Setup: records, forwarding, DNS

Five steps, in this order. Each one is a fact the product reads back, not a stage it remembers — so if you leave in the middle and come back a week later, you land exactly where the facts say you are.

• Connect your system of record.
• Forward your wholesale address.
• Watch coverage build, and decide nothing yet.
• Start every class in Watch, and ratify your first policy version.
• Move a class to bounded Run when you have seen enough of them.

1. Connect your records

Shopify. You install the public app from the App Store. The permissions it asks for are shown on Shopify’s own grant screen before you accept, and again on Connections afterwards — that screen is the authoritative list, so this page does not print a second one that could disagree with it.

At install, every company location is checked against your store by live probes rather than assumed from your plan, and a location that cannot be served is named with the reason: no payment terms on the location, quantity rules that could not be read, a price calculation that does not agree with the location’s prices, no contact who can order there, or no active variant with a SKU to probe. Named, never mis-priced silently.

Zoho. Your organisation stays in the Zoho data centre it is already in — every call is made against the regional host that answered your authorisation. The Japanese editions are the ones verified end to end so far; write to me for another region. It is a private beta switched on per workspace by us, so there is nothing to buy and nothing to self-serve.

One store per workspace. Installing a second store into a workspace that is already connected is refused before you reach the grant screen, and the refusal names the store in the way, because the act that unblocks it is disconnecting that one first. Nothing is written and no permission is granted for a connection that cannot be made.

2. Forward your wholesale address

Trade Counter mints an intake address for your workspace, of the form <workspace>.<mailbox>@…. You add it as a forwarding destination in your mail settings. Your provider will send a confirmation mail to it; that is picked up here automatically, and you approve it from those same settings.

Nothing is installed on the mailbox. Nothing in it is moved, labelled or deleted. A Google-account connection exists in the product but is not open to new merchants until our Google OAuth client is published — forward instead, which is the path the App Store reviewer is asked to use for the same reason.

3. The DNS records

Forwarding gets mail IN. Answering it goes OUT from your own domain, and a recipient will only believe that if your DNS says so. Four records do it. Their values are issued in Connections when you start verification — one of them, the signing key, does not exist until then — so what is listed here is what each record is and where it goes.

You add them by hand. Until the domain verifies, the desk can read your mail but cannot answer it — which is a safe half-configured state rather than a broken one.

Addresses replies can never be sent from. There are 12 consumer mailbox domains — the free Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, AOL and Proton ones — whose SPF and DKIM we can never author. Wholesale mail on such an address can be forwarded here and read; a reply can never leave from it. Answering from your own address needs a domain you own.

4. What you see before switching anything on

Before any decision, the product shows you what it found in your own mail. Coverage starts from the first message you forward. The preview is counts and nothing else:

• Inbound mail — how much arrived.
• Desk messages — how many of those are the desk's work.
• Other mail — how many are not a retailer's at all.
• Known companies — how many of your companies were recognised as senders.
• Attachments with text — how many attachments text could be read out of.

The product states it in its own footnote and it is the honest limit of the whole screen: Coverage and extraction facts against timestamped records only. Nothing here is a claim about replies. There is no accuracy figure on that screen, on this page, or anywhere on this site.

5. Then Watch

You ratify a first policy version — an owner or an admin act — with every class in Watch. From there each class moves to bounded Run when you decide, one at a time, reversibly. What Watch and bounded Run each do, and how a sender is verified before anything is answered.