Ship From Store
Terminologies
Ship From Store (SFS)
Generally, Ship From Store is a fulfilment strategy that allows retailers to utilise their physical stores as additional distribution centres for fulfilling online orders. Instead of shipping products from centralised warehouses or distribution centres, retailers can leverage their store inventory to fulfil online orders and ship them directly to customers.
Web Stores and Web Inventory
When we make a request to the StockChanged endpoint (Retail API), Apparel21 returns to us a list of what they call "stores". However, this "store" isn't necessarily a physical store (or warehouse). You can configure in the Apparel21 backend which stock locations and pools contribute to a particular "store" which is how the Web Stores work.
Please note that these are "stores" over the Retail API, but they're actually groupings of various warehouse and/or store locations in the backend, to form the stock counts which go to the website.
The Web Inventory refers to the total amount of available inventory for sale on a website. Typically, this includes the inventory stored in your warehouse. However, with the Ship From Store feature, you can also include the available stock from your physical stores. For instance, you can have a designated "store" such as Web Sales, Online Store, or Web Store, where the stock number is calculated by adding up the inventory from your warehouse and all the stores that are enabled for SFS.
SFS with Shopify and DotApparel
DotApparel only integrates the Web Inventory with a Shopify location to facilitate the SFS feature. All other processes will be managed by the ERP. This means that DotApparel will continue to send online orders as normal, and Apparel21 will decide if an order will be shipped from a physical store based on the configured logic or rules.
Are any changes required in DotApparel?
In essence, there will be no changes unless the Web Store is modified. As previously stated, your ERP representatives will need to set up your Web Stores and Web Inventory in the ERP backend. This will guarantee that the inventory counts from the WEB Store already include the store inventory. For example, if the inventory number of Product A was 3 in the warehouse and 2 in Retail A, without SFS, the total inventory number from your WEB store would be 3. However, with SFS, it will be 5.
Are any changes required in Shopify?
No. Since the Web Inventory has been configured in the ERP, the Shopify inventory also includes the floor stock available in your physical stores. Let's say that Product B is out of stock at the warehouse but there are 2 units available at Retail B. With SFS, in Shopify, there are 2 units available for purchase on the website. When customers purchase them, the orders will be sent to the ERP by DotApparel and then they will be processed by the ERP according to the SFS configuration.
What is the process to get started?
Contact your ERP representatives and discuss your requirements to enable SFS.
Agree on the locations(stores) that will be included in the inventory pool (Web Inventory).
Let us know when you plan to launch SFS and also if the existing Web Store will be used or new Store ID provided.
Schedule your configuration change with the ERP and confirm that date and time with us.
Once activated we will process a full inventory sync and get you to confirm all inventory is expected.
Orders will start syncing through to the ERP as normal and the ERP will start assigning them to retail stores for fulfillment.
Last updated
Was this helpful?