Advantages of Ship from Store
As a retailer, Ship from Store can bring you a wide range of advantages. Depending on your goals, some of them may be more or less relevant:
- Fewer sold-out items in the shop: Instead of only showing warehouse stock in your online shop, you can add the stock of all your stores.
- Fewer slow sellers: Avoid slow-moving items and sell stock specifically from the stores where a product is selling less well.
- Warehouse downsizing: Reduce your warehouse costs or do without a warehouse completely.
- Go green: Why ship products from a central warehouse when they are available just a few kilometers away from your customers?
- Save shipping costs and time: Save time and costs, especially for international shipping, by shipping products from local stores instead of from your warehouse in Germany.
- Make your stores more efficient: Use quiet times in the store to ship orders.
How do I activate Ship from Store?
If you'd like to use Ship from Store, just get in touch with us.
Once Ship from Store has been set up for your account, you can activate Ship from Store as a fulfillment method under Settings › Fulfillment and configure it under Settings › Ship-from-Store. You also need to make the appropriate shipping settings for your shop.
Ship from Store process
Shopgate Omnichannel Suite Order Routing
Shopgate assigns all new orders to the most suitable location (store or warehouse) according to the routes and priorities you specify. This process is fully automated and takes no more than a few seconds.
The first principle is that we always try to assign orders to a single location, so that process and shipping costs and the environmental impact of shipping are kept as low as possible. Only if no single location can fulfill the order is it split according to your specifications.
Handing orders over to warehouses
If Order Routing decides that an order should be shipped from a warehouse, we notify your interface via webhook. This lets you create the order in the corresponding warehouse tool.
Handing orders over to stores
Orders are handed over to the store fully automatically via the In-Store App. We notify your employees by push notification.
Alternatively, fulfillment in stores can also run in your own tools. In that case, the handover can be set up in a similar way to the handover to the store.
Processing an order in the store
Orders are processed intuitively in the store with the Shopgate Omnichannel Suite In-Store App. The software guides your employees through the process until the order is completed. If an order was not accepted within the specified time or had to be rejected (e.g. because of damage), it is reassigned. Your employees don't depend on anyone else and don't have to decide how to handle such an order. They simply reject the order in the app, which restarts Order Routing. The store in question is no longer considered in the next attempt.
Error case: No location can fulfill the order
If neither a warehouse nor a store can fulfill the order, for example because of damaged items, it has to be checked manually. For this, we notify a dedicated contact in your company by email. This person can manually assign the order to one or more locations in the admin and override the rules set in the system (e.g. maximum order splits).
You can find more information here.
Integrating Ship from Store
There are different levels and options for integrating Ship from Store. Feel free to contact us for an individual implementation plan. You can find an example integration here.