1. Purpose
Recognise an order that imported but never became shippable, get it moving, and tell the two possible causes apart.
2. Scope
Orders that exist in Ship Side Kick and sit in Open with no pick or ship task. Orders that never arrived at all are a different problem; raise those with Ship Side Kick support.
3. Roles & Responsibilities
Role | Responsibility |
|---|---|
Shift lead or account manager | Spots stranded orders and resyncs them. |
Integrations owner | Confirms the sales channel location mapping if a resync does not fix it. |
Ship Side Kick support | Wants to hear about these. Volume tells us how often the import is failing. |
4. When you need this
An order shows as Open but has no tasks and never reached a picker.
A customer chases an order you cannot find in any mission.
You are reconciling at the end of a day and the order count does not match the channel.
5. Key concept: the resync is a diagnostic, not just a fix
What people assume | What actually happens |
|---|---|
An order in the system is an order that will ship. | Not until it has tasks. An order can import successfully and still fail at the step that creates the ship task, leaving it inert. |
If a resync fixes it, nothing more to learn. | The resync working tells you the import stumbled once. The resync not working tells you something is misconfigured and will keep happening. |
Someone will notice a stranded order eventually. | Nothing surfaces them today. An order nobody looks for simply does not ship. |
6. Procedure
Open the order and confirm it has no pick or ship task.
Use Resync on the order.
If it flips to confirmed and picks up tasks, you are done. Note the order number for Ship Side Kick support.
If it does not, go to Apps and open your sales channel connection.
Check the location mapping. An order assigned to a channel location that is not mapped to be handled by Ship Side Kick will not produce tasks no matter how often it is resynced.
Map the location, then resync the order again.
If it still does not move, send the order number and the channel location name to Ship Side Kick support.
7. Verification
The order leaves Open and shows a ship task.
It becomes eligible for a mission on the next generation.
Stock is committed to it, so the units no longer read as available.
8. Constraints and caveats
Resyncing is safe to repeat and will not duplicate an order, but it will not conjure tasks for an order whose channel location is unmapped.
A newly mapped location applies to orders imported from that point. Existing stranded orders still need an individual resync.
There is no alert for stranded orders today, so this needs to be a scheduled check rather than a reaction. Ship Side Kick is working on surfacing them automatically.
9. Worked example
An operations lead at a 3PL found orders from two client brands sitting in Open with no tasks, and wanted to stop them slipping through rather than adding a manual sweep to the daily process.
Observation | Reading |
|---|---|
A manual resync flipped the order to confirmed straight away. | The import stumbled at ship-task creation. The order itself was fine. |
A second brand showed the same symptom. | Worth reporting. Repeat occurrences across brands indicate frequency, which is what drives the fix. |
Nothing in the app flagged the stranded orders. | Correct reading of a real gap. Until that changes, run the check on a schedule. |
10. Related documents
SWI-018 — Set Up Shopify Inventory After Connecting, for the location mapping step
SWI-015 — Find Urgent Orders That Are Not on a Mission