Using the Shipping, Discount and Gift Card products for QuickBooks Online

When configuring your integration, you’re required to choose or create a Shipping product and also have the option to create a Discount Product and Gift Card product. These products are very useful in your integration as they provide a default product that can be automatically created for line items in your invoices not represented by standard products.  There is, however, a bit of confusion on how to use them and how they work. Below explains how this concept to help you understand how easy, simple and great these products are.

The Shipping product:

The Shipping Product is called a product because that is what it will be treated as in a connected service, however it’s much more than just a product. We create and use the Shipping Product to gather shipping costs from BigCommerce, then pass this data on in the correct format to your accounting system. After the Shipping Product is configured, no further action will be required by you – We use it to process your shipping costs differently than other line items in your orders and invoices, for example to apply different taxes and to allocate it to a different income account.

 

Why do I need to create the Shipping product?

Well, we don’t want to automatically start creating data in your accounting system without you knowing how, or why it ended up there – so we let you create it yourself. This allows you to stay in control of your data and how you want it to be treated.

What does it look like in an invoice?

In QuickBooks Online with shipping enabled:

In QuickBooks Online with shipping disabled:

Tip: shipping can be enabled and disabled in QuickBooks Online via Settings -> Company Settings -> Sales -> Sales form content -> Shipping

The Discount and Gift Card products:

The Discount Product and Gift Card products are very similar to the Shipping Product in that they enable us to create products to represent line items in your invoices that are not standard products. What makes these different to the Shipping product is that they’re not mandatory.

 

Awesome, how do I configure these special products?

These items are already automatically configured, however if you would like to configure different items to be used, follow the steps below:

1. Select Edit on the workflow for orders, if you're going through the configuration for the first time, just tick the check box
   
   
2. Please select Default Products and Advanced Options
   
   
3. Now, using the drop down menus provided you can choose another one of your products for any of the three default product options
   
4. Once configured, scroll down and select Save to save your changes