Connect your webshop with Active Ants

Your own stock, Active Ants and other suppliers in one webshop

Many growing brands keep fast sellers in an automated warehouse, ship a few products themselves and sell items that a supplier drop ships. Your customer places one order in one webshop, and nobody on your team has to work out who ships what. Dropday checks every order line against your rules, stores the matching supplier on each line and splits the order, so Active Ants receives only the products it stores, with the same products and quantities your customer ordered.

More orders, not more order entry

When an order comes in, Dropday passes the Active Ants lines to Active Ants with your customer's delivery address and the SKU and quantity of each line, ready for the fulfilment centre to pick. Nobody copies orders into the Active Ants portal, so a busy week adds orders for the warehouse, not hours of typing for your team.

Stock you don't have to maintain

The stock of the products you store at Active Ants follows what Active Ants reports, so your webshop shows what the warehouse can ship, without stock files or manual corrections. Products you ship yourself or buy from other suppliers keep their own stock. Dropday sets this up for you.

Your shipments in view

When Active Ants ships, Dropday brings the tracking back to the original webshop order. You follow your Active Ants shipments in the same place as the rest of your orders, instead of looking them up in the portal.

How you get started

You connect Shopify or another supported webshop, keep your account with Active Ants and share the API access that Active Ants arranges for you, and tell Dropday which products Active Ants stores for you. Dropday sets up the orders, stock updates and tracking, and tests them with you before your first real order goes to Active Ants.

How the Active Ants connection works

Active Ants runs its warehouse on its own system with a user portal and an API, the Paxon ShopApi.

Version 3 of the API follows the JSON:API specification and covers orders, shipments, stock levels, returns and webhooks.

Active Ants issues API credentials per client, and a token requested with them is sent with every call.

An order names each product by its SKU, with a quantity and a price, next to the delivery address.

This shortened, illustrative request shows the shape of one order, not a complete call. The values are placeholders.

{
  "data": {
    "type": "order",
    "attributes": {
      "externalOrderNumber": "1001",
      "currency": "GBP",
      "email": "alex@example.com"
    },
    "relationships": {
      "orderItems": {
        "data": [
          { "type": "orderItem", "id": 1 }
        ]
      }
    }
  },
  "included": [
    {
      "type": "orderItem",
      "id": 1,
      "attributes": {
        "sku": "SERUM-30ML",
        "quantity": 2,
        "price": 24.0
      }
    }
  ]
}

Dropday sends each Active Ants order to the API and reads shipments, tracking and stock levels back from it, so your webshop and the warehouse work from the same orders.