How to Automatically Pass Orders to a Third-Party Fulfilment House

[mwilliamson]

Hi,

I'll be using a third-party fulfilment house to pick, pack and despatch products.

The fulment house want data from my orders to be uploaded from my host server to their fulfilment system by HTTP post automatically overnight for fulfilment the following day. They have this arrangement in place with a number of other e-business clients and they say it works well as long as the file format is presented in the correct way. In discussing this with other fulfilment houses, they say they do the same thing. This also makes sense for me because it means that I'm not tied to my PC every night downloading orders - instead this happens automatically.

However, I have absolutely no idea how to achieve this with Actinic. The web host says that this is not possible with Actinic.

Has anyone had any experience of integrating an Actinic site to automatically supply orders to a fulfilment house? If so, any advice would be useful.

Thanks in advance.

[pinbrook]

We send all our orders to several 3rd parties, however we prefer to check each order first, ie we check the payment has been received before sending the order on and the CC checks out.

we use the email feature within the order dialog boxes, and use autoit to auto type the supplier email

[Jan]

Actually a lot of Actinic users do just this, using a variety of ways, here are a few examples:

1) Forward a copy of the confirmation receipt to the supplier (manual)

2) Print the invoice or packing list to a PDF or text file and send this to the supplire (manual)

3) Use the Mole End One Stop Automation programt to forward all orders to the supplier (http://www.actinicplugins.co.uk/acat...utomation.html)

4) Use the Mole End Multiuser One Stop Order Processing to forward selected orders to one or more suppliers.
(http://www.actinicplugins.co.uk/acat...rocessing.html)

5) Use a custom program to export orders (or approved orders) to a file of the format required by the third party application and then either have the application pick the file up (usually by putting in a certain directory on the PC) or send the file to a program or internet location programmatically. You would have to write the custom program yourself or hire someone to write it for you.

It sounds as if you might need to do option 5, if so you need to make sure that your product references match the manufacturer references.

Regards,

[doug selby]

Perhaps we could use an email template to generate an order to our suppliers from within the order panel mail tab?

I will detail my attempts to make this work, here.

[Jan]

Actually we have a product called One Stop Order Processing that can do this, you can define an email template that has a fixed email address, you can then select orders and send them to the suppliers with a single click. This is a beta product though (One Stop Order Processing is released, but this version is not), it has been in use for drop shipping by one of our customers for a couple of months and is working well.

Regards,

[doug selby]

Thanks Ian,

I saw the software on your site from the links in your sig. and I will recommend the one stop order processing to my client. He will be loathe to spend any more money before the orders start coming in, so I will be mailing a pdf of the packing list for now.
Mind you, I do still hope to wring enough infomation out of the email generator in v7 to achieve this much at least, even if in the end I do turn to plug-ins to get automation.

Doug.