Video Tutorials – Zippykind Docs

What are WebHooks and How to Use Them?

David Shields — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 01:04:03 +0000

WebHooks are HTTP requests that occur when an event changes within the Zippykind driver’s application. So let’s say you want your Zippykind account to notify your application or website when your driver marks the delivery ticket ‘successful’, you can easily accomplish this by setting up WebHooks.

A common scenario for setting up a WebHook would be if you want to archive the order in your shopping cart platform when your driver marks the delivery ticket successful. Or perhaps you want to send your customer a text message or email through your own notifications system when your driver marks the delivery ticket as ‘started’, this can also be done using WebHooks.

Do I need to send through an API request to Zippykind in order to get a WebHook callback?

Some platforms only use WebHooks as a callback and require an API request to be sent before a WebHook can be triggered; however, Zippykind doesn’t require you to send the API request, you can use WebHooks unilaterally.

What format is the WebHook data sent in?

The WebHook data will include some basic information like the event name which will indicate what status the delivery ticket is in, plus the date and some other basic information. The data will be sent to the endpoint you provide in JSON structure.

WebHooks vs Polling

Polling can be very annoying and very resource intensive. Polling is when you setup a cron job or a script to ping an endpoint on a recurring basis. So if your endpoint checks for status changes in the delivery tickets and their have been no changes, the ping was for nothing and only used resources that didn’t need to be used. This is why many people prefer WebHooks to polling.

Watch our demonstration video below to see how simple we have made it to setup WebHooks in your Zippykind account. You can learn more about our WebHooks through our API documentation.

Shopify Local Delivery Stores Easily Connect to Zippykind’s Delivery Software to Instantly Dispatch New Delivery Orders Totally Hands-Free

David Shields — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:35:26 +0000

Shopify operates one of the largest ecommerce platforms on the internet. They make setting up your inventory of products to providing checkout payment solutions a breeze. If you currently own a Shopify store and your store deliveries products and or services to your end consumers, then you should read on.

Delivery Roots and Direction

For years delivery companies used large bulky GPS units and spreadsheets to track their delivery orders, but with new innovations in technology, services like Zippykind have taken billion dollar technology and have offered it to small and medium sized businesses. You don’t need to be a Pizza Hut, Edible Arrangements, FedEx or Uber to run your business with top industry technology. From order processing, dispatching to driver tracking and customer notifications, Zippykind has bundled all of the most important parts of the delivery process and is offering it to all sized businesses.

A Hands-Free Delivery Process

Imagine a totally hands-free process. Normally when your store receives an order online, someone from your store has to copy and paste the order information into a GPS unit or a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) and then provide that information to the delivery driver. With Zippykind, you can easily connect your Shopify store to your Zippykind account, so that every order that your store receives, will automatically send all the delivery information to your delivery driver and can also notify your customer. The easiest way to connect your Shopify store to your Zippykind account is through Zapier. After a lot of contemplation, you may ask yourself, “but what if I don’t know which driver I want to assign the delivery ticket to?”. That is a good question and we have an answer.

Setup Map Zones to Automatically Assign New Delivery Tickets To Drivers

Another step towards totally automating your delivery business is to setup Map Zones. Map Zones is a feature offered through Zippykind that lets you draw zones on a map once and assign drivers and/or fees to those zones so that all future deliveries are automatically either assigned to a new driver and/or imposed a delivery fee.

Watch our demonstration video below to see how easy it is to go from spending 30 minutes or more dispatching deliveries to a totally hands-free dispatching experience. Learn more about all of our amazing features or sign up for a free account.

Create Routes for Your Delivery Drivers using our Route Planner

David Shields — Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:00:26 +0000

Sometimes a delivery company plans their routes in advance and sometimes deliveries are not planned at all and are dispatched at the last minute. The latter is referred to as on-demand delivery. The two most common ways delivery companies dispatch their delivery drivers is:

On-Demand Delivery
Route Delivery

On-Demand Delivery

Let’s say your delivery company deliveries ice cream and you have 4 delivery trucks driving around in the field waiting for their next delivery destination from dispatch. Additionally, let’s say your dispatch operator just received a phone call and an order was placed so your dispatch operator sends the delivery details to the delivery driver through Zippykind’s Manual Dispatch form. This is an example of an on-demand delivery scenario and is very common for on-hand products that don’t need to be tailored toward the end consumer.

Route Delivery

Alternatively, let’s say your company receives 20 orders and each order has an assortment of products that need to be delivered to the end consumer. Or let’s say, you own a water delivery company and your customers are setup on recurring delivery, these are common scenarios of a route delivery business modal. If your company has customers who need items/products delivered on a recurring basis, you should really check out our Recurring Subscriptions feature which lets you easily setup recurring deliveries very easily. If your company needs route planning tools to help your dispatch operators find the shortest route for your delivery drivers, please watch the video below. You will see how easy it is to create new routes by simply clicking on the markers on the map. Your delivery drivers can also find the best route by using our route optimization feature within the drivers application.

Zippykind’s Delivery Software Route Planner

Upload Deliveries, Products and Customer Accounts to Your Zippykind Account

David Shields — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 05:31:27 +0000

Using the Zippykind uploader, you can upload a large number of delivery tickets, customer accounts and products. Please watch the video below to get a better look at the uploader.

