ChannelEngine: hybrid fulfillment

About this article

This article describes ChannelEngine's hybrid fulfillment feature, which automatically switches fulfillment of an item between a marketplace fulfillment service and a merchant fulfillment workflow.

Table of contents

Introduction

Automatic fulfillment switching

Fulfillment overrides

Marketplace fulfillment stock level

Receiving orders

Introduction

In Setup, Settings, on select channels, you can configure your preferred marketplace fulfillment method:

• Fixed fulfillment - you choose the marketplace's fulfillment service for all orders.
• Hybrid fulfillment - based on business rules, ChannelEngine decides whether the orders on the channel are fulfilled by the marketplace fulfillment service or by you, the merchant. 

By default, your channel plugin is prepared to support hybrid fulfillment. 

Automatic fulfillment switching

When hybrid fulfillment is set up on your channel, the Fulfillment override attribute appears in Mappings, Offer mappings. 

By default, ChannelEngine sets Fulfillment override to Automatic. As long as there is known marketplace stock for the product, its orders are fulfilled by the marketplace fulfillment service. If there is no known marketplace stock, the fulfillment automatically switches to the merchant.

To support high-velocity sales on Amazon, it is possible to implement a variation of hybrid fulfillment, called dual fulfillment. For more information on Amazon dual fulfillment, check out ChannelEngine: dual fulfillment (FBA and FBM).

Fulfillment overrides

Override the fulfillment type on some or all of your products in Fulfillment override. 

Fixed-value overrides

• If you choose to fulfill all items yourself, choose Fixed value, Merchant.
• If you choose the marketplace to fulfill all items, choose Fixed value, [marketplace]
• To manually override a fulfillment method for a product, select a value from its corresponding field in Fulfillment override. The field turns yellow to indicate that the original fixed value was overridden.

Override with advanced rules 

If your products have a specific custom field that indicates that they should always be fulfilled via the merchant fulfillment service, set up an advanced rule in Fulfillment override:

1. Click the dropdown menu under the Fulfillment override attribute and select Advanced rule. 
2. Click Edit advanced rule to create your rule.
3. A pop-up appears. Whenever your custom field indicates marketplace fulfillment, Use [marketplace].

Marketplace fulfillment stock level

When using marketplace fulfillment on ChannelEngine (e.g.: FBA, FBC, LVB, ZFS, etc.), you need to keep track of the current stock levels. ChannelEngine enables you to retrieve the external stock levels of your products from the channel and schedule sending this information to your merchant systems.

First, make sure the following prerequisites are met:

1. In Setup, Advanced settings, enable Use fulfillment service.
2. In Offer mappings, map Fulfillment override to Automatic or [marketplace].

To import the external stock levels from ChannelEngine into your merchant systems (e.g.: ERP, OMS, etc.), use the following Merchant API calls:

• GET /v2/stocklocations - to retrieve the ID and the name of an external fulfillment warehouse.
• GET /v2/offer/stock - using the ID parameter obtained in the previous step to retrieve the SKU of a product, as well as the remaining stock in the warehouse. ChannelEngine can schedule this task to run every 15 minutes.

On ChannelEngine, you can verify if the marketplace stock retrieved from the channel at Products, Product details, Stock. If you experience issues with external stock not being retrieved and displayed, there are two main causes:

• The external stock is connected to a different GTIN, which typically occurs on bol, where certain products exist with ten or more different GTINs. ChannelEngine can only connect stock to the GTIN that is known on ChannelEngine.
• The task to import external stock is not yet enabled on the channel. Verify if the underlying import task is running by checking the Settings, Scheduled tasks from the sidebar menu. If you are missing specific Import fulfillment stock from channel tasks for the channel (or they are marked as Failed), contact ChannelEngine's Support team to verify and resolve this issue.

Receiving orders

Merchant-fulfilled orders are always New and ready for further processing by you in your merchant systems. Channel-fulfilled orders are imported as In progress and are not meant for further processing by you.

On ChannelEngine, you can view a list of marketplace-fulfilled orders at Orders, Orders from the sidebar menu. A channel-fulfilled order has a label indicating that a marketplace fulfillment service is processing the order, i.e.: it is being handled by Amazon, bol, Cdiscount, or Zalando. 

Alternatively, retrieve all of your orders via the Merchant API.