Overview

MintJams Commerce is a system that connects to Shopify to automate and give you visibility into the day-to-day work of running an online store. When an order, a refund, or a change in inventory happens in Shopify, it flows through to MintJams Commerce, where it's automatically checked against rules you've set up in advance. Only the items that actually need a human decision get turned into tasks and assigned to someone on your team.

Shopify remains the source of truth for products, orders, inventory, and customers, but a copy of that data is also brought into MintJams Commerce. That copy is what powers your day-to-day operations work: reviewing flagged items, sending notifications, checking for mismatches against Shopify (reconciliation), and producing reports.

What happens automatically

  • When an order, a refund, an inventory change, or a product update happens in Shopify, it's sent over to MintJams Commerce automatically.
  • Incoming orders and refunds are automatically checked against the rules you've configured (for example, a large order amount or a suspicious payment status). If nothing looks wrong, processing continues on its own; only the ones that get flagged become tasks waiting for review.
  • When stock falls below a threshold you've set, a task is automatically created asking someone to look into it.
  • Communication with Shopify and any errors along the way are logged automatically, and you can be notified if something goes wrong.
  • MintJams Commerce periodically and automatically checks whether its own data has drifted out of sync with Shopify — this check is called reconciliation.

What needs an operator's action

  • Approving or rejecting tasks waiting for review (order review, refund review)
  • Entering shipping details (fulfillment)
  • Entering the reorder quantity on an inventory-check task
  • Adding or editing extra product information, such as multi-language descriptions and metafields
  • Initial setup of notification channels (Slack, Discord, etc.) and the Shopify connection

All of these show up as a list in the Tasks app in the admin screen (Webtop). This is where the people responsible for them do the work.

How to read processing status

There are two different ways to look at the status of a piece of data.

  • How far MintJams Commerce's own processing has gotten (for example: received, waiting for review, approved, completed, or error). This has nothing to do with Shopify — it just shows where the item stands within MintJams Commerce's own workflow.
  • Shopify's own status (for example: whether a product is published or still a draft, an order's payment status, or whether it has been refunded). This simply mirrors the information as it stands in Shopify.

Most screens show these two side by side, so you can always tell which one you're looking at.

Feature list

  1. Products — Starting from the product information held in Shopify, you can add and edit things like multi-language descriptions and metafields on the MintJams Commerce side, then push those changes back to Shopify when needed.
  2. Inventory — Track stock levels at each location, automatically create a check task whenever stock falls below a threshold, and keep an eye on orders that are waiting on backordered stock.
  3. Orders & refunds — Receive orders and refunds, check them against your rules, and record shipping details.
  4. Storefront — A read-only window for publishing product information to the outside world. No setup is needed — it always reflects Shopify's current published state.
  5. Operations tools — Brings together the dashboard, health monitoring, notifications, checking for mismatches with Shopify (reconciliation), report output, task due-date management, and viewing and editing customer information.
  6. Data integration — Handles the Shopify connection settings, reviewing and reprocessing the history of data you've received, and writing changes back to Shopify.

Getting started

Most of the features above won't send any notifications until you set up the following two things (incoming data is still recorded either way):

  1. The Shopify connection (the Shop settings in the admin screen that correspond to your Shopify store)
  2. A notification channel (Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, LINE, email, or a generic webhook — take your pick. They all ship disabled, so turn on at least one that you plan to use)

For setup steps, see "Data integration" and the "Enabling it" section on each feature's page.