Create Recurring Subscriptions for Your Delivery Business

David Shields — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 03:12:00 +0000

Do you deliver products to your customers on a recurring basis? If the answer is yes, then you should watch the video below. Zippykind’s subscription feature lets you setup subscriptions for each of your customers that you deliver products to. Most subscription based systems make you setup a “batch” of future occurrences that has an end date, whether it’s a delivery or an appointment. Zippykind let’s you setup subscriptions that will continue to recur and automatically create delivery tickets for the customer which means you don’t have to take any actions in the future. Once you setup the subscription, Zippykind will continue to create new delivery tickets and assign them to the appropriate driver.

Setup Your Zippykind Delivery Software Account In Minutes

David Shields — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 02:01:36 +0000

Do you need help setting up your Zippykind account? The video below will is a crash course on Zippykind and will walk your through most of the basic setup steps you will want to complete. Some of the setup steps includes:

Create team account.
Create driver account.
Add products through the CSV Uploader.
Add products manually.
Create delivery ticket.
Track delivery driver.
Driver delivery load.
Change dashboard map calendar day.
Login to driver’s app.
Update dispatch operator and customer with delivery progress.
Find driver’s GPS positing during status update of delivery ticket.
Export delivery ticket and order information as a PDF.

You will be taken through the Setup Account module at the beginning of the video. When you log into your Zippykind account for the first time, you will see the Setup Account module. If you close the Setup Account module, you can re-open it by going to the settings page.

Manage the Products for your Delivery Business

David Shields — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 01:15:00 +0000

Using Zippykind’s product manager, you can easily send product information to your driver’s, so they know what to delivery. Adding products is easy and adding them to new delivery tickets is even easier. Simply add a new product through the Zippykind product manager and when you go to create a new delivery ticket through the ‘Add New Ticket’ form which will let you create a new delivery ticket, you will see all of the products you have added in a dropdown menu.

You can add your product list to Zippykind and then search or browse your products while creating a new delivery ticket. Easily add product information and order information to each delivery ticket that you send to your delivery drivers.

Please watch the demonstration video below to learn more about the Zippykind products manager.

Manage Your Delivery Orders

David Shields — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:54:52 +0000

Orders that appear in the orders manager of your Zippykind account should not be confused with delivery tickets and are not required. You can send a delivery ticket with delivery information such as delivery address, customer’s name, customer’s email address and customer’s phone number without sending order information.

When you create a new delivery ticket through the ‘Add New Ticket’ form in Zippykind, you have the option to add order information such as: products ordered, quantity, weight, tax and total due. Providing order information gives your driver more information about what products need to be delivered and if the order is a COD (cash on delivery), how much money to collect. All orders can be exported as a PDF and download or printed.

Below is a screenshot of what the order view on the ‘Add New Ticket’ form looks like.

When a delivery ticket is created that has order information included, the order record will be added to the orders manager. You can click on Orders from the main menu and search through past orders. The order information will also be provided on the delivery ticket details page.

Please watch the demonstration video below to learn more about the Zippykind Order Manager.

Create Multiple Logins for One Zippykind Account

David Shields — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:43:09 +0000

You can create multiple logins for your Zippykind account by creating Operator accounts within your admin account. When you first sign up for a Zippykind account, your account role is that of an admin. Which means you have the highest permissions and can access all of the Zippykind software.

You can create operator accounts for your office staff so that they can login and manage your Zippykind account. Your operators can have their own login credentials. Operator accounts don’t have all of the permissions that an admin account has. An operator can’t see sensitive account information like your accounts payment history, invoice and membership information. Additionally, they can’t make crucial account changes such as changing the notifications or changing your Zippkind account settings.

Please watch the demonstration video below to get a better understanding of how to create Operator accounts.

Send Customer’s SMS Text Messages and Email Notifications with Delivery Details

David Shields — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:26:22 +0000

Communicating efficiently with your customers can save your delivery business a ton of time and money and can make the difference between a good review online and a bad review online. Customer satisfaction should be your delivery businesses number one priority, luckily, Zippykind has a feature for that too.

Using Zippykind’s notifications feature, you can create custom messages that will be sent out to your customer’s when your driver has:

Accepted a delivery or pickup ticket.
Started the delivery or pickup.
Arrived to the delivery destination.
Completed the delivery successfully.

Other delivery and pickup notifications that you can add include:

Driver added a photo to the delivery ticket.
Driver added a signature to the delivery ticket.
Driver added a note to the delivery ticket.
Driver declined the delivery ticket.
Customer was not home, so driver cancelled the delivery.

Countless times, Zippykind has received positive messages about the notifications feature and the tremendous value it has added to their customer relations. You can use the notifications feature in many ways. Some companies will use the notifications feature to send the notifications to the person who is receiving the delivery while others will use it to send notifications to the person who ordered the item that is going to be delivered. The latter option is very popular among Florist.

Imagine you own a floral company and you have an order that was just placed from a husband who wants to have flowers delivered to his wife at work. Using the Zippykind notifications feature, the husband can receive notifications throughout the delivery process and even receive a photo of the flowers in the hands of his grateful wife upon completion of the delivery. This is a common scenario for florist who use the Zippykind platform. The possibilities of how you can use the notifications feature is vast.

Please take a moment to watch the SMS Text Message and Email Notification demonstration video below.