You run a store that pulls products from several suppliers, sells across a few markets and passes orders on to those suppliers every day. If you handle each of these three steps with a separate tool or by hand, you lose time in three places at once. In this article we’ll show how online store automation ties these three processes – products, translations and orders – into a single integrator, instead of three separate, manual jobs.
A modern store doesn’t need three tools, just one integrator
A typical dropshipping store works with a few suppliers. Each of them sends data in a different format – one gives you an XML file, another CSV, a third an API. On top of that comes translating descriptions, if you sell abroad, and passing those orders to the right supplier. Three processes, each of which can grow into a separate, tedious job.
Modern e-commerce doesn’t solve this with three tools. It solves it with one integrator, where everything happens in one place: products come in from suppliers, they’re translated along the way, and orders reach suppliers automatically.
We look at this from an integrator’s perspective. For over 15 years we’ve been connecting stores with suppliers, and our offer includes over 300 suppliers ready to integrate. Below we break this architecture down into three processes.
Products from suppliers to your store
This is the foundation. Before you sell anything, products have to reach your store – with an up-to-date price and stock level. Adding and describing products by hand eats up an enormous amount of time, which you simply don’t have once your catalogue grows. And products aren’t a one-off task – prices and stock change every day.
The second problem is formats. Every supplier describes its assortment differently. If you have a few suppliers, you have just as many different data structures to deal with. The integrator normalises them in one place – it takes XML, CSV or an API and brings them to a common form your store understands.
On this foundation runs automatic synchronisation: stock and prices update themselves, at short intervals, without your involvement. This is the first process, and usually where tidying up a store begins. We explain the mechanism itself in more detail on how our supplier integration works.
Translating products into your markets’ languages
If you sell on more than one market, translating descriptions can be the second big time sink. Translating thousands of items by hand is simply unfeasible – which is an argument for automation in itself.
In a single integrator, translation isn’t a separate tool. It happens along the way: during product synchronisation the module translates the name, description and the remaining fields in the background, without blocking the sync itself. A product comes in from a supplier and is ready straight away in your market’s language.
So it’s not translation "in the dark", every item gets a quality score from 0 to 100%. Translations above a set threshold can go into the store automatically, while weaker ones land in a panel where a person reviews, corrects and approves them. You decide the threshold from which you trust the automation.
The biggest value shows when you expand into several markets at once. One supplier feed can be translated into many languages simultaneously – in one of our scenarios a Polish feed is translated straight into four markets: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Finnish. One source, four language versions, without running four separate processes. We go deeper into this in 5 reasons why you should automate product translation today.
Order transfer to suppliers
The third process is the path of an order from the customer to the supplier. The customer places an order in your store – and that order has to reach the supplier who ships it. If you re-key it by hand from your store panel into the supplier panel, you pay for it two ways: in time and in errors.
Re-keying a single order takes about 3 minutes, and an hour of an order-handling assistant costs around £15 once you add up the full cost to the employer. At a few dozen orders a day that turns into several hours daily spent purely on re-keying – and that’s before mistakes. A typo in an address or the wrong quantity means extra work – contacting the customer, correcting the order, sometimes reshipping.
Automatic transfer removes this step: every order reaches the right supplier without manual re-keying. It gets more interesting when a customer buys products from different suppliers in one basket. The integrator splits such an order into sub-deliveries – each part goes to the supplier that has the given product, and each parcel gets its own tracking number. You don’t have to manually work out what to order where.
We have hands-on experience with automatic order transfer. For how to work out whether it pays off for you, see How much does manual order entry to suppliers really cost you?, and we describe the service itself here: Automatic order transfer – a must-have in modern e-commerce.
Why one integrator beats three separate tools
You can handle each of these three processes with a separate tool. The question is why. Three tools mean three logins, three places where something can break, and data you have to move by hand from one to another. A product pulled into one tool has to somehow be passed to translation in a second, and an order for that product handled in a third.
One integrator keeps everything in a single flow: the same product, from the moment it’s pulled from a supplier, through translation, all the way to the order, is one record in one place. There’s no re-keying between systems, because there are no separate systems.
On top of that, the integrator is independent of your store platform. It works whether you’re on WooCommerce, Shopify, PrestaShop, Shoper or another platform – it’s the same flow of products and orders underneath.
Where to start
You don’t have to connect everything at once. Start with the process that hurts most – for most stores that’s products and stock synchronisation, because that’s where errors and selling out-of-stock items show up fastest.
Automation starts to genuinely pay off once you have a few hundred products, work with several suppliers, or your order volume is growing. That’s the point where manual work stops scaling, and every extra supplier or market adds hours, not minutes.
Then add the remaining processes gradually: once products are syncing, add translations for a new market, and as order numbers grow, switch on automatic transfer. Each step adds another piece of the same architecture.
Summary
A modern store isn’t a set of three tools for three jobs, but one integrator that ties products, translations and orders into a single flow. Products come in from suppliers, they’re translated along the way, and orders reach suppliers – automatically, in one place, regardless of your store platform.
If you’d like to see how this could work for you, check out our integrations with suppliers or get in touch – we’ll suggest which process to start with.