What can you do with a Quiet Logistics Integration?
Quiet Logistics is a multi-channel e-commerce fulfillment provider. You can use the Quiet Logistics integration to:
- Send Return Merchandise Authorization’s (RMA) to Quiet Logistics
- Send item profiles to Quiet Logistics
- Send purchase orders to Quiet Logistics
- Send shipment orders to Quiet Logistics
- Retrieve shipping confirmations from Quiet Logistics
- Retrieve PO receipts from Quiet Logistics
- Retrieve RMA receipts from Quiet Logistics
- Retrieve inventory levels from Quiet Logistics
- Retrieve error messages associated with previous operations
Configure Quiet Logistics
Quiet Logistics Account & Amazon Web Services
This guide assumes that you have already registered an account with Quiet Logistics. Because Quiet Logistics uses Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) as well as Amazon S3 to manage your Data Flows you must have an active Amazon Web Services (AWS) account.
Amazon Web Services Security Credentials
In order to connect FlowLink to Quiet Logistics you must supply your AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access Key security credentials. This will enable FlowLink to access messages in SQS and Data files in your S3 Buckets. You can find your Access Key and Secret can by logging into your AWS account and clicking “Security Credentials” from the top menu as shown below:
Amazon does not allow users to retrieve their existing secret access keys, however a new key can be generated. Click “create new access key” to generate new keys and download them onto your local machine.
Be sure to save your access keys in a secure place as they are no longer retrievable after this initial download.
Alternatively you can create an IAM user that has access keys if you do not want to use keys from your root account.
Basic Workflows for Quiet Logistics Distribution
Workflows are at the foundation of FlowLink. Although you will need to customize your Workflows to match the exact business logic that you want for your specific fulfillment needs, we will present some common Workflows here.
To begin using your Quiet Logistics Connection go to Setup → Connections and select “Add Flow” under the Quiet Logistics icon.
Get Messages
Data about your shipments and orders are exchanged between FlowLink and your Quiet Logistics account in the form of “Messages”. These Messages are pushed to a SQS queue by Quiet Logistics which can then be retrieved by FlowLink. FlowLink then uses these Messages to update your storefront.
Define your Flow by selecting the “receive” option and select “Message” from the dropdown. If you have not yet pushed Message Data to FlowLink than Message Data may not appear as an option in the dropdown. In order to tell FlowLink how to handle Message Data push a sample Message object.
Next, select the “Get Messages” Webhook to routinely pull messages from the queue after a specified time interval. After you have finished defining the Flow, click “Next”.
The next step is to specify which message queue in your Amazon account FlowLink should check. If you do not already know the name of the correct queue you, should contact Quiet Logistics directly. You can view a list of all your existing Amazon SQS queues by logging into your Amazon Web Services account → SQS as shown below
If this is the first Flow that you have configured for Quiet Logistics, you will also be required to supply additional Connection Parameters before you can save the Flow. Please see the “Connection Configuration” section of this guide for more details.
Click “Save” to complete Flow setup. View your completed Flow by clicking “Setup” → “Flows”.
Send Shipment/RMA/Purchase Order
For example, whenever a customer places an order from your storefront, FlowLink will update Quiet Logistics so that the fulfillment process can be initiated. This guide will configure a Flow that processes Shipment data, however identical Flows can be configured for several types of data such as RMAs or Purchase Orders.
Define your Flow by selecting the “send” option and select “Shipment” from the drop down. Next, select the “Add Shipment” Webhook to send Shipment data to Quiet Logistics. After you have finished defining the Flow, click “next”.
In order to configure your Flow, you will need to supply the following Parameters:
- Outgoing Queue: This is the name of the Amazon SQS queue which is used to store messages with the details of your shipment. If you do not know the name of the correct queue to use, contact Quiet Logistics directly for your account configuration details.
- Outgoing Bucket: This is the name of the Amazon S3 bucket which stores XML files containing information about your shipment. Quiet Logistics generates these files to handle shipment data. If you do not know the name of the correct bucket to use, contact Quiet Logistics directly for your account configuration details. Similarly, you may view a list of all your Amazon S3 buckets by logging into your Amazon Web Services account → S3 – as shown below:
- Client ID: For more details about finding your client ID please contact Quiet Logistics directly.
- Business Unit: For more details about finding your business unit please contact Quiet Logistics directly.
Enter the correct Parameters and click “Save” to complete Flow setup. View your completed Flow by clicking “setup” → “Flows”.
Connection Configuration
Whenever you create your first Flow for a Connection you will be prompted to supply Connection Parameters. Subsequent Flows that you create will reuse this information, and you will not be required to enter it again.
Enter your AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access Key and click “save”.
If you ever need to modify the Connection Parameters, you can do so by locating the existing Quiet Logistics Connection and clicking the ‘Connection Parameters’
The Quiet Logistics Integration is an officially supported Integration provided by FlowLink. It is hosted on our infrastructure but as a FlowLink customer, you have the option to fork the source code and host a modified version yourself. Full source code is available on Github.
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