HOW IT WORKS
Forward supplier email. Shopify gets tracking.
Under 60 seconds. No supplier cooperation. No spreadsheets.
Here’s what actually happens between the moment your supplier hits send and the moment your customer gets their shipping email.
1. You forward supplier dispatch emails to a Relayship address
When you connect Shopify, we mint a unique forwarding address like ch7a2fqk@in.relayship.app. You add a Gmail or Outlook filter that auto-forwards anything from your suppliers to that address. Takes about 90 seconds per inbox. Your suppliers never change how they email you.
You can filter at domain level (“forward everything from supplier@acme.com”) or by subject pattern (“forward anything containing ‘shipment notification’”). Onboarding walks you through both.
2. We extract the tracking number, carrier, and order reference
We read the email body, any HTML tables, and any PDF attachments, and pull out:
- Whether this is actually a dispatch email (vs an invoice, a newsletter, or spam)
- A confidence score for the extraction
- Each shipment. One email can contain many.
- Tracking number and carrier per shipment
- Order reference (PO number, order name, customer name)
- Shipping address
- SKUs and quantities
If confidence is low, the email goes straight to your human queue. We never guess.
3. We match the extracted shipment to the right Shopify order
Matching is a four-tier cascade. We try the most precise signal first:
- Tier 1. Exact reference. Normalized order name or PO matches exactly. About 60–75% of shipments land here. One match, we auto-fulfill at confidence 1.0.
- Tier 2. Address fingerprint. We hash zip + street number + first few street letters, compare against each open order’s shipping address. Roughly 15–25%.
- Tier 3. Name + SKU + recency. Fuzzy customer-name match intersected with SKU match, ranked by recency. About 5–10%.
- Tier 4. Queue. If nothing matches cleanly, the shipment lands in your confirmation queue with the top 3 candidate orders ready to one-click pick.
4. If we’re confident, we auto-fulfill
Every match gets a confidence score. If it’s above your threshold (default 90%, adjustable), we fulfill the order on Shopify with the right line items, tracking number, and carrier. Shopify emails your customer.
Below threshold, or anywhere the match is ambiguous, it goes to your queue. We’d rather ask than ship wrong tracking.
5. Split shipments and partial fulfillments are first-class
Two suppliers ship parts of one order? Each gets its own fulfillment tied to the line items that left that warehouse. A resent tracking email with an updated number? We update the existing fulfillment instead of creating a duplicate. One email with 20 tracking numbers? We split it into 20 shipments and match each independently.
6. Per-supplier learning makes us smarter over time
Every time you correct a match in the queue, we store that correction as a few-shot example for that supplier’s domain. After a handful of shipments from a given supplier the format becomes a solved problem and most messages match without any intervention from you.
On Growth and above, you can write custom instructions per supplier (“ACME emails use ’PO’ prefix but the Shopify order name drops it. Use the numeric portion only.”) that we apply whenever we see a message from that supplier.
What we don’t do
Relayship doesn’t replace AfterShip (customer-facing tracking pages), Klaviyo (post-purchase email), or Spark Shipping (enterprise EDI). We’re the missing link between your supplier’s inbox and Shopify’s fulfillment API. That’s the whole product.