Order safety
How PO Autopilot prevents incorrect orders
The safeguards that keep automation from quietly producing a wrong draft order.
Updated
Automating order entry is only worth doing if the output can be trusted. These are the rules that make that possible.
Shopify holds the truth
Products, prices, companies, delivery rates and payment terms are read from Shopify at the moment they are needed. Nothing is copied into PO Autopilot and used later as though it were still current.
A draft order is built from Shopify’s own values, so it cannot disagree with your store.
Nothing is invented
PO Autopilot never creates a product, a company, a location, a contact, a delivery option or a payment term to make an order fit.
If a purchase order names a product you do not sell, the answer is that it does not match — not a new product. If it names a buyer who is not in Shopify, you are asked, and the buyer is created in Shopify by you.
Identifier matches must be exact
A line resolves automatically from an item code only when the code matches a Shopify SKU, barcode or configured identifier metafield exactly. Results that come back from search are re-checked before use, so a search matching loosely cannot produce an automatic selection.
Ambiguity becomes a question
Where more than one Shopify record matches equally well, nothing is chosen. Two variants sharing a SKU means you are asked which one — because picking either would be a coin toss on a real order.
Suggestions wait for you
When a match is made from a description rather than an identifier, it is applied to save you typing and then held as a decision until you agree.
Candidates are drawn from your catalogue and ranked; the ranking chooses among things that exist, and cannot produce anything outside that set.
Buyers’ vocabularies are kept apart
Everything learned about a buyer — their item codes, pack sizes, delivery wording, payment terms — is stored against their company location. One customer’s code for a product is never applied to another customer’s order, even when the codes are identical.
Decisions are re-validated before the draft is created
Between resolving an order and creating the draft, your store can change. If a variant is archived, a delivery rate changes, or payment terms are altered, the order returns to review with the affected decision reopened rather than being created on stale information.
The same order is not processed twice
Sending the same document again does not produce a second order or a second draft. See Duplicate order detection.
Files are scanned before they are read
No document is opened, decoded or extracted until a malware scan has cleared it. See File security and malware scanning.
What this means for you
You still review orders — that is the design, not a limitation. What you should not have to do is check the things that resolved cleanly, because those were resolved by exact matches against your own Shopify data.