Home Office Space
Home Office Space — Building and Automating a Multi-Supplier Shopify Store
Home Office Space (homeofficespace.co.nz) is a New Zealand eCommerce store focused on the work-from-home market — desks, chairs, accessories, electronics, and everything a Kiwi home office needs. The brief was to build something that looked professional and trustworthy, performed well on mobile, and could handle the operational complexity of a multi-supplier fulfilment model without the team having to manually manage every order.
Here’s how we approached it.
Design and Build
The store was built on Shopify, which made sense for a product-focused eCommerce site at this scale — a robust inventory system, reliable checkout, built-in payment handling, and a solid foundation to customise from.
The design goal was clean and confidence-building. Home office furniture is a considered purchase — customers are often spending several hundred dollars or more, and the site needed to feel like a place worth buying from. That meant clear product photography, straightforward navigation, honest product descriptions, and a checkout experience that didn’t get in the way.
Home Office Space is New Zealand only website, which focuses on bringing the best quality desks, chairs, accessories, electronics, and gadgets to the New Zealand work-from-home market. Our aim is to be the main one-stop-online-shop for all Kiwis who work from home. It’s definitely going to be an interesting ride!
We focused on:
- A clean, uncluttered layout that let the products speak
- Clear category structure across desks, chairs, accessories, and electronics
- Mobile-first design — a significant portion of browsing happens on phones, even for considered purchases
- Fast load times, which directly affect both conversion rates and Google ranking
- Trust signals throughout — clear returns policy, NZ-based business, and straightforward contact details
The Fulfilment Challenge
This is where things got interesting. Home Office Space operates a drop-shipping model with multiple suppliers. When a customer places a single order, it might contain products from two or three different suppliers — each of whom needs to receive their own picking and packing instructions, with the right customer details, the right products, and nothing from anyone else’s order mixed in.
Doing this manually is error-prone and time-consuming. As order volume grows, it becomes unmanageable. We needed a system that could handle this automatically, from the moment an order was placed.
The Automation Workflow
We built the order routing and notification system using Azure Logic Apps, connected to the Shopify API.
Here’s how the workflow runs:
1. Order placed on Shopify When a customer completes checkout, Shopify triggers a webhook. This fires the Logic App workflow automatically — no manual intervention required.
2. Order parsed and split by supplier The Logic App reads the order line items and groups them by supplier. An order containing products from three different suppliers becomes three separate supplier orders, each containing only the relevant items.
3. Packing slip generation For each supplier order, a formatted packing slip is generated automatically — including the customer’s delivery details, the specific products and quantities for that supplier, and any relevant order notes.
4. Automated supplier email Each supplier receives an email with their packing slip attached. The email is sent directly from the workflow — no one at Home Office Space has to touch it. The supplier has everything they need to pick, pack, and ship their portion of the order.
5. Customer confirmation The customer receives their standard Shopify order confirmation from the store, with no visibility into the supplier routing happening behind the scenes.
What This Means Operationally
Before this system, fulfilling a multi-supplier order required someone to manually identify which products came from which supplier, create separate communications for each, and send them individually — for every single order.
Now, that entire process is fully automated. An order comes in, gets routed, and each supplier has what they need within minutes — without anyone at Home Office Space doing anything. The team can focus on marketing, customer service, and growing the product range rather than processing orders.
As the store scales, the workflow scales with it. Adding a new supplier means updating the routing logic, not rebuilding the process.
The Stack at a Glance
- Shopify — storefront, product management, checkout, and order management
- Shopify Webhooks — triggers the automation on new orders
- Azure Logic Apps — orchestrates the order splitting, packing slip generation, and supplier notifications
- Azure API connectors — handles the Shopify API integration and email delivery
- Custom packing slip templates — formatted per supplier for clear, professional communications
The Takeaway
Home Office Space is a good example of how eCommerce automation can remove operational bottlenecks before they become a problem. Shopify handles the customer-facing side excellently — but out of the box, it doesn’t know anything about your fulfilment workflow. That’s the gap we filled.
The result is a store that can take orders, route them to the right suppliers, and get fulfilment underway — all without manual handling, and all within minutes of a customer clicking confirm.
Running a Shopify store with a complex fulfilment model? Get in touch — we’d love to help you take the manual work out of it.
