Email to JSON Checklist for E-commerce

List storefront order confirmations, marketplace vendor acknowledgements, RMA requests, and carrier notifications that must be parsed to JSON. Capture sender domains and expected subjects for routing rules.

Establish required fields for orders, shipments, and returns, including order_id, line_items, totals, taxes, discounts, addresses, and timestamps. This anchors parsing rules and downstream contracts.

Archive full RFC 5322 sources for each vendor and scenario (new order, partial ship, return, cancel). These fixtures fuel repeatable tests and catch template drift.

Use unique addresses per vendor or plus-addressing tags for seller IDs (e.g., orders+vendor123@). Clear routing reduces rule collisions and simplifies parser selection.

Combine Message-ID with vendor order number or a content hash to prevent duplicate processing. Store these keys in a replay-safe datastore.

Determine how long to retain raw emails and which fields to redact (e.g., masked card tails, phone numbers) before logging or forwarding. Align with privacy policies.

Create dedicated inbound addresses or a catch‑all with tags for each marketplace seller or supplier. Route to parser pipelines based on recipient and tag.

Validate authentication on receipt and include pass/fail results in JSON metadata. This helps trust signals and fraud detection for payment and fulfillment decisions.

Store From, To, Subject, Date, Message-ID, and a SHA-256 hash of the raw MIME in the JSON. These fields aid auditing, deduplication, and dispute resolution.

Sign payloads with a shared secret and implement exponential backoff with jitter on delivery failures. Downstream services must treat deliveries as at-least-once.

Expose a time-ordered inbox with pagination to recover during webhook outages or deploys. Include filters by recipient, vendor tag, or processing status.

Accept text/plain, text/html, multipart/alternative, text/csv, and application/pdf. Reject or quarantine dangerous types, and enforce size caps to protect parsers.

When multipart/alternative is present, parse the HTML part for structured line item tables and totals, falling back to text/plain only when needed.

Use DOM selectors and targeted regex to pull order numbers, POs, invoices, and dates from known vendor templates. Avoid brittle global patterns.

Parse SKU, variant, quantity, unit price, and currency from tables, normalizing whitespace and symbols. Preserve line-level notes and gift messages if present.

Handle quoted‑printable and base64 bodies, and convert charsets (e.g., ISO-8859-1 to UTF‑8). Decode RFC 2047 encoded headers for accurate subjects and names.

Filter 1x1 images and marketing footers. Only process inline images or attachments when they contain barcodes, packing slips, or labels relevant to fulfillment.

Detect reply separators, prior message blocks, and timestamps to isolate the newest transactional content, preventing duplicate items from older chains.

Extract carrier names and tracking numbers using pattern libraries, mapping to internal enums and URLs for tracking deep links.

Populate canonical fields for customer, shipping, billing, totals, taxes, discounts, and payment method. Include a vendor section for raw fields you do not standardize.

Recalculate line_items subtotal, add shipping and taxes, and compare to grand_total. Emit a validation_error flag when mismatched to avoid bad invoicing.

Strip vendor suffixes or whitespace and map to your catalog's internal SKU. Extract variant attributes (size, color) into structured fields for inventory allocation.

Parse localized number formats and currency symbols, outputting ISO 4217 codes and minor units. Keep vendor_currency and converted_currency when rates apply.

Split names, street lines, locality, region, postal code, and country, and output ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes. Validate postal formats per country.

Map carrier strings to internal enums (e.g., UPS_GROUND, USPS_PRIORITY, FEDEX_2DAY) and validate tracking formats to avoid bad fulfillment updates.

Include item-level fulfillment quantities, backorder flags, and return reasons with condition codes. Keep a status timeline for each item.

Maintain unit tests with real vendor MIME samples for new order, split shipment, cancellation, and return. Assert every key field in the resulting JSON.

Replay the same Message-ID and content to guarantee a single logical result and safe reprocessing. Verify no duplicate webhooks or order inserts occur.

Test HMAC signatures, retries, and downstream idempotent handlers. Simulate 4xx/5xx responses and network timeouts to validate resilience.

Track parse success by vendor, average time from receipt to webhook, attachment rejection counts, and dead-letter volume. Alert on threshold breaches.

Monitor DOM structure diffs and drops in field extraction rates to catch vendor email changes early. Route suspected drifts to review with sample captures.

Send failed parses to a review queue with reasons, metadata, and raw MIME. Provide replay tooling after rule fixes to close the loop quickly.