FOR GRADUATED DROPSHIPPERS

You upgraded to a sourcing agent. Get the auto-tracking back too.

Better margins shouldn’t cost you a working fulfillment flow.

Marketplaces like Zendrop and CJ pushed tracking to Shopify for you automatically. A private agent just emails you instead. Relayship reads those emails and puts the tracking back on Shopify in seconds. No marketplace required.

You traded the marketplace for a better agent — and lost auto-tracking

When you ran on Zendrop, CJ, AutoDS, or DSers, the tracking number landed on the order by itself. The marketplace knew which order it shipped, it had the tracking, and it pushed a fulfillment to Shopify so the customer got their notification. You never thought about it.

Then you graduated. You found a private sourcing agent who gives you a better unit price, faster shipping, and products the marketplace catalog never carried. Your margins went up. But the agent isn’t a Shopify integration. They’re a person. So now the tracking shows up the way a person sends it:

  • A per-order email: “Order #1043 shipped, YunExpress LX123456789CN.”
  • A daily batch email or pasted spreadsheet with 40 order references and 40 tracking numbers.
  • Sometimes a forwarded, WeChat-exported message with the tracking buried in a wall of text, or a 4PX PDF shipping label attached and nothing typed in the body at all.

And someone (you, or a VA on a 12-hour lag) has to open each one, find the order, copy the tracking, pick the carrier, and mark it fulfilled. The automation you used to get for free is now manual labor. That’s the tax on leaving the marketplace, and most people just eat it.

The two formats agents use

Almost every private agent sends tracking in one of two shapes. Relayship handles both without you sorting them first.

1. Per-order dispatch emails

One email, one shipment. The agent confirms an order shipped and includes its tracking number, carrier, and usually your order reference. Relayship extracts the tracking number, carrier, order reference, SKUs, and address from the body, the HTML, or an attached PDF label, then runs a four-tier match cascade (order reference first, then customer plus SKU, then name and address heuristics, else the review queue) to find the right Shopify order.

2. A daily batch email with many tracking numbers

One email, many shipments. This is where most tools fall over: they treat the email as a single thing and you’re back to copy-pasting rows. Relayship is batch-email aware. A single email with N tracking numbers becomes N independently-matched shipments. Each row gets its own match against your orders, its own carrier, and its own fulfillment. If two of those rows are the two halves of a split shipment for one order, they’re matched independently too, so each customer sees the right tracking for what they actually received.

You forward one batch email. Relayship fans it out into one correctly-fulfilled order per tracking number.

Set it up

This takes a few minutes once. After that, you forward nothing by hand: a Gmail or Outlook filter does it.

  1. 1

    Install from the Shopify App Store

    Standard OAuth with minimum scopes. Relayship mints a unique forwarding address for your store.

  2. 2

    Auto-forward your agent’s emails to that address

    Add one Gmail or Outlook filter on your agent’s sender so every dispatch or batch email forwards itself. Your agent changes nothing and never knows.

  3. 3

    Relayship extracts and matches

    It pulls tracking, carrier, order reference, SKUs, and address from the body, HTML, or PDF label, then runs the four-tier cascade to find each Shopify order, even from a 40-line batch.

  4. 4

    Auto-fulfill or queue for one click

    Above your confidence threshold (default 0.9) it calls fulfillmentCreateV2 with the right line items and tracking, and Shopify notifies the customer. Below it, the shipment waits in a human review queue.

New installs default to review mode (auto-fulfill off) until you’ve confirmed your first real matches. And here’s the part that matters for a private agent: every correction you make becomes a few-shot example for that agent’s specific email domain. Their oddly-formatted, WeChat-exported, label-only emails go from “needs a glance” to near-perfect within about 10 shipments. The longer you use one agent, the less you touch it.

Typical time from the agent’s dispatch email to the customer’s shipping notification: under about 60 seconds.

Keep your agent, keep your margins

The pitch from every marketplace tool is “come back inside our walls and we’ll handle fulfillment.” You left for a reason: better pricing, better products, a real relationship with a supplier who answers you. You don’t have to give that up to get automation back.

Relayship is the one piece that was missing: it turns your agent’s plain emails into Shopify fulfillments, so your store behaves like it did on the marketplace without putting you back on the marketplace. Honest trade-off — if your supplier is still a marketplace that already pushes tracking cleanly, you don’t need Relayship for that supplier. The moment your tracking arrives as an email a human typed, that’s exactly what Relayship is for.

You only pay for successful uploads. Failed extractions, duplicates, verification codes, and non-dispatch emails are free, and there are no hard caps. Overage is 0.02 USD per upload if you go over your plan.

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