Automating Cross-Continental Order Tracking CSB (Crop Shop Boutique)
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Eliminated manual CSV export/import workflow
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Dual integration across ShipBob, Klaviyo, Shopify
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Seamless tracking for cross-continental fulfillments
The Brief
Transforming fragmented manual processes into seamless automated tracking for international athleisure fulfilment.
Crop Shop Boutique (CSB) is a premium Australian athleisure brand founded by Rachel Dillon, who has built a devoted global community around confidence-inspiring activewear designed for gym, Pilates, yoga, and everyday wear. With over 1 million social media followers and a cult-like following characterised by rapid sellouts of new collections, CSB has transformed from a frustrated search for the perfect crop top into an international fashion phenomenon. The brand's success stems from its distinctive approach: compression-fit, four-way stretch fabrics with quick-dry fabrication, combined with fashion-forward design that goes far beyond purely functional sportswear. CSB offers everything from halter crop tops to booty-lifting leggings across an inclusive size range from XXS to XXL, reflecting the founder's commitment to building an empowering community rather than exclusionary luxury.
As CSB's operations scaled internationally, the brand's fulfilment strategy became increasingly complex. The company ships worldwide, but established a strategic partnership with third-party logistics to fulfil orders destined for United States customers from an Australian warehouse. This approach offered logistical advantages and cost efficiencies, but created a significant operational challenge: US customers received no proactive communication about their orders until they physically arrived - a experience fundamentally misaligned with modern e-commerce expectations. Customers expected timely pre-shipment notifications informing them that their order was being prepared and would soon be in transit. They expected accurate tracking information and estimated delivery dates. Instead, CSB faced manual, error-prone processes where staff members had to extract data from fulfilment systems, update spreadsheets, and manually trigger customer communications - a workflow that was time-consuming, inefficient, and prone to mistakes.
The core problem was a fragmented operational environment. CSB's order data lived in one system, customer communication tools existed in another platform, and the third-party logistics partner provided fulfilment and tracking information through yet another integration point. No system automatically connected these pieces - instead, staff members served as manual bridges, translating data between systems. This created multiple failure modes: orders could be missed entirely, tracking information could be outdated or incorrect, notifications could be delayed, and customers could receive duplicate or conflicting communications. The manual process consumed significant staff time that could be better invested in business growth, customer service, or product development. More importantly, it degraded the customer experience precisely at the moment when communication was most valuable - when customers were anticipating arrival of an order they had already paid for.
The challenge required building an automated solution that integrated three separate platforms - each with distinct APIs and data structures - into a unified workflow. The system needed to identify which orders were destined for US customers, detect when those orders shipped from the Australian warehouse, extract the correct tracking information, and push it to both the email marketing platform and the e-commerce order management system. All of this needed to happen automatically, without manual intervention, whilst maintaining data integrity and ensuring customers received timely, accurate communications. The scope had to be carefully managed - the solution needed to solve the immediate problem without requiring months of development or substantial infrastructure investment. Speed to market was essential given the ongoing frustration from customers and the opportunity cost of continued manual processes.
Beyond the technical integration challenge lay a business imperative: international shipping, particularly to premium markets like the United States, represented growing revenue for CSB. The customer experience during the shipping phase directly influenced brand perception and repeat purchase likelihood. Customers who received proactive, helpful shipping notifications felt valued and informed; customers who heard nothing until tracking was manually provided felt neglected. CSB recognised that automating this workflow would simultaneously improve customer satisfaction, reduce operational burden, and create a scalable process that would grow seamlessly as the business expanded into new markets.
Our Solution
PixelForce developed a lightweight automation system that handled the complete tracking communication lifecycle across two distinct integration points, eliminating manual workflow entirely whilst maintaining data integrity and reliability. The architecture was designed for pragmatism - solving the immediate business problem efficiently rather than over-engineering a solution that would require extensive maintenance. The system operated on cloud-hosted infrastructure, ensuring high availability and elasticity to handle varying loads without manual intervention.
