Send To Many offers flexible settings to streamline how your bulk orders are created in Shopify, whether you're handling influencer mailings ("Marketing Sends") or customer orders ("Paid Sends"). Understanding these settings and their accounting implications helps you manage inventory, finances, and customer interactions more efficiently.
You can set defaults to be applied automatically to all your Sends. You can also update these settings while you're creating an individual Send.
Default Tags
Automatically applies specified tags to every order created by Send To Many. You can also add tags to all orders in a specific send.
Send To Many also adds a tag to every order generated ("Send To Many #xxxx") to make it easy to view and manage in Shopify's orders page.
Operations Impact
Simplifies tracking, reporting, and analytics in Shopify. Tags help differentiate orders for accounting, inventory tracking, or reporting purposes (e.g., influencer sends vs customer orders).
Marketing vs Paid Sends
Consider using specific tags to differentiate Marketing Sends (e.g., "influencer") from Paid Sends ("corporate gift").
Product Inventory
You can control whether the orders generated for your Send pull from product inventory in Shopify.
Options:
Take from inventory: Normal inventory management applies. Stock levels adjust automatically.
Take from inventory and ignore out-of-stock: Deducts from inventory but allows orders even if stock is insufficient.
Don't take from inventory: Inventory levels remain unchanged regardless of send quantities.
Operations Impact:
Choosing to "take from inventory" keeps accurate inventory records and can impact cost of goods sold (COGS) reporting.
"Ignore out-of-stock" can lead to negative inventory levels and accounting discrepancies if not managed carefully.
"Don't take from inventory" works well for sample products or digital goods, preventing inventory and COGS adjustments.
Marketing vs Paid Sends:
Marketing Sends: Often set to "Don't take from inventory" for promotional or non-sale samples that you might be managing outside of Shopify inventory.
Paid Sends: Typically set to "Take from inventory" to accurately reflect stock movements and revenue.
Shipping Method
When Send To Many pre-calculates orders, it can query your store and any fulfillment or carrier services you have configured for the available rates for each order, based on products and recipient location. During the Send workflow, you can then apply rates to the orders, so that when we generate those orders, we'll use actual rates and those will work properly with your fulfillment settings.
Options:
Calculate shipping using rates on your site: Uses your Shopify store's configured shipping rates.
Free shipping: Shipping charges are waived completely. You can provide a specific rate title as needed for your fulfillment settings.
Fixed shipping rate: Applies a uniform shipping fee across all orders. Select the flat rate you want applied to each order and give it whatever rate title you want to appear on your orders.
Accounting Impact:
Calculated shipping ensures accurate expense tracking and cost recovery.
Free or Fixed shipping options simplify budgeting and promotional expense tracking.
Marketing vs Paid Sends:
Marketing Sends commonly use a Free Shipping setting, unless you need use specific rates based on location.
Paid Sends typically use calculated shipping rates for cost accuracy and revenue consistency. This will also enable you to calculate the full shipping cost for invoicing your customer.
Order Revenue Handling
One of the trickiest things about bulk orders in Shopify is tracking and reporting on the revenue and taxes from the bulk order vs all the individual orders. To help with this, we provide two options for how value is tracked on individual orders.
Create $0 value orders: Orders are created without revenue recognition.
Create orders marked as paid using calculated amount: Orders show standard product price, taxes, and shipping, marked as paid with the payment gateway set to "send_to_many".
Accounting Impact:
$0 value orders prevent revenue and tax recognition, ideal for gifts or influencer sends where you don't want the orders to impact your sales numbers
Marked-as-paid orders accurately track revenue, taxes, and fulfillment costs in Shopify's reporting. You can also break out these orders in revenue reports based on payment method (gateway) or sales channel.
Aggregate draft orders can also impact revenue reporting. If you choose to generate an aggregate draft order for your Send. If you collect revenue from that draft, by marking it paid or processing a credit card payment, you may want to use the "$0 dollar value" option to avoid double-counting your revenue. You can filter reports by payment method ("manual" if you "mark as paid", for instance) or sales channel ("draft orders" vs "Send To Many") to help manage this issue as well.
Uses:
Marketing Sends often use $0 orders to avoid inflating revenue or taxes.
Paid Sends should select "marked as paid" to ensure proper accounting of revenue and tax obligations.
Order and Delivery Notifications
Since Shopify (and/or another notification platform like Klaviyo) generates multiple emails per order, it's important to be able to manage notifications when you're generating 10s or 100s of orders at a time. You don't want a corporate customer or marketing team member to unexpectedly receive hundreds of emails.
Here are your options for manage notifications in Send To Many:
Suppress all notifications: to prevent your customer (or recipients) from receiving notifications, we direct all order notifications to a "[email protected]" blackhole mailbox.
Send to recipients: The order recipients will receive order and fulfillment emails for their specific order.
Send to customer: Notifications go to the customer account tied to the order. Use this option with extreme caution as the customer will typically receive 3-5 notification emails for each order in the send. So a send of 100 orders could generate 500 emails!
Uses:
Marketing Sends: "Send to recipients" could be handy to keep influencers posted on their deliveries, unless your marketing team wants to manage all communication directly. In that case, you can provide them with access to the Send Summary page in the app, where they can see delivery status and tracking ids.
Paid Sends: "Send to recipient" can be handy for scenarios where a recipient should know in advance that the order is coming, as with perishable items.