Support

1. Getting help

Write to support@ballastcloud.com. Replies usually come the same day, typically within one business day, and always within two, Monday to Friday.

Four things in the first message usually mean the first reply is the answer rather than a request for more detail:

• Your store domain — the yourshop.myshopify.com one, not your custom domain.
• Which screen you were on, and what you had just done.
• What you expected to see, and what you saw instead.
• Roughly when it happened, and your time zone.

A screenshot helps and is never required. Please do not send passwords or Shopify staff account credentials; nobody here will ever ask you for them.

2. Installing, and the permissions it asks for

Installing is the ordinary Shopify flow: you approve a list of permissions, and the app opens inside your admin. Nothing is changed in your store until you tell it to — the first thing it does is read.

One permission is worth explaining, because Shopify treats it specially and because you may see it listed as pending. read_all_orders is the permission that lets an app read order history older than 60 days. Shopify approves it per app, on request.

Everything else the app asks for is read or write access to products, inventory, locations, orders and fulfilments. There is no customer permission in the list, and the app never sees who your shoppers are.

3. The first hour

1. Install, and let the first sync run. It reads your products, variants, locations, inventory levels and order history. A small catalogue takes a few minutes; a large one with years of orders can take considerably longer, and it runs in the background — you can close the tab.
2. Add your suppliers, and give each one a lead time in days. Lead time is the single number that most changes what the app recommends, and a guess is much better than a blank.
3. Check the reorder suggestions. Every one shows its working: what it expects to sell, over what period, what is already on order, and what is left on the shelf.
4. Turn the ones you agree with into a purchase order, adjust the quantities, and send it to the supplier.
5. Receive the delivery against that order when it arrives — including a partial one — and the stock goes into Shopify at the right location.

Forecasts get better as the app watches more of your sales. The first week's numbers are arithmetic on history it inherited; by the second month it has seen your store itself.

4. How a reorder suggestion is made

A suggestion is not a black box, and it is meant to be argued with. For each variant at each location the app works out how fast it sells, how long the supplier takes, how much cover you want to hold, and what is already on its way.

• Days a variant could not be sold — because it was out of stock — are excluded from the rate. Counting them would teach the app that a product nobody could buy is a product nobody wants, which is how a bestseller quietly stops being reordered.
• Stock already on an open purchase order is counted, so the same delivery is never ordered twice.
• Each location is planned separately, because a shop that sells four a week and a shop that sells none do not want the same delivery.

If a number looks wrong, the usual cause is a lead time that has not been updated, or a product whose history belongs to a variant that was replaced. Both are worth checking before anything else.

5. Purchase orders and receiving

A purchase order holds what you ordered, from whom, at what cost, in the supplier's currency. Receiving is done against it, and can be done more than once: three of five boxes arriving on Tuesday and the rest on Friday is the normal case rather than an exception.

Freight, duty and other costs on a delivery are spread across the lines received, so what you see afterwards is what the stock actually cost you on the shelf rather than what the invoice said per unit. That landed cost is also written to the product's cost in Shopify — but only when the order is in your store's currency. The app converts nothing, so an order in another currency keeps its cost here, and the order page tells you it was not sent.

This app sends no email. A purchase order leaves it when you print it, save it as a PDF, or export it as CSV — and then it goes to your supplier the way you already send things to that supplier. The printed copy carries the quantities and the unit costs you agreed with them; it leaves out your landed cost, your receiving progress and your notes.

6. Counting, moving and writing off stock

7. Barcode labels

Labels print on Avery L7160 and 5160 sheets, and on Dymo 30336 and Zebra 2x1 rolls. The sheet is drawn on screen at its real size before anything is printed, so a misalignment is visible before it costs a sheet of labels. A run can also be started straight from a purchase order you have just received, which is the fastest way to label new stock.

If a product has nothing in its barcode field, the app offers to give it one from the range reserved for a shop's own use. The number is written to Shopify as well, so it scans at your till. It belongs to your shop alone and means nothing in anyone else's.

Printing at anything other than 100% scale is the usual cause of labels drifting across a sheet. Check that page scaling is off in the print dialog before adjusting anything else.

8. Bringing data in from somewhere else

Suppliers, supplier costs and product-to-supplier links can be imported from CSV, so years of purchasing detail held in another system does not have to be retyped. The import shows what it matched, what it could not, and what it would change, before anything is written.

Rows that cannot be matched to a product in your store are reported rather than skipped quietly, with the reason for each, so a file can be corrected and run again.

9. Plans and billing

Billing is handled by Shopify and appears on your Shopify invoice. Your current plan, what it includes and what it costs are shown on the Billing screen inside the app, and on Shopify's own subscription page — deliberately not repeated here, where it could fall out of date.

• Every store starts on the Free plan, which has no time limit. The first paid plan you choose begins with a 30-day free trial: nothing is charged during it, and uninstalling during it means you are never billed.
• Changing plan takes effect immediately, and Shopify prorates the difference.
• Uninstalling cancels the subscription. There is nothing separate to cancel.

10. Your data

What is collected, why, and how long it is kept is set out in full at /privacy. The short version: the app records what sold, not who bought it, and it holds no shopper personal data at all.

• Every report and list exports to CSV, so your data is never locked in here.
• Uninstalling deletes your access token immediately. Your records are held for 48 hours and then deleted — long enough that reinstalling after a mistake or a declined card gets you back everything, including sales history that cannot be rebuilt from Shopify.

11. Common problems

12. Who publishes this app

WILLIAM JORDAN ISAAC ELVY, 16/71 Jijaws St, Sumner, QLD, 4074, Australia.

Support: support@ballastcloud.com. Privacy policy: /privacy.