Ecommerce & Retail · Dropshipping
A Shopify application, published on Shopify App Store designed to automate a B2B distributor’s dropshipping fulfillment service.
Outcome
20 merchants self-onboarded from the App Store; paid orders post straight to the fulfilment API.
A Belgium-based wholesale distributor offered a dropshipping service, allowing e-commerce businesses to sell its products without holding inventory. This model held significant potential for growth, but it was limited to a small group of technically proficient customers. The larger market of non-technical store owners on platforms like Shopify remained inaccessible.
The core friction was the manual, high-touch nature of the existing process. Merchants needed technical expertise to connect their stores, manage product data, and process orders. This created a significant operational bottleneck for the distributor and a barrier to entry for potential customers, preventing the service from scaling into a meaningful revenue channel.
Robust Devs was engaged to remove this friction. We developed a self-service Shopify application that acts as a direct bridge between the distributor's inventory system and their customers' storefronts. The application automates the entire dropshipping workflow, from product synchronization to order fulfillment, and 20 merchants have onboarded themselves through the App Store.
The challenge
How we solved it
Technologies
The engine is the core of the automation. It regularly pulls product data-including stock levels, pricing, and descriptions-from the distributor’s master inventory feed. It then intelligently updates this information across every connected merchant store, ensuring data accuracy without manual work. This prevents overselling and protects the brand reputation of both the distributor and the merchant.
This feature provides store owners with direct control over how products appear on their storefront. From a central dashboard within the app, they can apply global price markups or set specific VAT rates. They can also rewrite product titles and descriptions to match their brand voice and select which product images to display, giving them essential control over their own business.
How we built it
Consumed the distributor's JSON feed as the single source of truth, and posted paid orders straight to their fulfilment API. Manual product entry across merchant stores was where the pricing and stock errors came from. A sync engine reads the partner's inventory feed and updates every connected Shopify store automatically, and merchants apply their own margins and edits in a rules-based dashboard before importing. On the other side of the sale, paid orders are transmitted directly to the distributor's fulfilment API with invoicing and notifications built in, so twenty merchants could self-onboard from the App Store without the partner's team growing with them.
In the client's words
“Twenty merchants set themselves up without emailing us once. For a two-person company that matters.”
Tell us what you're building. We'll show you how we'd approach it and what it would take to ship.