Connecting Shopify to the Last Mile - CIGO

A Shopify merchant recently asked me to hook their store up to CIGO. I had no idea what CIGO was but after a brief web search I came to the CIGO and quickly learned how it works. In a nutshell it lets a merchant organize their sales so they can dispatch drivers to deliver what they sell, perfect for online businesses that serve a local clientele. This service sells groceries to a local client base, and they had to have more control over their deliveries than what is possible with Shopify alone.

To simplify the merchant's workflow, we send orders via a webhook to the custom App for processing. The interesting details in the order are primarily the customer. We setup a job for the customer, something that can be later manipulated into a fulfillment or delivery. As part of setting up the job, we include the items purchased as the actions associated with the job. In the case of a grocer, the items are typically food, and the action concerns the details of the food. So how much does it weigh, what did it cost, etc. All for organizing a delivery.

Once the delivery is setup in CIGO, we can issue the tracking information back to Shopify and keep the customer informed of their delivery.

This is a fascinating aspect of Shopify not many people get into, as Shopify really has no quality local delivery last mile equivalent to CIGO built in. Time will tell how useful this is to many merchants, but for now, I am certainly impressed with the number of options that suddenly become available to a merchant when they hook-up their Shopify sales to CIGO.