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Order routing

Route every Shopify order to the right fulfillment location. Cross-reference live inventory, shipping zone, and SLA. Push the assignment to the WMS via API.

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The prompt

I want to route incoming Shopify orders to the right fulfillment location based on real-time inventory availability, shipping zone, and SLA requirements. Can you build me a flow that pulls orders from Shopify, cross-references inventory and SLA data from NetSuite, applies routing logic to assign each order to the correct fulfillment center, and pushes the assignment back to the WMS via API?

Just copy and paste the prompt into a new Parabola flow to get started.

What Parabola builds

A workflow with seven steps you can edit:

1. Pull incoming orders. From Shopify, in near real time. Order number, customer, items, ship-to, channel, service level.

2. Pull live inventory. From NetSuite or your ERP. On-hand by SKU, by warehouse, with the reservation logic applied.

3. Pull SLA and zone data. Shipping zone by ship-to, service-level commitment by channel, transit times by warehouse.

4. Apply the routing rules. Closest warehouse with stock, prefer DTC over wholesale lanes, honor split or no-split logic, respect overflow rules at peak.

5. Assign the order. Pick the warehouse, set the carrier, lock the service level. The flow generates the assignment record.

6. Push to the WMS. API call to ShipHero, Fulfil, or your 3PL. The assignment lands as a pickable order in the right facility.

7. Log and alert on exceptions. Anything that did not route cleanly lands in a review queue with the reason attached. Stuck routes alert the ops team in Slack.

Why teams stop doing this manually

Routing logic used to fit on a whiteboard. East orders to the east warehouse, west to the west, overflow to the 3PL. Then the company added two more warehouses, a second 3PL, a couple of retailers with specific service levels, and a peak-season surge plan that nobody documented. The whiteboard does not work anymore.

The manual version is a series of Shopify flows, retail platform settings, and a workbook the operations lead opens twice a day to fix the routes that came out wrong. It works at one warehouse. It limps along at three. It collapses the day a hurricane closes a region and the surge plan needs to actually be a plan. By that point a person is in the inbox rerouting orders by hand at midnight.

Routing is the kind of work that has to be right every time and is too tedious for a human to be reliable at. The rules are simple. The execution is fast. The judgment lives in the rules, not in the assignment. That is what a flow does well.

How it works

Step 1. Paste the prompt.

Open Parabola, paste the prompt in section 2, and let it ask follow-up questions about your warehouse footprint, your inventory reservation logic, and which channels have non-standard SLAs.

Step 2. Connect your data.

Shopify for orders, NetSuite for inventory and SLA, your WMS or 3PL API for the assignment push. Plus the zone master and the routing rules table.

Step 3. Run it on every order.

Continuous routing during the day, batched runs during off-peak. Exceptions land in the review queue with the reason attached.

Related prompts

FAQ

How does the flow handle orders that need to split across warehouses?

The split logic is a configurable rule. The flow can prefer single-warehouse fulfillment when stock allows, split only when no node holds the full order, or split by line based on inventory and zone.

What if the API call to the WMS fails?

The flow logs the failure, retries on the next cycle, and lands the order in a review queue if it does not resolve. No order falls through silently.

Can the routing decision factor in carrier cost?

Yes. Pull rate-card data into the rule set. The flow compares the lane cost across viable warehouses and routes to the cheapest one that hits the SLA.

What about peak season surge logic?

Maintain a separate surge rule set. Toggle it on at the season, off when it ends. The day-to-day rules stay clean and the surge logic does not bleed into normal operations.

How is this different from Shopify's native fulfillment routing?

Shopify can route to a single warehouse or a simple priority list. The flow adds live inventory, SLA, zone, cost, and surge logic. The decision lives in your rules, not a vendor's setting.
Route every order to the right warehouse without a person in the middle.
Paste the prompt, point it at your orders, inventory, and WMS, and let the routing run on its own.
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