Shipping

Shipping is the last thing you do to a position and the first thing the customer sees of it.

What you enter here ends up in their portal: the carrier, the tracking link, the status. Filling it in properly is the difference between a customer who can answer their own question and one who writes to your support.

Shipping details can be recorded for any position, not only ones that came through purchasing, warehouse and picking, because plenty of deliveries happen outside the integrated route. Whether it makes sense is your call: a tablet, yes; a software licence, probably not.

How a position gets here

Three different journeys end in this list, and the status column tells you which.

Ready for packing means production is done. The device has been picked, any production steps are closed, and it is waiting to be boxed. When you finish the last step in Production, equipme offers to bring you straight here.

Ready for delivery means the position needed no production work and went from Picking straight to dispatch.

Delivery requested (outgoing) is a preorder the customer has called off. The device has been in stock for a while and they have now asked for it. This is the one to remember: if a customer says they requested something and nothing seems to have happened, it is waiting here.

Starting a shipment

Ship selected takes the rows you ticked and opens the shipment mask for them. It is the everyday route.

Create parcel starts from the parcel instead, which is what you want when several things go into one box.

Either way, only positions going to the same delivery address can travel together. An order for three notebooks going to three offices is three parcels.

Check the recipient

The mask is prefilled from the order, which saves time and leaves one thing to check.

The recipient defaults to the person who placed the order, not the person the service is for. When a team lead orders equipment for four new starters, all four parcels are addressed to the team lead unless you change it.

Worth a glance every time.

Booking the parcel

With Sendcloud, there is nothing to type. The integration books the parcel and sends back the carrier, the shipment number, the tracking link and the status on its own. Those fields stay locked because the integration fills them.

This is the short route, and the one to use whenever the integration is available.

Without it, switch the toggle off and the same fields open up for manual entry: carrier, shipment number, tracking link, status, expected delivery date, delivery date and a comment. In exchange, the recipient address locks to the address from the order.

Three situations call for the manual route. You do not use the integration at all. The distributor shipped the goods directly and gave you their tracking number. Or somebody collected the device in person, in which case there is no carrier involved and you are simply recording that it was handed over.

The comment field is the one place to tell the customer something the tracking link cannot, for example that their order went out in two boxes.

The walkthrough below takes the manual route, so every field is filled in by hand.

Submitting closes the position

Submit shipment creates the parcel, moves the position to Completed and makes the service instance active.

This is the step that ends the order. Picking and production finish stages; shipping finishes the job. The position moves to Completed positions.

Note what that does not mean. The position does not pass through In delivery or Delivered. Those belong to the parcel, which carries on with a status of its own after the position is already closed.

The split is deliberate: the position tracks your work, the parcel tracks the journey. Your work is finished when the parcel leaves.

Keeping it current

Shipping details stay editable, either on the position or under outgoing parcels in the Shipping area, which lists everything you have sent and where it went.

Updating the status as the parcel moves is the cheapest support you will ever provide. The customer sees each change.

If something about a shipment turns out to be wrong, correct it there. For a parcel that has already gone out, editing keeps the delivery documented, where deleting would remove the record along with the tracking details.