Automated dropship routing for Reflaunt — accept, publish, quarantine or delist without touching ops.

The problem

Reflaunt needed a mechanism that automatically decides whether to accept integrated products from partners, then routes them through the right chain: publish, push to the Reflaunt channel, quarantine for manual review, or delist.

The foundation is standard Shopify Flow triggers plus custom actions through a connector app — no bespoke ops spreadsheets, no guessing on every SKU update.

Eligibility rules

Accept/reject decisions combine product tags, metafields, and policy matrices:

• Tags: partner:<id>, condition:A|B|C, images:<n>, brand:<name>, reflaunt:blocked, reflaunt:eligible
• Metafields: qa.required_filled (bool), qa.images_count (int), compliance.authenticity (enum), pricing.vat_included (bool)
• Brand whitelist/blacklist, pre-owned grade, logistics constraints, minimum photo/field sets
• brand ∈ blacklist → reject; missing VAT where required → quarantine with auto recalc task
• duplicate SKU or brand+title+image fingerprint match → quarantine tagged duplicate

Tag taxonomy

Recommended tag structure keeps decisions auditable and filterable in admin:

• Source: partner:reflaunt, partner:xyz
• Quality: condition:A|B|C, images:<n>, incomplete:>3_fields
• Engine decision: reflaunt:eligible | reflaunt:quarantine | reflaunt:rejected
• Operational: duplicate, blocked:brand, blocked:policy, needs:vat_recalc

Shopify Flow scenarios

Flow 1 — Product Intake: on product create/update, if partner:* tag exists, a custom action computes qa.score, images_count, and required_filled. Blocked items → rejected. Score ≥ 80 with ≥ 3 images and condition A/B on a whitelisted brand → eligible, added to collection, webhook push_to_reflaunt. Everything else → quarantine with Ops notification.

Flow 2 — Inventory/Price Drift: quantity or price changes that violate policy (minimum photos, brand price floor, regional VAT) return the item to quarantine with a remediation task.

Flow 3 — Order Routing: on order create, if all lines are eligible with Reflaunt fulfillment → route to Reflaunt DS, send idempotent payload to connector. Mixed orders → split/partial route and notify Ops.

Custom Flow actions

Three custom actions power the logic:

• Compute QA — score, field completeness, image count, duplicate detection via indexes
• Policy Check — brand/region matrix (VAT mode, banned categories, dimensions)
• Push to Reflaunt — pack target contract, webhook/GraphQL call, handle retries

Integration requirements

Idempotency keys on SKU/VariantID plus payload hash. Exponential backoff retries and a DLQ for stuck batches. Queues and throttling to stay inside external rate limits.

Quarantine and manual review

Quarantined items never publish to the Reflaunt channel. Ops gets a task list: upload missing photos, fill critical fields, fix brand/category/policy mismatches, resolve duplicates.

After fixes, Flow recalculates status and promotes eligible items automatically. Variant-level decisions aggregate to product level — partial publish is supported when at least one variant qualifies.

Monitoring and audit

Dashboards track eligible/quarantine/rejected ratios, rejection reasons, and processing time. Alerts fire on duplicate spikes, policy_mismatch clusters, or falling quarantine → eligible conversion.

Every manual override (e.g. reflaunt:force-eligible) is logged with who/when.

What the business got

Automatic accept/reject for integrated SKUs without manual triage. Transparent quarantine with reasons and a short remediation path. Reliable order routing in Reflaunt dropship scenarios. New partners mean new rule profiles — not rewrites of core logic.