First off, I'd like to start by saying that our journey with Zoho Commerce and the entire process thus far in attempting to implement it as our e-commerce platform has been continuously marred with intense level frustration!  A two steps forwards, ten steps back kind of situation!  Along the way, I have held on to the hope that, despite the shortcomings and progressive discoveries of yet another lack of expected functionality requiring constant workaround 'gymnastics' to be figured out, the integration with Zoho Inventory, which we use for our inventory management, will still make it worthwhile.  (Suffice to say, I'm really not so sure about that anymore.)  

As we inch towards the finish line though, here is the latest one in the long list of unfortunate discoveries ....

I get to the stage of doing a couple of test orders to check/test the checkout and shipping process.  I have set up the customer email notifications that we want in Zoho Commerce. 

For the 1st test order, I create the shipment manually from the pending sales order within Inventory, and then add the relevant tracking number to the shipment (the consignments are handled through a third party shipping platform).  This then allows the shipment to be automatically tracked through to 'delivered' status in both Inventory and Commerce.  Good.  HOWEVER, by confirming the order and creating the shipment from the Inventory side, the customer email notifications in Commerce don't trigger (even though the shipment does progress through to being marked as 'delivered' as it also does in Inventory), so apart from the initial Order Summary, the customer doesn't get any of the others that have been set up, ie Order Shipped, Order delivered etc.  Not good.

For the 2nd test order then, this time I confirm and manually create the shipment for the order from the Commerce side instead, adding the tracking number in to the relevant field there.  Doing it this way, further email notifications do trigger, ie Order Shipped (with tracking link), but the shipment in this case doesn't automatically track through to 'delivered' status so the order shipment remains languishing as 'sent' only and hence the final Order Delivered email notification won't trigger (unless manually manipulated).

So, to summarise:

- If we 'ship' the order from the Inventory side, the automated shipment tracking works but the associated customer email notifications set up in Commerce don't work. 

- If we instead 'ship' from the Commerce side, the email notifications will work but not all the way through to conclusion because the automated shipment tracking doesn't work. 

So whichever way you do it, it only kinda sorta half works!

Aaaggghhh!! 

When I contacted Zoho Commerce support about it, I fully expected that there must be some kind of bug, they would fix it, get the developers on to it, straighten it out in the back end, or perhaps there was something I was doing wrong and they would show me how to do it correctly, so that it works as it should, right?  Nooooooo, wrong ....  they got back to me after relaying the issue to the developers informing me that there is no two-way sync on the Commerce side for the shipment tracking, unless you use the VERY LIMITED direct shipping carrier integration.  (Ie, not manually entering the tracking numbers as you can do in Inventory, and have it tracked via Aftership, hence my title question for this post). 

As I expressed to Zoho Commerce support ... Are they for real?  Is that supposed to be a straight-faced acceptable answer from the developers?  Are they satisfied with this half-baked type of offering?  In my subsequent follow-up crankily complaining about the whole sorry mess, support have told me they will lodge it as a feature request.  Really?  A feature request?  How about a 'bloody-well get it fixed in a hurry because this is such bullshit and your software doesn't work properly' request??

I'm now checking with/waiting to hear back from Inventory to see if it's possible to set up and automate email notifications from that side for the Commerce channel orders only.  And also, am investigating the possibility of segmenting out email notifications for Zoho Commerce orders only directly from the shipping platform we use (which sync via API).  This is looking the most likely 'best' alternative option.