Settings, team and setup

The Admin screens: company profile and addresses, who gets alert emails, shipping method mappings, carrier accounts, holidays, feature switches, billing, the Team page, and the Setup checklist.

Settings has tabs; each is linkable (for example /settings?tab=holidays).

Company

Alert Emails

One row per category, each with a comma-separated list of addresses, a description and an active flag. Provisioning creates the three rows addressed to the installing owner; change them to the right inboxes.

Shipping Method Mappings

Orders arrive with the shipping option name exactly as your checkout shows it ("Economy (5 to 8 business days)"). A mapping turns a Raw Value into a Normalized Value that the pack station understands: Standard, Expedited, Overnight, or a specific service such as USPS Priority or UPS Ground. Add a row for every shipping option your store offers; unmapped methods fall back to Standard at the pack station and show the raw text.

Carrier accounts

A carrier account is a USPS or UPS postage account inside your Stamps.com account, used to buy Endicia labels at the pack station. The row holds: Name, Carrier (USPS or UPS), Postage account number, Client ID and Client secret (from the Stamps.com developer registration), Refresh token (obtained by signing in as the Stamps.com user who should be billed), the API and token endpoints, Default and Active. The How to get and enter your shipping API credentials panel on the tab walks through it.

• Test connection confirms the credentials work before anyone buys a label.
• One account per carrier is normal; Set default chooses which is used when several exist. A single account can serve both USPS and UPS.
• Deactivate hides an account from the pack station without deleting its history.
• Each account needs its own refresh token; sharing one token between two rows breaks both.

Holidays

The days the warehouse is closed. They feed the handling time Lodsted reports and the next-business-day logic. Weekends are always closed. Each rule has a name, a type, and an active flag:

• Fixed date: the same date every year (December 25). Add a Year to make it a one-off closure (an inventory count, a weather day).
• Floating: the nth weekday of a month (4th Thursday of November; Last Monday of May).

The table shows each rule's next date. Uncheck Active to pause a rule without deleting it. The Instructions button on the tab repeats this.

Features

Pack station on or off. Off removes the menu entry; shipments can still be added by hand or imported.

Billing

Plan, subscription status, trial or period end dates, the orders used this cycle, and whether the install has full access. Plans are bands of orders per month, and every plan includes every feature. Every band starts with a 14-day full-access free trial, approved on Shopify like the subscription itself; there is no setup fee. Until a plan is chosen Lodsted is read-only, and the banner at the top of every page links here while that is the case. Plans are chosen and changed on the Setup page (Manage on the Setup page).

More than 15,000 orders a month: contact us.

What counts. An order counts once, in the 30-day billing cycle in which it first ships or is closed as Complete (including one fulfilled in Shopify). Orders fulfilled during the free trial are not counted. The meter on the tab shows this cycle's count against the band and when it resets.

Orders over the band are billed at your plan's own per-order price (the band price divided by the band), as Shopify usage charges on the same Shopify bill. Lodsted posts them every 6 hours; admins also see Post usage now. The tab shows how many orders are over the band, what they come to and how much has already been billed. Each band up costs less per order than the one before.

When a bigger plan costs less. Because extra orders are billed at your own plan's rate, a busy month on the right plan costs only a little more. Past the count in the last column, the next plan up would have cost less for the cycle: for example 1,500 orders on the $29 plan come to $87, the price of the 2,000-order plan. From that point Lodsted emails you once a cycle with the plan that would cost less and what it would save.

Usage cap. When you approve a plan, Shopify also asks you to approve a cap on usage charges per cycle (the table above). Shopify never lets a cycle's usage charges go past it. As extra charges reach 80% of the cap Lodsted emails you with the date the cap would be reached at your current pace.

At the cap. On the three smaller plans, reaching the cap starts one full business day of grace (weekends and your holidays skipped, in the warehouse time zone): everything keeps working, and the email gives the exact time it ends. After that, until the next cycle starts or a plan change is approved:

• Paused: creating new waves, and shipping or buying a label for an order that is not in a wave (including a label sent outside an order).
• Never paused: downloading orders, picking, packing and shipping waves already created, receiving, moves, every screen, Billing and Setup, and changing plan.

A plan change lifts the pause as soon as Shopify confirms it. On the 15,000-order plan nothing pauses: usage charges stop at its $1,500 cap and work carries on. For more than that every month, contact us.

Who is told. Each of these emails (a cheaper plan, 80% of the cap, cap reached, new waves paused) is sent once per cycle, to the store owner and the Admin alert addresses. A cap cannot be raised on its own; moving up a plan raises it. A plan approved before 20 October 2026 keeps the cap approved then (three times its price) until it is changed.

Changing plans. A plan change is approved in Shopify like the first plan. Lodsted follows the subscription Shopify reports as active: until you approve the change you stay on, and are billed by, your current plan, and declining or abandoning the change leaves it as it was.

