Wholesale Fulfillment Methods

Note: it is possible to mix & match the fulfillment methods.  For example, you could use fDaemon to download orders but your own integration with our REST API to submit order status updates. 

1. USING THE PRINT 50 or LAB 50 WINDOWS APPs

Print 50 and Lab 50 are operator-driven Windows apps that allow you to download orders, print custom invoices & labels, and mark orders are printed or shipped.  They are designed to handle the order volume of a typical camera shop and may experience performance issues if your volumes grows beyond a few dozen orders a day.  Some basic automation is available.  Only the three basic order status gates are supported -- order received, order printed, and order shipped.  A shipping tracking numbers can be manually entered (only one per order).

2. USING THE fDAEMON WINDOWS APP

The fDaemon app is built for high capacity and minimal operator involvement.  As orders are placed, fDaemon downoads all of the necessary photos or rendered images into a local path on the hard drive, which can be configured in the fDaemon.xml file.  Each order will be stored in a unique subfolder and will contain all of the image along with an order metadata xml file.

If you would like fDaemon to be configured to send notifications to you for successful and/or failed orders, please let us know.  Notifications can be sent via: Email, HTTP/HTTPS POST, SMS, AWS Lambda, or AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS).

You can post order status changes (printed, shipped, etc.) back to our platform by dropping text files into a local directory (c:\FDaemon\Outgoing\OrderStatus\) with the updated info.  

Documentation on the text file format is here: fDaemon

3. USING OUR REST API

Our REST API allows you to integrate fulfillment of orders from our platform directly into your workflow.   

Overview of Integration steps:

1. Notifications of new orders are posted to a dedicated AWS Simple Queue Service queue.  Use the Amazon AWS SDK to poll the SQS queue we provide. The order notification message body will contain XML with Order ID and originating Dealer Code: <OrderID>12345678</OrderID><Dealer>1234</Dealer>
2. Upon receiving an order notification, make a request to the Photo Finale API's GetAPMOrderXML method. (GET)
3. Use the XML order data to ingest into your system and fulfill the order.  The URLs for any required photo or rendered assets are provided in the XML data and can be downloaded directly.
4. Submit order status messages back using PF API's UpdateOrderStatus method.  (PUT)

Companies interested in using the API should contact us (rachel@photofinale.com) for documentation, setup and use-case approval.