The first integration connected CSB's fulfilment system directly to their email marketing platform, enabling fully automated pre-shipment customer communication. The team built monitoring that continuously tracked new shipments within the fulfilment system, filtering for specific criteria: orders being prepared for shipment with delivery destinations in the United States. When these conditions were met, the system automatically constructed a custom event containing relevant order details - customer name, order number, expected ship date, and product information. This event was then pushed to the email marketing platform, triggering pre-configured email workflows that informed customers their order was being prepared in Australia and would soon be in transit. The system handled the timing intelligently, triggering notifications at the right moment in the fulfilment process when staff had actually packed and were preparing to hand off to the logistics partner. This meant customers received timely information rather than notifications arriving too early (creating confusion) or too late (reducing their value).
The second integration was considerably more complex, requiring careful navigation of the e-commerce platform's fulfilment architecture. When shipments were marked as dispatched in the third-party logistics system, the team built monitoring that automatically detected this state change. The system then extracted tracking numbers and generated the corresponding tracking URLs specific to that logistics provider. Next, it queried the e-commerce platform's API to retrieve existing order data, cross-referencing shipments with customer orders using order numbers and other identifying information. The system had to navigate the nuances of the e-commerce platform's data model - specifically ensuring that line items (individual products within an order) were correctly mapped between systems. Different systems represented product information differently, used different identifiers, and tracked inventory at different levels of granularity. Without precise mapping, tracking information could be associated with the wrong products or orders entirely, creating customer confusion.
Once the team had validated data integrity across all these mappings, the system created or updated fulfilment records within the e-commerce platform, injecting the tracking information that customers could then see in their order history. This meant customers could immediately access tracking details through the same platform where they had made their purchase - a seamless, expected experience rather than tracking information arriving via email alone. The integration ensured that order histories remained accurate and complete, providing customers a single source of truth about their shipment status.
The technical approach prioritised reliability within the constraints of a two-week development timeline. Rather than attempting to build comprehensive error recovery for every possible failure mode, the team implemented standard, proven patterns: event-based monitoring that continuously checked for shipments requiring processing, standard error handling and retry logic for API calls that temporarily failed, and basic logging for troubleshooting issues when they occurred. The system was designed to be self-healing - if an API call failed due to temporary network issues, the system would automatically retry after a delay. If data validation failed, the system logged the error and an alert notified staff to manually review and correct the issue rather than silently dropping the shipment from processing. This hybrid approach - fully automated when everything worked correctly, with manual intervention available as a safety net - provided confidence that the system would not silently create bad data or lose orders.
The implementation used cloud-based infrastructure that could scale elastically as CSB's order volume increased. The system processed orders continuously in the background, requiring no manual triggering or oversight. Staff could focus on other priorities - customer service, product development, business strategy - confident that orders were being automatically processed with accuracy. The entire system was designed to be maintenance-light; monitoring alerts would notify the team immediately if processing stalled, but day-to-day operation required virtually no human attention.
The two-week development cycle delivered remarkable speed to market. Rather than spending months designing the "perfect" integration platform or attempting to handle every conceivable edge case, the team focused ruthlessly on solving CSB's immediate problem: automatically communicating with US customers about their shipments. This pragmatic approach meant the solution was deployed quickly, customers began receiving notifications immediately, and staff could measure the results to inform future enhancements. If certain edge cases surfaced after deployment, they could be addressed incrementally without delaying the primary business benefit.
The automation delivered transformative results for CSB's operations. Pre-shipment notification delivery achieved 100 percent automation - every eligible order received timely, accurate customer communication without staff intervention. The system integrated with three separate platforms seamlessly, maintaining data integrity across all systems without manual reconciliation. Development consumed only two weeks, a remarkable timeline that reflected ruthless prioritisation of the core business problem. Most importantly, customers received the experience they expected: proactive communication about their orders, accurate tracking information, and the sense that CSB cared about keeping them informed throughout their purchase journey. This operational excellence directly supported CSB's growth, allowing the team to scale international fulfilment without proportionally increasing administrative overhead.
Our services included
Technical Breakdown
Built as a cloud-hosted integration connecting three platforms via APIs. The fulfilment monitoring filters new shipments by date and destination, pushing custom events for pre-shipment notifications. The e-commerce integration queries fulfilment data, validates line item mapping, and updates records with tracking information. Event-based architecture with standard retry logic provides reliable automation for cross-continental fulfilment workflows whilst maintaining budget-conscious operational complexity.