see with matching SKUs include having spaces in the SKU or using an underscore instead of a dash or vice versa. The SKU needs to be identical to be automatically matched. If you are having problems getting your SKUs aligned, it might be worth using an app like Microsoft Excel to analyze your products and SKUs. You can export your lists from your systems and plug them into Excel to see what is happening.

It’s sometimes worth trying to open your exported file in a plain text editor as well like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on a Mac. This helps identify when there are extra characters in your SKU.

Disable Old/Unused Products

With IDA, you will only sync those items that match and those that are active. This helps maintain near real-time sync to allow you to sell using one stock pool. If you have a large number of historical products or you maintain a seasonal catalogue, we suggest you deactivate any products not selling instead of relying on a zero stock count to make the product unavailable. The best thing is to go through your sales channels and make sure you deactivate any products that are not selling now.
 
We only sync stock levels for matched products so if you have 2000 products in your manager system and only 100 active on your Sales channel, we will only sync the 100 products, so this will keep things moving fast and reduce the risk of delayed stock level updates.
 

Have A Manual Process

Due to the nature of integrated systems, we cannot guarantee 100% delivery of orders or stock level updates. Because we don’t manage the systems we connect, and we have no control of the Internet, which is how we talk to each of the system, we don’t have enough control to make sure the sync is completed error free. In the cases where syncs could not be completed, you will receive a notification letting you know and, in some cases, you may need to complete a process manually. Having a manual process to ship an or-der or update stock levels will help in this situation.
 
We do run the sync regularly as well as use real-time notifications where systems allow for this to make sure we get the sync completed as error free as possible. And the regular sync means that for issues like time-outs, the process will normally run on the next scheduled event.

In any case, it would be very beneficial for you to have a manual pro-cess in place for times when things out of our control stop us from automating the process for you.

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