A fulfillment request is a transaction that acts as an intermediary step between the sales order and the fulfillment stage of the order fulfillment workflow. It is a request or demand to fulfill a sales order.
For example, it lets employees at a fulfillment location — typically a store or a warehouse — manage orders that need to be shipped to or picked up by customers. Employees at a store can view fulfillment requests for their location, accept or reject the request, and process the request to fulfill the order.
Another example is use of drop ship. Drop shipping is a fulfillment method where a store doesn't keep the products it sells in stock. Instead, when a store sells a product, it purchases the item from a third party and has it shipped directly to the customer. The store never sees or handles the product. The store is only responsible for marketing and selling the product, while the third-party supplier handles all other aspects of the order fulfillment process, including manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping.
When To Use Fulfillment Requests
Depending on the type of fulfillment request, you then fulfill an order from a fulfillment request in one of ways:
- For shipping orders (an order that you ship to the customer’s address), you create an item fulfillment and shipping package.
- For pickup orders (an order that the customer picks up at the store), you create a store pickup fulfillment.
- For drop ship order, you forward fulfillment request to a third party for processing and they either ship directly to customer or to you, your warehouse and you forward ship to the customer.
Using Fulfillment Requests
You can create multiple fulfillment requests from a single sales order. Likewise, when fulfilling the order from the fulfillment request, you can create multiple item fulfillment records or store pickup fulfillment records from a single fulfillment request.
If multiple locations are specified at line-item level in a sales order, you must create at least one separate fulfillment request per location. For example, in a sales order with two line items, if the first line has a store location in Boston and the second line has a store location in San Diego, you must create two fulfillment requests.
Fulfillment requests can be created manually after a sales order is saved and approved, or automatically when fulfillment request creation is set as an automation process.
To be able to create fulfillment requests in a sales order, you need to specify the locations that will use the fulfillment request transaction. To let Omniibasis to create fulfillment requests automatically, you also need to run the fulfillment request automation process and specify options for the process. If you are using drop-ship or running marketplace, fulfillment requests will be match to the selling vendor based on the rules you setup.