Allowing Customers to Drop Ship

Owned by Jonathan Tew
Jul 09, 2021
3 min read

Introduction

This tutorial will allow walk you through the process of allowing other merchant’s to drop ship orders to their end customers using a customer profile.

Configuring a Customer Profile

Only customer profiles that are configured to allow drop shipping are presented with the option to drop ship the order during the checkout. To enable drop shipping on a customer profile, go to the billing tab of the customer profile editor, check the box shown below, and save.

 

StoreFront Visual Builder

The StoreFront Visual Builder checkout implements the drop shipping option using two elements:

  • Checkout Condition - the condition is “Allow Drop Shipping”

  • Checkout Drop Shipping - presents the toggle to the customer during the checkout.

The option for drop shipping is presented to the customer like this:

How Drop Ship Orders Appear in the UI

Whenever a drop ship order is placed, the back-end display of the order will indicate the fact that it is a drop ship order as shown below.

 

How Drop Shipping Works

The goal of drop shipping is to allow the wholesale customer to place orders that ship directly to their end customer. To do this UltraCart automatically suppresses certain information from displaying when printing packing slips or transmitting orders to your fulfillment house.

What the End Customer Receives

The final customer will receive their order with a packing slip that does not mention your company shipped the product. The packing slip will not contain:

  • logo

  • bill to information

  • email

  • pricing

  • payment method

  • customer service information

  • return policy

What the Drop Shipper Receives

Since the email is associated with the drop shipper, they will receive all the receipt emails, shipping notifications, etc. Typically the drop shipper will take that information and plug it into their own e-commerce platform which will then let the end customer know that the order has shipped, product them with branded tracking information, etc.

Integrating with Wholesale Sections of your StoreFront

Typically a drop shipper is going to receive discounted prices compared to retail. This is accomplished with pricing tiers and customer profiles. Most merchants will have a wholesale section of their StoreFront that requires a customer profile containing certain pricing tiers in order to access. After the customer logs in they will be able to see the faster wholesale order entry section with their discounted prices. The drop shipper will add the products to their cart, specify the end customer’s address, mark the order as drop ship, and then complete the order.

Things To Consider

  • If your fulfillment house is printing packing slips that contain some of the information that you normally would suppress for drop shipping, you’ll need to talk with your fulfillment house about printing generic packing slips.

  • How returns will be handled between the intermediate merchant buying from you wholesale and the customer. Typically you want to make the intermediate merchant handle the return and either attempt to resell the product themselves or dispose of it.