What a flow actually is
Every 15 minutes, pull new orders from this Shopify store, normalize them, and upsert them into NetSuite as Sales Orders. The flow owns the schedule, the field mapping, and the error-handling policy.
A flow is not a script. It is a declared contract with a schedule, a state cursor, a mapping version, and a retry policy — running under the same audit trail as apixx.data, apixx.ai, and apixx.crew.
Anatomy of a flow
Eight declared parts — every flow in production has all of them, versioned and auditable.
Source
The authenticated connector data comes from — Shopify, NetSuite, EDI, a REST endpoint.
Destination
Where the data lands — an ERP, WMS, marketplace, or another system of record.
Entity
The canonical object being moved: Order, Product, Inventory, Customer, Shipment.
Schedule
Cron, interval, webhook, or event trigger. Every trigger type is first-class.
Filter
Predicates that decide which records the flow should touch on this run.
Mapping
Field-by-field translation between source and destination, versioned in place.
State
Cursor, watermark, and dedup key — how the flow knows what it has already processed.
Dependencies
Other flows or entities this flow blocks on. Runs coordinate, they don't collide.
How we keep it running
A managed pipeline is only as good as the humans behind it. Ours are on-call, before you are.
On-call, not on-your-own
We page an engineer after three consecutive errored runs on any production flow. You're not the first line of defense — we are.
Retries before you're paged
Exponential backoff for up to 24 hours before a run is marked failed. Transient upstream noise stays out of your inbox.
Soft quotas, never a hard stop
Approaching a plan limit sends a warning with headroom. We don't cut off a live integration to enforce billing.
What operators actually get from apixx.flow
Median Shopify → NetSuite latency for in-store and .com orders across 250+ locations.
Order and payment reconciliation moved onto apixx.data — close time cut by two-thirds.
Vendor Central chargeback dispute prep replaced by a single automated flow.
EDI 856/810 enrichment plus retailer-specific validation caught errors before dispatch.