Drop-shipping from Sage 200, with nothing to rekey

Drop-shipping should be simple: you sell, your supplier ships straight to your customer. For one UK retailer selling through Dunelm and Very, it had become the opposite, with every order handled by hand at every step.

Each marketplace order was keyed into Sage 200, then emailed to the drop-shipper along with the shipping labels downloaded from the marketplace as PDFs. The drop-shipper keyed the order into their own system, matched each label to the right box, shipped the goods and emailed back to say they had gone, with the tracking. Both businesses felt the strain, the drop-shipper most of all: matching labels to boxes was slow, and a label on the wrong box is a costly mistake.

Tilted Channels and Tilted Carriers now do that work between them.

Channels downloads Dunelm orders through Dunelm's API, and Very orders from Very's supplier feed, on a schedule you set. Each one becomes a Sage 200 sales order without anyone keying it in.

The Channels 3PL module then sends the order to the drop-shipper, by file or API, and can raise the matching purchase order to them in Sage at the same time. The purchase order can carry the drop-shipper's shipping charge, as a fixed amount or a value taken from the marketplace order. The marketplace's own order number travels with the order.

That order number is what the drop-shipper's Tilted Carriers uses to fetch the label. When they book the shipment, Carriers asks Dunelm or Very for the label through the marketplace's own API, so each label is produced for the order it belongs to. There are no PDFs to download, no attachments to forward and no labels to match to boxes by hand.

Once the goods have gone, the shipment comes back to the retailer's Sage through the 3PL module. Channels receives the goods on the purchase order, despatches the sales order and records the carrier and tracking number against it, ready for Channels to confirm the despatch to Dunelm or Very on its next run.

The last step is the drop-shipper's invoice, which arrives the same way. Channels matches it to the purchase order line by line and posts it to the purchase ledger. If a price on the invoice differs from the order, the invoice is posted marked as queried, so someone can check it before it is paid.

Neither business keys orders, downloads labels or emails tracking numbers to the other any more. Each step runs on its own schedule, and anything that cannot be processed is shown in Channels and emailed to the people you choose.

The same 3PL module connects Sage 200 to outside warehouses as well as drop-shippers. If you drop-ship, use a third-party warehouse or are thinking about either, talk to us about running it from Sage 200.