Made Trade founders Cayley Pater and Andy Ives thought shopping for ethical and sustainable home decor and clothing should be simple. So in 2018, they launched their Shopify eCommerce store to bring the best ethically made and sustainably sourced goods to one place.

Unfortunately, Made Trade’s manual process to manage customer returns prohibited scalability. In their prior setup, customers would submit a request for a return, prompting the Made Trade team to review the request and enter any returns or exchanges by hand into their dropship system, Jetti.

To streamline their manual process, the Made Trade team made the decision to invest in Loop, an automated post-purchase service that helps Shopify brands effectively manage returns. It was up to us to determine if integration was possible between Loop and Jetti and then to figure out how to develop a custom backend to bridge these two services for the Made Trade Shopify store.

Our teams met to identify the functional requirements of the final product. This included defining which types of products could be returned, supported transaction types, and what order information Loop would need to pull from Jetti.

Next, we assessed what was feasible with the existing APIs from Loop and Jetti – both of which integrate with Shopify – and how we could leverage this technology to build a custom solution to connect these two systems. That way, when a customer selects a product from their order to return in Loop (which renders a list of Made Trade’s products from Shopify), it automatically creates a return in Jetti.

Our engineers created a webhook to automate dropship returns through Loop and Jetti. This was achieved by standing up a Node.js server that exposes a webhook to receive POST requests from Loop, queries the associated order from Jetti with the external Loop ID with a GET request, and then uses a PUT request to update the return status and associated package tracking information.

With the custom webhook implementation, the team at Made Trade will now have more time to focus on their growing business and make the returns process easier and more efficient for their customers.