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How do I route orders to multiple fulfilment warehouses?

Background

Many drop-shipping and e-commerce business use mulitiple warehousing or drop-shipping partners to get their products to their customers. But most often, web stores only support sending your orders to one place. Using Shipatron's rules based fulfiment engine means you can route your orders to where they need to go. Plus, you can setup the rules yourself, so no need for expensive products or services to make it happen.

Reminder: Fufilments are actions in Shipatron, triggered by events like a new or a cancelled order. A fulfilment can be configured to send product information to a warehouse provider via email or FTP, in a variety of industry standard formats. Read more about setting up a fulfilment in Shipatron.

Scenarios

Shipatron's multiple fulfliment capability is flexible and rules based, it can be in a wide variety of situations, whether you have in house shipping, third party logistics companies (3PL), drop-shipping or warehouse providers. To illustrate Shipatron's capability, we have provide a few scenarios below. In each case we assume you've already got a Shipatron account and your first channel (usually your primary web store like Shopify, Big Cartel or Squarespace) is configured.

1: Ship only selected products to a drop-shipper

You have a Shopify store where you publish your products. Most products you dispatch in-house, but there are a few physically large products which are drop-shipped direct by the manufacturer. You can use Shipatron to automatically transmit orders of these direct to the drop-shipper, while Shipatron ignores other products so you can fufil them manually.

To set this up in Shipatron, you would create one fufilment which filters for your drop-shipped products. You could either manually select these products, or you could tag those products in Shopify and then set the fulfilment to filter by that tag.

2: Route orders based on a customer location

You sell on a Mirakl marketplace and on Amazon, as well as through your Shopify store. But when an order comes in, you want it to be fulfilled by the nearest warehouse, 3PL or drop-shipper to that customers location.

First, make sure you've configured Shipatron to use Shopify to manage marketplace orders. Then you would need to create a new fufilment for each of your fulfilment locations. For each you would specify geographic filter conditions.

3: Your customer choosing a shipping method changes order routing.

You want to be able to have a single page for products which you fufill through different warehouse partners. However you wish to ship from different locations, depending on what shipping method the customer selected when they placed the order.

Using Shopify, create two shipping methods (e.g. international and domestic) and then you can create two fufilfilments in Shipatron, one for each of your warehouses. You can filter each fufilment to only take certain prodcuts and/or, only orders with a specific shipping method.

Hints and Tips

  • Make sure you have thought through how your filters will be configured. Shipatron works through order fulfilments in order, so if you have multiple fulfilments for an Order Creation trigger, then the first fulfilment to qualify will be activated and no further order creation fulfilments will take place.

  • Shipatron will automatically split an order so that if different product related rules apply, only the products where that rule applies will be included in that fulfilment.

Further Reading