In brief; it’s not just using zapier and data brokering is only the start. The real issue is the source of truth for the data and business logic.

For complex businesses and services, dedicated servers are required to handle data inputs, outputs and perform business logic to provide an effective service at the application layer, scale and differentiate from competitors.

Outcome

3x order throughput. Full logistics visibility. Start of day 6am

Commercial scenario

Looking back: it’s 2022, the middle of the pandemic in London and there’s a lot of confusion. Small businesses are struggling, some are holding ground, others scramble to adapt and pivot. But at the time new shops are popping up all over to problem solve and fulfil demand that is rocketing for products and services: this was one of them, and it needed to move fast.

The service required multiple 3rd party resources working in a coordinated sequence. To wire processes together the dilemma is whether to use off the shelf data brokers like zapier gluing services like monday.com to mailchimp or just jump in and code a dashboard from scratch.

Without the ability to manipulate the data going in and out it’s hard to quickly adapt to evolving competition and the product will become stale, fast.

The business pressure

Explosive demand outstripped ability to supply and management sleep deprivation was setting in, orders were being turned down and customers were on the phones ringing constantly as it all cranked into action. Unless processes are automated businesses can’t scale, reduce management pressure whilst maintaining a tier one service.

The business

Rapid response COVID testing kits, dropped door to door within London perimeter and a laboratory grade result within hours and fit-to-fly certificate: for business people needing last minute certificates to fly and for those that wanted a bespoke couriered service.

It started as a simple Shopify storefront coupled with a bunch of SERP keywords and a buy now button.

Quickly it evolved to an army of drivers dropping off testing kits all over London to hundreds of customers a week couriering kits to multiple labs as the pandemic regulations evolved. The process had to work with a zero failure rate: customer’s flights were on the line if they didn’t receive their certificates on time.

The fulfilment pipeline

Before

• Shopify order page
• Excel spreadsheet (for order details)
• Customer service team
• Friends dropping off kits
• One laboratory

At the time the conversation in the office centered around using monday.com as a dynamic spreadsheet to house the order fulfilment data. It allows the customer service team to all read from the same source of information and can receive data inputs from other sources.

Shopify alone wasn’t suitable for fulfilment and logistics tracking as the pipeline involved multiple pick up and drop off locations and a changing logistics flow. At any one time the business needs to know where a customer’s test is, whether its arrived at the lab, what the results are, and whether the customer has been notified and sent their certificate.

Monday.com was advertising aggressively at the time and seemed at the outset to be a natural next step.

Pros and Cons of Monday.com

Pros: quick to start and get going with dynamic data flows. Very good developer documentation.
Cons: costs scale quickly, investment in time and resource required to understand their ecosystem.

It’s a spreadsheet in the cloud with add ons. It’s WYSIWYG features enable no code teams to integrate data sources and dynamically update rows and columns. For example, once a driver arrives at a customers house, it can trigger a spreadsheet cell to turn green - to indicate successfully arrived.

Then

• Shopify custom storefront
• Excel Monday.com
• Friends in cars Onfleet.com
• VPS server and database
• One Multiple laboratories

Is Zapier the right tool?

Data broker tools are tempting to use to get going quickly - and they’re cheap to begin with but they ultimately limit the business logic and place a glass ceiling on scale and scope. The costs also scale.

If the data format input is roughly the data format output, then zapier is fine. If the business logic and product differentiation doesnt rely on data manipulation and back end calculations then a third party data broker service is the route to go.

Some systems can’t be integrated using zapier at all (see example here)

For this application though: no. It was given a trial on the free then paid tier over a 48 hour period: as ever about 6 hours was wasted grokking data APIs reading zapier’s proprietary documentation and generally being forced to get to grips with their annoying parlance and terminology.

Without the ability to manipulate data as it transitions from one service to another or perform simple calculations there wasn’t a meaningful service upgrade or differentiation to the customers. For example: calculating driver delivery times before notifying labs or automating PDF certificate creation depending on a variety of lab criteria.

Added to which the commercial landscape was rapidly changing as well as the updating fit-to-fly certificate regulations were evolving weekly. Reacting fast was the key to staying ahead of the competition.

What is Onfleet.com?

A last mile delivery platform.

Upside: good UI, easy driver onboarding, extensive documentation.
Downside: costs scale quickly.

Integrating software services with a dedicated server

To future proof the product a simple VPS server was set up to take data from one source eg monday.com and send it on to onfleet for example.

And finally

• Shopify custom storefront
• Monday.com Custom dashboard
• Onfleet.com
• VPS server and database

Just use Zapier ?

Explosive demand outstripped ability to supply. Sleep deprivation was setting in, orders were getting missed, customers on the phones ringing constantly. Unless processes are automated the business can’t scale, provide the tier one service in the mission statement and reduce management and clerical pressures.

If done again, what would be different.

Issue of data source of truth when wiring together third party tools

monday vs centralised database

Problem to solve 1: start yesterday.

Keywords: monday.com shopify order fulfilment logistics software software consultancy software engineering zapier software integration software integration tools