Getting Started

Overview

Hello, and welcome to Channels, Despatch Cloud's industry leading integration solution. 

With Channels, you can easily integrate your company with different sales channels, accounting programs and plugins, allowing you to manage all your orders from many different sources in one place. Whether you're selling a single brand or multiple brands on different platforms, our solutions have you covered.

Use Cases

Let's talk about some hypothetical scenarios and how you can take advantage of Channels to support your business.

• Your business is selling one brand on multiple sales platforms

With Channels, you can easily integrate your business to over 60 sales channels across different countries, allowing you to easily manage all your operations on a single platform. All you need to do is setup your store and sales channels once and watch as your products, orders and customers are automatically imported. You can setup your store and channels through API, or you can do it through our user UI:

What you need to do:

1. Login to your account and setup a store for your business. You can find instructions on how to create and edit stores here.
2. Next, you need to setup the sales platforms you're selling on as a sales channel in your account. You can find a list of channels we support here and setup guides for sales channel in this page.
3. Additionally, you can sync product stock levels to your sales channels. This allows you to synchronize all stock data for your products across all sales platfroms you're using, and removes the risk of over-selling. You can do this on a channel by channel basis, turning on "Download Products", "Add To Main Products" and "Auto Sync Stock" under "Stock Management. You can find more information about additional channel settings here.
4. Next up, you'll need to create fulfillment data through an API call. After the fulfillment data is created, we'll take it and sync it through with the sales channels you have integrated into your store. You can find more information about creating fulfillment through API here.
5. Finally, you can setup a plugin or webhook for your store. If you're working with a fulfillment center and would like for some or all of your products to be fulfilled through them, you can setup a plugin or webhook to do so. You can also specify which orders are sent to which plugins through plugin rules. You can find instructions on how to setup plugins here and how to setup webhooks here.

• Your business is selling multiple brands on multiple platforms.

Channels allows you to manage multiple stores - i.e. multiple brands - all in one place, each with their own sales channels, plugins and webhooks, thus making it easier for companies that sell different products through different brands, on multiple marketplaces. You can create separate stores for separate brands to manage data, orders and all other aspects seperately from each other, all in one place. All you need to do is setup your stores and sales channels once and watch as your products, orders and customers are automatically imported.

What you need to do:

1. Login to your account and setup a store for each of your brands. You can find instructions on how to create and edit stores here.
2. Next, you need to setup the sales platforms you're selling your brands on as a sales channel for each of your stores. You can find a list of channels we support here and setup guides for sales channel in this page.
3. Additionally, you can sync product stock levels to your sales channels. This allows you to synchronize all stock data for your products across all sales platfroms you're using, and removes the risk of over-selling. You can do this on a channel by channel basis, turning on "Download Products", "Add To Main Products" and "Auto Sync Stock" under "Stock Management. You can find more information about additional channel settings here.
4. Next up, you'll need to create fulfillment data through an API call. After the fulfillment data is created, we'll take it and sync it through with the sales channels you have integrated into your store. You can find more information about creating fulfillment through API here.
5. Finally, you can setup plugins or webhooks for your stores. If you're working with a fulfillment center and would like for some or all of your products to be fulfilled through them, you can setup a plugin or webhook to do so. You can also specify which orders are sent to which plugins through plugin rules. You can find instructions on how to setup plugins here and how to setup webhooks here.

• You're a fulfillment center or a courier looking to automatically get your customers' orders from their sales channels.
  

Channels also allows you to rapidly and automatically integrate with any customers sales channels through the use of API and hosted pages. Through our API solutions you can easily create new stores with a simple API call, send over a hosted page link and let your customers integrate themselves into our system. You can change the formatting, colors, logo and available channels on the hosted page so that the only thing your customers see is what you allow them. You can setup your stores and channels through API, or you can do it through our user UI:

What you need to do:

1. You first need to integrate your own system to Despatch Cloud through our API solutions. You can find our API documentation here and you can also get in touch with us to book a call with our technical team for more support.
2. Afterwards, you can set it so that a new Post request to create a store is sent whenever a new user is added to your system. You can find the Post request in question here.
3. Next, you can setup different create Post requests for each of the sales channels you're interested in using. This allows you to rapidly integrate your customers through the information you receive from them. This can be useful if you're using only a few sales channels, but would take a lot of resource to setup seperate API calls multiple channels. Each sales channel has a different Post call, which you can find on our API documentations page here.
   
   1. Alternatively, you can choose to utilize our Hosted Pages solution. Hosted Pages allow you to create a single use page through an API call which lets your customers integrate themselves to Channels using our API connections and their API credentials. You can change the formatting, colors, fonts, logos and the sales channels displayed on the created hosted page, which means your customers will only see what you allow them to see. You can find the Post request for creating Hosted Pages here, and you can read through our Hosted Pages documentation for more information.
4. Additionally, you can sync product stock levels to your sales channels. This allows you to synchronize all stock data for your products across all sales platfroms you're using, and removes the risk of over-selling. If you're using API calls to setup sales channels, you can edit the request you're sending to enable "Stock Management", "Download Products", "Add To Main Products" and "Auto Sync Stock". Alternatively, if you're using hosted pages, you can set an input customization to include the aforementioned settings. You can find out more about how to do that here.
   
5. Next up, you'll need to create fulfillment data through an API call. After the fulfillment data is created, we'll take it and sync it through with the sales channels you have integrated into your store. You can find more information about creating fulfillment through API here.
6. Finally, you can add plugins and webhooks as needed to each of your customers' stores using an API call. Each plugin utilizes a different Post request, which you can find here.