Collaboration Tips (Source Store)

Written by Rayman
August 12, 2024

Found a new destination store to work with on the Syncio Marketplace? Here's a collection of tips to help make the most of working together.

1. Topics to discuss before deciding to connect
2. Kick-starting the partnership by connecting your stores
3. What happens after I connect our stores?
4. Syncing products from your new partner
5. Sending orders to your source store partner
6. Organizing the revenue split

1) Topics to discuss before deciding to connect

To promote an ideal level of co-operation between parties, we recommend discussing the following topics before making the decision to connect stores:

1. Branding and marketing

   • Guidelines and advice on how best to represent your products

2. Payment and commissions terms

   • When do you want to be paid?
     • eg: Every 30 days?
   • Will commission be a flat-rate (eg: 20%) or do you want to specify special commission rates per item?

3. Shipping rates and fulfillment times

   • How quickly does your business fulfill orders?
   • Are there any countries/ regions you don't ship to?
   • Decide on a shipping rate arrangement that works for both parties
     • Flat-fee arrangement works best
       • eg: Free shipping for products over $100
     • Recommend products with built shipping built into the commission

4. What's your returns policy like?

5. Products and inventory available to sell

   • Have a specific collection to recommend?
   • Best sellers?
   • Tag your products with a special tag so your retail partners can find products you want to share:
     • eg: [sync2023_summer], [sync2023_bestsellers]
   • Share the tag after
   • Want to hide products to prevent destination stores from syncing and selling them?
     • Add this tag to any product to hide them: [syncio-hidden]

When ready, share your Syncio keys using the "Connect Store" feature found in Syncio's "Stores" page.

2) Kick-start the partnership by connecting your stores

Syncio bridges and keeps in sync important product, stock and orders data to simplify the collaboration between online stores.

To enable the sync, simply follow the steps in our store connection guide.

• Where to find your Syncio key
• Sending a store connection invite to your new partner

3) What happens after I connect our stores?

Once the store connection is made, your partners can start syncing and your selling products right away!

As a source store besides fulfilling orders as they come through, ensuring:

• Your products each have a unique SKU per variant
• Try not to change your SKUs after they have been synced by your partners.
  • Mismatched SKUs can cause issues with the stock sync.

Here's some quick settings to check:

• Assign a specific location to send synced stock over to your partners
  • The location options can be found on the [Stores] page
  • Check out our inventory location guide.

Pro tip: Try creating a separate Syncio only inventory location and then transfer stock from your main pool to create safety net, or to control how much stock you want to make available to your partners.

4) How partners sync your products

Once your stores are connected. Your partners can use Syncio to create a synced copy of your product.

Besides stock updates controlled by Syncio, whenever an order comes through or when your team updates stock. Syncio protects your original products by preventing any manual edits (such as: changes to images, descriptions, titles) from updating your products.

Pro tip: Did you know whenever you delete an old product from your store, Syncio will automatically delete any synced copies of that product on your partner's store? This helps prevent oversell.

5) Fulfilling orders from your destination store partner

If they have the Syncio orders-add-on. Any paid order containing one of your synced products can be push orders directly to your Shopify order's admin for fulfillment.

These orders pushed by Syncio will appear as regular Shopify orders which makes it easy for you to fulfill as normal. Keep an eye out for orders tagged with the store name of your destination store partners.

Syncio also syncs tracking information back to their order customer after you fulfill, so it's all automated.

6) Organizing the revenue split

Syncio has a Payouts tool which helps organize and auto-calculate the revenue split based on commissions rates agreed upon by you and your partner.

When the time comes to organize the revenue split. If your destination store partners have the Payouts add-on activated. They can select fulfilled orders and generate a payout which automatically calculates how much they owe you.

When a payout is created. Syncio will send it to your account for review. Just like orders, Syncio auto splits payouts by destination store too.