What we actually do, before you trust us with orders.

Manual repping scales linearly with orders and inversely with rep attention. By the time a human has opened a ticket, read three quotes, and pinged the lowest bidder, the buyer has already refreshed the cart elsewhere. ShipStream replaces that loop with a deterministic match: order arrives, scoring engine returns a winner, fulfilment goes out the door. The cost of each routing decision drops from minutes-and-emails to milliseconds-and-margin, and your team steps in only for the cases that genuinely need them.

• Median match-to-firewall latency under 800 ms at the 99th percentile
• Re-routes automatically when a winning supplier rejects or stalls the order
• Every routing decision is auditable — no mystery about who got the order and why

A scoring engine is only as honest as the signals it weighs. ShipStream’s score blends four independent dimensions per supplier: landed cost on this SKU, on-time delivery rate over the trailing 90 days, lead-time variance, and product-fit confidence from the catalog match. The weights are published, the inputs are pulled from primary sources (the supplier’s own feed and confirmed delivered orders), and the composite is recalculated on every order so a supplier that gets faster this week moves up the leaderboard the same week.

• Inputs are explicit and observable — suppliers can challenge a score, not a black box
• A single KPI never dictates the outcome (so nobody can win by gaming the metric)
• Scorecards are surfaced to the merchant, not buried in admin tooling

No-match is the failure mode most merchants quietly dread: a paid order, no fulfilment path, and a refund that costs you the customer. ShipStream treats no-match as a first-class state. The order is held, the buyer receives an honest ETA range, and the routing engine keeps polling suppliers (price drops, new entrants, restocks) until one of them closes the gap. If the supplier market genuinely has nobody, you find out with enough lead time to make a real decision — refund the buyer and keep them, or watch the order and hope.

• No back-orders, no fake confirmations, no silent fall-throughs to the cheapest supplier
• Held orders auto-resolve when a real supplier enters the picture
• Buyers see an honest timeframe; merchants see a clear re-routing or refund prompt

Returns get messy when responsibility blurs. ShipStream enforces a clean split: the refund is issued by the seller (you, the merchant) the moment a return is approved, and the supplier runs the reverse logistics back to their own warehouse on a separate workflow. The buyer sees one ticket, one timeline, one resolution. The merchant sees a refund ledger. The supplier sees a return manifest. No party waits on the other two to act, which is the usual reason dropship returns drag on for weeks.

• Customer-facing refund commits on approval — no waiting on supplier confirmation
• Reverse logistics route back to the supplier’s warehouse, not a generic hub
• Every step has an SLA so a stuck refund is visible as a stuck refund, not silence

Margin in dropshipping is the difference between what the buyer pays and what the supplier charges, minus the cost of the merchant work between them. Most of that work does not exist in ShipStream’s day-to-day: there is no rep time per order, no spreadsheet triage, no chargeback investigation pipeline, no returns handling paid by the merchant. What remains is the price gap the scoring engine found, the speed at which the routing machine cycles it, and the value of the supplier relationships the system surfaces — both are real, both are observable, and both are bigger than a human team’s equivalent.

• Per-order margin is reported on the routing record — not estimated, attributable
• Scorecards make the price gap visible so you can lift it deliberately
• Operating cost drops because routing, vendor triage, and fulfilment loop are automated

• Place orders via aliexpress.ds.order.create when the scoring engine elects an AliExpress seller.
• Receive tracking updates through a HMAC-signed inbound webhook we already operate (no polling).
• Feed delivery telemetry back into the on-time delivery inputs that drive the next round of scoring.
• Retry with rate-limit awareness — we pace outbound calls, never burst against the published window.

The full partner application lives at /apply-partner: company summary, the four Order API uses in detail, expected monthly volume, and the technical and legal posture that backs the integration. It is the document we hand to AliExpress’s partner-approval reviewers.