Drop Shipping and other silly thoughts...

[rseigel]

I, among others here I know, use a lot of drop ship vendors so I don't have to stock much merchandise.

 

This brings up a whole slew of oddball problems.

 

I'm trying to put together some ideas of what we need that's specific to this need.

 

1) Ability to email the order directly to the drop shipper. Easy enough if all the products in a given order are for the same distributor but creates a whole other problem in there are multiple distrbutors included in the same customer order. Need to be able to split orders based on who's shipping it and only send them the part they need.

 

2) Ability to specify for each individual product whether it's self-ship or drop ship. Not a biggie. Just a new table and one new field in the products table and some additional logic. I think I have a handle on this one.

 

3) Shipping charges are the tough one IMHO. Personally, I've decided to just charge a flat rate per order and eat anything extra that it costs me. I'd like to hear others thoughts on this one though. I just can't picture charging someone a bunch of individual shipping charges though just because of the way I've decided to run my business.

 

4) Other thoughts???

 

Once the ideas are together I need to know if anyone else is interested enough for me to bundle this up as a contribution. My site has been modified quite a bit (just the layout really though for the most part) so it's going to be a royal pain in the butt for me to do it as a contribution but I will if need be. Luckily I haven't changed a lick of code in the Admin side yet.

 

I'm also planning on adding a third option to the self-ship and drop ship thing....affiliate ship.

 

Example: I want to be able to add products from say Petsmart or Amazon and have the customer whisked off to their site if they want to buy them (with a commission for me of course). Obviously this creates some other obstacles but I think I have it pretty much thought through.

 

I may be the only one that cares about the affiliate option (although I've already tested this before and I made some nice $ from it). If nobody else cares about it I'm not going to waste any time creating a contribution out of this one though.

 

Ok...ideas????? Let's hear 'em.

[rseigel]

Couple more thoughts that I saw Greg come up with in the other thread:

 

- Allow vendors to log in to their own area of the admin. Hmmm...sounds a tad like overkill to me but worth considering.

 

- The email to each vendor should be customized for them specifically (with just the information they need to know obviously).

 

What else?

[loxly]

I'm interested in all of the above and would be willing to help out.

 

Debbie

[rseigel]

Well, I'm a week away from being able to start on this as I'm going to be leaving tomorrow. No Web the whole bloody time I'm gone either. With any luck I won't knock my wife to the floor by mistake trying to get to the computer the second I get back. :lol:

 

I might just take you up on your offer when I start to put this together Debbie. :wink:

 

In the meantime...the more ideas the better here.

[HLT]

Rseigel

 

We did this exact thing. In fact almost all of it.

 

Half of our orders were being sent to my warehouse, and half were being emailed to me, to be forwarded to the appropriate vendor. In addition, we created an admin interface that displayed ONLY the orders which contained the specific product for that vendor, allowing them to log in to their own secure area and process things themselves. It was pretty quick and easy.

 

I've opted to completely end the whole dropship thing though because the more we cusotmized the store, the more bugs were created, and the less stable the whole thing became.

 

HLT

[mattice]

1) Ability to email the order directly to the drop shipper. Easy enough if all the products in a given order are for the same distributor but creates a whole other problem in there are multiple distrbutors included in the same customer order. Need to be able to split orders based on who's shipping it and only send them the part they need.

You can split up products on manufacturer basis or with an additional field in the product table that holds an unique reference.

 

2) Ability to specify for each individual product whether it's self-ship or drop ship. Not a biggie. Just a new table and one new field in the products table and some additional logic. I think I have a handle on this one.

See above. Do it in one go.

 

3) Shipping charges are the tough one IMHO. Personally, I've decided to just charge a flat rate per order and eat anything extra that it costs me. I'd like to hear others thoughts on this one though. I just can't picture charging someone a bunch of individual shipping charges though just because of the way I've decided to run my business.

Once you have decided which products are going to be dropshipped you'll have to determine THEIR rates. Your rate is simply total weight of all products you yourself are going to ship. Their rates could be flatrate, table rates or even calculated real time with a module that sends them along.

4) Other thoughts???

The biggie will be to get the results across to the clients screen / admin / dropshippers and make it all appear smooth/ logic

 

Mattice

[Menno]

altough still running on another (open source) shop we are seriously figuring out if Oscommerce is a suitable solution for our needs. Most of our needs you just described.

We have a database of 6000+ items, originating from at least 20 different suplliers (none of them drop ship btw, not a common thing in the Netherlands - most of it is next day delivery). We also carry stock of least 800 products, and we use a preorder system to boost or sales.

