I’ve been working on a integration project for my boss for just over a week and I’m close to having the Zap functional but my chosen approach has a bit of randomness to it that despite my best efforts I can’t seem to fully curb. My free trial runs out today and before I ask for the bosses credit card I want to be able to present a plan!
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The Task:
Customer places order on Shopify with a date and time for delivery
Order data is sent to Zapier and is formatted and filtered
Then is exported to Teamup Calendar which we are using to schedule and dispatch our own fleet of delivery vehicles.
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What Works:
Currently I’m using a 9-10 Zap process to filter and isolate the information I need from Shopify and the first half of the critical information gets sent over without an issue, works every time (the date and time of delivery and the customer notes for delivery instructions).
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Whats Unreliable:
The next part is where things get messy. I need a way of exporting the product data from the order into a single event field in Teamup. We have lets say 35 products, and each product has 4 variants (units of measurement, quarter, half, three quarter and full yard). I want to output a list that looks like this:
Quantity (SPACE) Variant (DASH) Product Name (SKU)
Ex:Â 3 Cubic Yards Miracle Grow (1010)
I also need to be able to combine partial yardage products with full yardage products of the same type and output it as a single line. So if someone orders 3.5 yards of Miracle grow, its on 2 lines in shopify, 1 line is 3 yards, the other is .5 yards.
So far my best success is using the AI prompt generator and writing scripts. I’ve gone through 4 versions now, with each being more tightly written and each time it gets closer to giving the right answer every time but I can already tell it’ll likely be impossible to perfect it as the AI doesn’t remember previous results.
So what ends up happening is I’ll fire 10 test orders through the system with varying quantities and products, a wide range of order types.  Around 7 on average will output perfectly. The other 3 will have issues. On average 1 of the fails will be close (perhaps improper output format or missing a part of the text). The other 2 will be completely disasters and output wildly incorrect numbers.  Sometimes the failure point is right out of the gate with the inputs, it’ll swap a value in position 2 with 4, despite the fact in all 9 of the other tests it has correctly assigned the right value to each product in the list.Â
If i rerun the replays or manually test each step in the zap using 1 of the failed orders as the reference order, it’ll often pass.  Its this fickle nature that has me worried I can’t use the AI prompts to achieve what I’m trying to do here.
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What Would You Do?
The main issue is finding a way to combine the same products and have the quantities adjust accordingly, and then outputting it in a clean, reliable way.
So the question is…… If you were to approach the problem, what angle would you take? I’m not looking for a step to step guide or anything, just help me expand my considerations to something I may not have considered yet. Â
I’m hoping its something easy and obvious I’m overlooking. Its basically Quantity multiplied by the numeric value of the variant options = Subtotal. Add all the subtotals present for each product type and then list a summary of whats in the order with some minor text editing.
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Much appreciated!