Data access

Connect Power BI, Excel, Tableau or any ODBC tool straight to your own Lodsted data. It is an add-on, a flat $20 a month added to your plan and approved in Shopify like the plan itself. Once it is on your subscription, Turn on access creates a read-only database login and shows its password once. Copy it then, or save all the details as a JSON file from the same window: Lodsted does not keep it, and a lost password means issuing a new one, which replaces the old one at once. Turn off access ends open connections immediately; turning it back on issues a new password. The same tab's Download a backup button is free on every plan, and matters most before you uninstall.

The login reads the reporting schema only: views named orders, order_line_items, shipments, inventory, inventory_transactions, products, locations, customers, customer_emails, shipping_addresses, waves, purchase_orders, returns and the rest listed on the tab. Column names stay the same between Lodsted releases, so reports keep working. Nothing can be written, and store API tokens, user passwords and carrier credentials are never included.

Every query that returns data from a reporting view is recorded with the login, the view, the connecting application and the time. So is every page in Lodsted that shows customer names, addresses or phone numbers (an order, a packing slip, a pack-station scan, a label, a backup), with the person who opened it, what it was (for example order 1234) and the application Lodsted app. The tab's Recent reads list shows the latest of both, with or without the add-on, and the data_access_log view holds the rest. Records are kept 90 days. Because the server writes that record during your query, a connection set to read-only (the psqlODBC "Read Only" box) is refused; leave it unticked. Connect with SSL mode require: the connection is encrypted, and the server's certificate is self-signed, so tools that insist on verifying it need that check turned off for this server.

ODBC driver: match your Office, not Windows. The psqlODBC installer adds a 32-bit and a 64-bit driver. Excel and Access can only use the one that matches Office itself (File › Account › About Excel says 32-bit or 64-bit), and most Office installs are 32-bit. For 32-bit Office, set the data source up in C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe with the PostgreSQL Unicode driver; for 64-bit Office, use ODBC Data Sources (64-bit) and PostgreSQL Unicode(x64). The wrong one shows up as a "driver not found" or "architecture mismatch" error.

Microsoft Access. Link the views with External Data › New Data Source › From Other Sources › ODBC Database. The table list also shows Lodsted's internal tables, named with public. in front: they are the raw tables behind the views and cannot be opened with this login, so tick only the reporting. ones. When Access asks you to "Select Unique Record Identifier", click OK without choosing a field: it asks for every view because views carry no key, and the link is read-only either way.

Writing your own queries. Query the views like tables: filters, joins and sorting work as usual, and a filter on a view uses the indexes of the tables behind it. Text comparisons ignore case, as everywhere in Lodsted, so store_name = 'MY-STORE' matches my-store. Filter on columns as they are (order_date >= '2026-10-01') rather than wrapped in a function, so the index can be used.

Removing the add-on is a link at the bottom of the tab. The change is approved in Shopify, and database access turns off as soon as Shopify confirms it.

Your data when you uninstall

Before you uninstall, download a backup. Download a backup on the Data access tab produces a single file holding every order, customer, item, inventory record, shipment, wave and purchase order, and it is free on every plan, add-on or not. The file restores into any PostgreSQL 18 database with pg_restore, so your history stays usable without Lodsted. Store API tokens, team passwords and carrier credentials are left out of it on purpose.

Uninstalling does not touch your data straight away. For 48 hours nothing changes, and reinstalling simply picks up where you left off. Two days after the uninstall Shopify tells Lodsted to erase the shop's data; Lodsted then keeps it for another 30 days, and reinstalling inside those 30 days cancels the erasure and brings everything back exactly as it was.

At the end of the 30 days Lodsted takes one final backup, emails the shop owner a private download link for it (valid for 30 days), and then permanently deletes the database and every login to it, including any Data access login. After that a reinstall starts from an empty warehouse.

If you want your data gone sooner than the 30 days, ask support and it is removed on request.

Team

Staff appear here automatically after they first open Lodsted from the Shopify admin. Click a row to set first and last name, email, level, and to deactivate someone. The list shows last login. Filter Active or Inactive, search by name.

Setup

The checklist shown at first run and available ever after. Each item says whether it is done and links to where it is done: Building your warehouse, Fulfillment location, Billing, Wave definitions, Products and stock tracking, Company profile, Add your team, Printing setup. The First-time setup page explains each in order. The Products and stock tracking review is described on Products and kits.

The title bar

Inside Shopify the bar above the page shows the current screen, with a back arrow to the parent page on order, PO, pack and setup sub-pages; a Sync button that pulls orders, processes shipments and pushes stock right now; a Pack station button that opens the pack station in its own tab; the theme switch; and a menu showing who is signed in and the build version. A clock in the corner shows warehouse time. The pack station tab has its own slim top bar with the same Sync and theme controls.