One of the benefits to using shipping modules like UPS, USPS, or FedEx, is the ability to generate shipping labels and tracking numbers for the shipments you process inside your Miva Merchant Store Admin. Although being able to generate tracking numbers from inside the Miva Merchant Admin is convenient, it may not fit every Merchants workflow.
If you're using a third-party solution to generate your tracking numbers, you can still import this data into the Miva Merchant software as part of your process for fulfilling order shipments. In this video, we're going to do just that.
Here we are in the Order Processing area of the Miva Merchant Admin. We can see that there are 11 orders here waiting to be processed for shipping. Here they have the status of “Pending.” We're going to import the shipping information on mass via a flat file import. And to do that, we’ll want to go into Data Management. From here, we’ll click into the Import Settings tab. We'll just scroll down this list. We’re looking for the one that says “Import Shipment Information” from CSV. If you click on it, you'll have the option of downloading this as a CSV template or an Excel spreadsheet template. I'm going to select CSV. Right when you open the CSV file into a spreadsheet program, it's going to look something like this. In this file, you’ll find columns for Order, Shipment Code, Track Type, Tracking Number and Cost. The Order column is where you type in the Order ID numbers of all of the orders you are processing. So I'll just copy and paste them in like so. Every time a shipment is created in Miva, the order gets assigned a shipment code which is a unique identifier for every shipment in the Miva Merchant system. In general, we’ll leave this column alone and upon import of the data Miva Merchant will automatically generate shipment codes for all of these different shipments. The only time you would type anything into this column is if you're working on an order that already has a shipment code, in which case you will copy that shipment code from inside the Miva Merchant system and paste it in here.
This column is used to tell Miva Merchant what shipping service is handling each particular shipment, such as UPS or FedEx. What you enter here will influence the tracking number link your customers will see on both their shipment confirmation emails as well as their Order History page in your Miva Merchant Store. Clicking on that link will take them to the “Track Shipment” URL for the designated carrier. Here we’re using UPS, but you can find a complete list of carriers configured in your store my browsing to the Domain settings and clicking on the “Shipment Tracking Links” tab. This Type column contains all of the possible options you can type into the Track Type column in your spreadsheet. Moving on, you paste the tracking numbers for each shipment in this column and finally this column allows you to include the shipping costs quoted by the carrier. When you have all of your shipment data entered into the spreadsheet, save it as a CSV file and you'll be able to import it into the Miva Merchant system.
Let's go back into Data Management and we want to click on “Import Shipment Information” from CSV. I'll just drag my CSV file into this box and we've successfully imported the data into the store. What’s the data is uploaded, all of the orders that you were working on will be updated with their tracking number information. Furthermore, when we go in to order processing, you'll see that the status of the orders you were working on will have changed from pending to shipped.