The Shipping Department is the order processing location for shippable goods that have been successfully processed for payment and are ready for the order fulfillment stage. The shipping department will have different screens depending upon whether or not you are processing the orders in-house or transmitting the orders out to a 3rd party fulfillment location for the order fulfillment processing.
Main Menu Operations → Order Management → Shipping Department |
Your Home page can be configured to display a "shipping Department" widget, which acts as a shortcut to the Shipping Department. There is an arrange widgets button that will display the available widgets that can be configured to display on the home page. To add the shipping department widget to the home page, click and drag the widget from the right side panel to the left side panel. Once dragged to the left panel, you can further drag the opened widgets into the particular arrangement you want them in, then save the settings. |
Once payment for an order has been processed, the order is moved to the Shipping Department. This Section can also be displayed in 1 of 2 ways.
There are two different views of the Shipping Department depending on your configuration. They are defined as follows:
Self Serviced view - for merchants doing their own shipping this view contains action buttons for printing packing slips and address labels and assigning fulfillment status's, etc.:
Please see the following for details regarding the formatting of the import CSV file: Import Tracking |
In the self-service view, you will find situations where you need to edit an order prior to shipping.
(click here for more details)
Please keep in mind that editing an order from the shipping department will not affect the credit card authorizations.
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Fulfillment Provider view - for merchants using a Fulfillment Center (Transmission Mechanism must be configured) to monitor the fulfillment activity of the orders.
Button | Description | |
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Refresh | Click on this button to reload the page. This will insure you are current with any possible order changes that may have occurred and it will remove all check marks. It's a simple and quick way to start over with a clean and up-to-date screen. | |
Release | Clicking this button will release orders from the "Held for Review" column. | |
Remove From Queue | This button is used to remove orders (Queued for Transmission) that you've decided not to send to the fulfillment center. Click on the checkbox to the left of the orders desired and then click on the "Remove from Queue" button.
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Retransmit | This button is used to retransmit any orders (those checked) listed in the Pending Immediate Transmission column that you want to retransmit to the fulfillment center. This may be necessary if you have received an indication that your fulfillment center has not received the orders. | |
Log | This button will appear only for those transmission mechanisms (fulfillment centers) that have 2-way communications integrated with UltraCart. Click this button to view the log file showing details of transmission between UltraCart and the fulfillment center. This is very helpful to confirm transmission times. | |
Mark Shipped | When orders are successfully sent to the fulfillment center, the Order ID's will move through the columns automatically and UltraCart will mark them as "completed". Occasionally you may need to manually mark a order as shipped. Click the Mark Shipped button to do so. |
The lower portion of the screen will display 4 columns; Queued for Transmission, Pending Immediate Transmission, Unacknowledged Shipments and Recently Acknowledged Shipments.
Column | Description |
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Held For Review | If you have configured the distribution center to hold orders for review, then the orders will initially go into the far left column "Held for Review". Once there you will select and click the "release button" to move them to the next column, "Queued for Transmission". |
Queued for Transmission / Pickup | Orders will appear in this column when you have configured Transmission Schedules within the distribution center. These orders will not be transmitted to fulfillment until the scheduled time arrives. Once transmitted, the order will move to the 3rd column "Pending Immediate Transmission" |
Manually Unqueued | This are orders that have been manually removed from being sent or picked up by the fulfillment center |
Pending Immediate Transmission | Orders will appear in this column on first arrival into the shipping department only if you do not have Transmission Schedules configured. They typically will reside in this column for only 2 to 5 minutes. |
Sent to "Fulfillment" | Orders that appear in this column have already been transmitted to the distribution (fulfillment) center and are awaiting return of confirmation and/or tracking information. If you have a 1-way transmission mechanism then the order will not appear here but goes directly to the Recently Acknowledged Shipments column. |
Recently Shipped by "Fulfillment" | Orders that appear in this column have received confirmation and/or tracking information. They are marked as "completed". You will see approximately one weeks orders listed here. |
There is a new warning if there are orders that were manually held. |
Some merchants have both types of Distribution Centers configured. The bulk of their shipments are handled by a Fulfillment Center and the remainder gets handling by their own shipping. Some merchants may have several Fulfillment centers in various geographical locations and therefore will have several Distribution Centers configured.
Answer: If they have transmission schedules configured, then when it's time for the transmission of the queued order over to the fulfillment service, the transmission routine that sends the orders over first checks to see if they are rejected, and at that point in time it removes any rejected order from the transmission batch.
Answer: If you use the refund and reject button from the shipping department it will return the money to the customer and count the order as voided instead of as a sale that is then latest refunded. (Rejected orders are always excluded from the sales reporting. See also: Understanding Period Sales reports and refund reporting)