Connect ShipStation to Foundry
Let ShipStation do what it's good at — rate shopping and label buying — while Foundry stays the source of truth for stock and order state. Orders push out, shipments and tracking come back.
What you'll get
- • New orders appear in ShipStation automatically, ready to rate and label
- • Shipments and tracking numbers flow back into Foundry within minutes
- • Order status advances on its own as items ship — including partials
- • Tracking pushes onward to the sales channel the order came from
- • Dropship orders can be kept out of the pipe entirely
How it fits together
ShipStation is an app, not a channel — it never sells anything. It sits downstream of whatever channel produced the order:
Shopify / BigCommerce / Woo → Foundry → ShipStation
tracking ← ← shipment
If your storefront platform also has its own native ShipStation integration, you can leave it on. Foundry matches on order number and adopts an existing ShipStation order rather than creating a duplicate, so both sides can push safely during a migration.
Setup
ShipStation is configured once for the whole organization — not per sales channel.
Generate ShipStation API keys
In ShipStation, go to Settings → Account → API Settings and click Generate API Keys. Copy the API Key and API Secret. If keys already exist, reuse them — regenerating breaks any other tool using the old pair.
Paste them into Foundry
In Foundry, open Settings and paste the key and secret into the ShipStation section. Save. Foundry begins pushing eligible orders from that point forward, and the backfill sweep picks up existing ones.
Decide whether auto-push should be on
Auto-push defaults to on: every order that reaches a shippable status goes to ShipStation by itself. Turn it off if you're dropship-first and don't want orders reaching the warehouse pipe before they've been allocated to a vendor. See dropship routing below.
What syncs
| Data | Direction | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Orders | Foundry → ShipStation | On order create, plus a 15-min backfill sweep |
| Shipments | ShipStation → Foundry | Every 10 minutes |
| Tracking numbers | ShipStation → Foundry | With the shipment |
| Order status | Derived in Foundry | When all items are shipped |
Which orders are eligible
An order is pushed only when all of these hold:
- • ShipStation credentials are set on the organization
- • Auto-push is enabled
- • The order isn't already in ShipStation
- • Status is live — not cancelled, refunded, or deleted
Anything failing a rule is skipped silently and re-evaluated on the next sweep, so fixing the cause is enough to make it flow — there's nothing to replay by hand.
Partial shipments
Shipping some lines creates a shipment against just those quantities. The order stays open, and Foundry advances it to fully shipped only once every line is accounted for. Multiple boxes on separate days work the same way.
Dropship & mixed fulfillment
If you dropship some items and stock others, you don't want every order landing in ShipStation — a vendor-fulfilled line has no label for you to buy, and an order sitting in the queue that nobody will ship is worse than one that never arrived.
Stocked-only merchants
Leave auto-push on. Everything routes to ShipStation, which is what you want.
Dropship-first merchants
Turn auto-push off. Orders stay in Foundry until you allocate them to a vendor, and only what you're shipping yourself gets pushed.
Mixed merchants
Foundry routes on what's actually on hand rather than on a single org-wide switch, so a stocked line can go to ShipStation while a dropship line on the same order goes to a purchase order. This is the area we're actively extending — if your split is unusual, talk to us before wiring it up.
Limits worth knowing
Foundry doesn't buy labels
Rate shopping, label purchase, and carrier accounts all stay in ShipStation. Foundry doesn't attempt to replicate them.
Shipment sync is polled, not instant
Shipments are pulled on a 10-minute cycle, so a label bought seconds ago won't be in Foundry immediately. This is deliberate — ShipStation's API is rate-limited, and polling in a predictable window is more reliable than racing per-event webhooks across every account.
One ShipStation account per organization
Credentials live at the organization level. Running genuinely separate ShipStation accounts per brand needs separate Foundry organizations.
Troubleshooting
Orders aren't reaching ShipStation
Walk the eligibility rules above in order — the usual answer is that auto-push is off, or the order is in a status Foundry doesn't consider shippable yet. Remember the backfill sweep runs every 15 minutes, so give it a cycle before digging further.
The same order appears twice in ShipStation
This happens when your storefront's own ShipStation integration used a different order-number format than Foundry, so the match-and-adopt lookup couldn't see the existing copy. Align the numbering or disable one of the two pushes. Duplicates already created need merging in ShipStation.
Tracking is in Foundry but not on the storefront
Tracking arrives from ShipStation first, then pushes onward to the originating channel — two separate hops. If the Foundry order shows tracking and the storefront doesn't, the second hop failed; check the channel's sync errors rather than the ShipStation connection.
Order stuck at partially shipped
Foundry only closes an order when every line is fully accounted for. A quantity mismatch — an item shipped in ShipStation that was never on the Foundry order, or a line cancelled on one side only — leaves it open. Compare the two line lists; the gap is usually obvious.
Stuck? Email support with an affected order number and we'll trace both hops.