Dropshipping

Dropshipping means your distributor ships straight to the customer. The goods never reach your premises, so there is no goods receipt, no picking and no parcel for you to pack.

What you keep is the commercial relationship and the record. The customer orders from you, is billed by you, and sees the delivery in their portal. The device simply takes a shorter route.

It suits standard hardware that needs no preparation, and it is the obvious choice when your customer sits three hundred kilometres from your warehouse. It is the wrong choice when the device has to be configured, labelled or bundled before it goes out, because nothing passes through your hands to do that with.

Setting it up

Dropshipping is a property of the service, not a decision you make per order.

Open the service in Portfolio Management, go to the Mapping tab, and set the provisioning type to Dropshipping. The default for every new service is in house.

The setting is released together with the bill of materials, and it is locked while the configuration is released. Changing it later means revoking the release first.

What actually changes

	In house	Dropshipping
Where demand appears	Order proposals, Stock purchase tab	Order proposals, Dropshipping tab
Goods receipt	yes	never
Picking	yes	never
Production steps	possible	not possible, nothing passes through your hands
Who steers the position	Fulfillment, then Purchasing	Purchasing, from the moment the order exists
Who ships	you	your distributor

Placing the order

Demand from a dropshipping service lands in Order proposals under the Dropshipping tab. The order mask is the same one you use for stock purchases.

One field deserves a second look before you send it. The delivery address is taken from the location assigned in the customer's order, and it is where your distributor will actually deliver. On a stock purchase a wrong address costs you a redirect within your own building. Here it means the device arrives at the wrong office.

A financing agreement can be assigned as usual.

From here, work in Purchasing

Once the purchase order exists, the position in Fulfillment is no longer where you steer things. The status field on it is disabled, and a note on the position points you to the purchase order instead.

That is not a restriction so much as a consequence. Nothing is going to happen in your warehouse, so there is nothing for Fulfillment to track. What moves the position forward is what your distributor tells you, and you record that on the order.

When the distributor confirms the goods are on their way, update the order. The fulfillment position follows.

Keeping the customer informed

This is where dropshipping is easy to get wrong. You have no parcel in your hands, so nothing prompts you to enter tracking details, and the customer has no other way of finding out where their device is.

Enter the shipment number and the tracking link on the purchase order as soon as the distributor gives them to you. Both appear in the customer's portal, exactly as they would for a parcel you sent yourself.

Closing the purchase order closes the customer order with it.

Let automation do the forwarding

The manual version of dropshipping is: place the order in equipme, then send your distributor an email with the same details.

The Automation module can do the second half. A workflow triggered by a new dropshipping order can send the distributor a mail with everything they need, or push the data into their system through a connector.

For anyone running dropshipping at volume, this is where it stops being administration and starts being a process.