Shipstation Supplier Settings
StoreAutomator has advanced dropshipper capabilities. This is achieved by adding your dropshippers to Inventory>suppliers. In StoreAutomator, ShipStation is also considered as a supplier, when you have multiple warehouses throughout the nation. With help of this extensive integration with ShipStation you can utilize these warehouses as dropshippers. For instance, if you have sold a product in a city, in the US, StoreAutomator selects a nearby warehouse and the order is issued for that warehouse. Warehouse personnel receive the order in shipstation by logging in their account and in their warehouse page, where they can pick, pack and ship the product and enter the tracking number. These settings set up the ShipStation to work as a supplier.
Below is a guide to the various tabs/settings in SA along with an explanation of what these mean.
GENERAL INFORMATION TAB:
Code this is your Supplier code and is generated automatically after supplier creation.
Name this is your given Supplier name
Inventory type this shows what inventory type you have chosen for the supplier. In this case it will be dropshipper.
Inventory Currency shows the currency that has been selected while adding your supplier.
Description free text field that you use to type any description as you need for this supplier.
LOCATION ADDRESS TAB:
You can fill out the address details for your supplier and add notes.
SETTINGS TAB:
Cost mode: You can choose either a Fixed Cost or Commission Based depending on your agreement with your dropshipper.
If it is fixed cost that means you agreed with your supplier for a certain cost and does not change according to your MSRP price.
If your agreement is Commission Based then the percentage you type into this field is the percentage that you will receive from your own selling price which will also be your dropshippers’ MSRP.
For example: your selling price is $100 and your Commission Base rate is 40% then you will receive $40 from the sale of this item and your dropshipper will receive $60.
Important Notes: The system calculates the price according to the MSRP and so the dropshipper must enter the MSRP when they upload their products in their account. The MSRP is a required field. The Dropshipper should not override prices because then the percentage will apply to the override price which may cause a problem on their end.
Purchase order mode: you can choose automatic or manual from dropdown.
If set to automatic then the purchase order will be created automatically.
If set to manual, then the PO has to be fulfilled manually.
Please see the following article for further detail:
Source of Dropship Order Prices
This setting can help you select the source of prices in an order.
You can choose from either “Warehouse item cost” or “Original Order Price”
Order Receivers
This is for selecting which account to send the order in Shipstation for this warehouse. Once it is sent you can view the order in Shipstation in the respective channel. The drop down list shows a list of available accounts in your Shipstation account, as shown in the picture below. Select the relevant shipstation account you want to send the orders for this warehouse.
When an order is received, StoreAutomator selects the warehouse automatically, and this selection sends the order to the correct warehouse location.
Warehouses
After the supplier is added, StoreAutomator adds a warehouse for this supplier automatically. To see the warehouses, go to Inventory>Warehouses, find the supplier added warehouse and click on edit. As a next step you must select the correct shipstation account for this warehouse. This will help you add shipstation tags for this warehouse, as seen in the below screenshot. These tags can be used to inform your personnel to only pick, pack and ship their warehouse products and do not touch other orders.
You can add multiple warehouses in this menu, assign them to the same shipstation supplier and to a different Shipstation warehouse along with different Tags. With this way, the order will go to the same warehouse but will have different tags.
Here is how to do it; you can add multiple warehouses by clicking on the “Add warehouse” button, top right corner, choose “Physical”, choose a currency for the warehouse and click on “Create”. Once the warehouse is created, edit the warehouse by clicking on the pen icon and under “Supplier” select your shipstation account. This will bring you all the tags, where you can select a different tag for this new warehouse, and this tag will be sent to Shipstation, to the same Shipstation account, same warehouse. With help of the new warehouse, you can send new tags and have the order or product treated differently in your warehouse.
The last thing is to assign products to this warehouse, so that the warehouse assigned tags can be sent to the relevant shipstation channel to be reviewed by your team and tended to.