Some orders contain items you ship from your own warehouse and items a supplier dropships to your customer. This article covers three ways to handle these partially dropshipped orders in SKULabs. Choose the one that matches how you route items to your suppliers today.
Option 1: Ship your own items in SKULabs and handle dropships outside SKULabs
Open every order in SKULabs and process only the items your warehouse ships. Keep handling dropshipped items the way you do today, outside SKULabs.
With this option, SKULabs tracks only your own warehouse's items and inventory. It does not track your suppliers' inventory.
Open the order and ship the items your warehouse ships.
Leave the dropshipped items for your existing dropship process. Tip: tag these orders so your team can identify them quickly.
Option 2: Use a Shopify custom fulfillment service
In Shopify, assign your dropshipped products to a custom fulfillment service. Shopify then routes those items to your supplier, and SKULabs flags them as dropshipped so they are left out of picking, shipping and inventory deduction. Your team only sees the items you ship from your own warehouse.
You can then scan-verify, bulk deduct or use auto-deduct for these orders, and keep stock sync on. With auto-deduct, your team does not have to open SKULabs to ship each order.
Option 3: Create dropship purchase orders in SKULabs
Set up your suppliers in SKULabs and assign items to them. When an order comes in with dropshipped items that your sales channel did not already route:
Open the order in SKULabs and create a dropship purchase order that tells SKULabs which supplier ships which item.
Optionally, SKULabs emails the purchase order to the supplier. The email includes a link the supplier uses to send tracking back to you, and SKULabs passes it on to your sales channel.
For the items that ship from your warehouse, scan-verify the order, add a manual shipment, use bulk stock deduction, or create a shipping label.
Auto-deduct does not create dropship purchase orders, so with this option your team opens each order in SKULabs to assign its dropshipped items.
Tracking supplier inventory
With any of these options, tracking a supplier's available inventory in SKULabs is meant for backorder and dropship decisions. It is not meant for advertising your supplier's stock on your own sales channels, especially for items that more than one supplier can dropship. For help with a supplier inventory feed, contact support@skulabs.com.