 

Here's how we took care of the exact same problem in our databases

1) The manufacturers code is already in the database, so that takes care of that.

 

2) altough i don't know yet how oscommerce handles in stock products (sorry!! newbie to oscommerce :( ), we added a code for every stock status in our database (which can be compared with orders_products database) :

0 - not in stock, needs to be ordered (after ordering, becomes 1)

1 - items on order

2 - in stock, needs to be picked from warehouse (after picking becomes 8 )

3 - preorder (order lots at once for big discount :D )

8 - available stock, ready for shipping

9 - shipped

 

3) we order when we meet minimum order requirements - in that case all of our suplliers give us free shipping. Of course this can be a problem with dropshipping or if you guarantee nextday delivery..

 

I tweaked MySQlman (and might try to start on Oscommerce somewhere in the future) into a complete solution for all of our needs, most of it by simply following a link to what you want to do :

 

1) create an orderform (supplier specific, containing their productnumbers, our company name and customernumber etc) which can be either emailed or faxed (also supllier dependant, orders can be made with one single keyboard stroke). To calculate if we met the minimum order, our databse also includes the default discounts, supplier prices, minimum order amount (either in # of items or amounts)

 

2) create a wharehouse picklist - says it all, we have an a-z wharehouse so pretty straightforward sorted from a-z, without any regards to its supplier

 

3) received orders - a simple module allowing us to administer all incoming items, either on their names, product id or checkbox lists, all supplier specific.

 

but apart from that we took it one step up, and also created the orderfulfillment based on the available stock: items availble for shipping (stock status 8) are printed on the screen and invoices, labels etc can be made.. I'm wandering offtopic now, but it looks to me that if you add one single table with all supplier infos (to keep things stable) and add a/some column/s to the ordered products DB you'll be on your way..

 

easy to get to the customer screen (the code=status of product), but since i'm absolutely not familiar with oscommerce.. will be a real pain to get into admin (no need for dropshippers to get their own screen if you email everything.. i guess.. ) .. the again, logic remains the same

 

well, thats all for my first post on this excellent resource for, what i'm now starting to figure out, is a really, really good ecommerce solution.

 

Menno

(with apologies for my long post, I always get carried away, and always have a hard time staying ontopic :)

[TeeJay]

I needed exactly the same sytem, but as I am not a programmer (or even an html-er) I decided the easiest thing to do was to buy X-Cart (sorry for using bad language)

It has come at a cost and I would never give up my oscommerce site/s

 

But it does exactly what drop shipping needs (I had some aspects tailored for me)

 

It is promoted as a "Mall" type cart but in reality it is far better for drop shipping.

 

on the back end you can set up multiple "providers" each with their own shipping and tax rates etc and each with their own login, products and orders.

 

All the orders are processed through the shop owners (admins) processing gateway but the order emails are split and sent to the relavant provider.

 

It's a real bugger to figure it all out, but it is a very powerfull cart.

I have recently paid for and had the Protx payment gateway integrated and had some updates done on the affiliate system, and as with all of this type of software I have no doubt that now I've paid for it they'll integrate it into a newer release (buggers).

 

Worth a look if you've got a couple of months to figure out what everything does, uses "Smarty Templates" and to be honest it is easier to taylor than osc (it has a "webmaster mode" which when activated opens up a window which tracks all the templates being used for the page you are loading and even creates a link to go straight in to edit a particular template)

 

I still think that osc rocks and I beleive that eventually osc will be the most powerfull and flexible of them all

Well done to Harrold and all of the developers/contributors

[optix]

I too suffer from the problem of not being able to match my dropship supplier's shipping rate. Is the only answer to just charge a flat rate or has someone come up with an ingenious way to handle this issue?

 

If I can't find one soon I may have to look at finding a local dealer to sell for :(

[cgchris99]

I need this too. I kept hoping someone would come up with a solution. The most important part I need is the calculated drop shipper costs.

[Guest]

Use the ship per item. It allows you to put a shipping rate on a per item basis with a few changes you can also add a cart fee. Plus you can add other fees if they choose say next day or second day etc.

It is in the contributions area

[talon177]

I would also be interested in this as i do drop shipping.

[cgchris99]

There are a lot of people interested in this but it doesn't seem like anyone is working on a contribution. If I knew more about PHP I would do it.

[hazer1]

I need this too. I kept hoping someone would come up with a solution. The most important part I need is the calculated drop shipper costs.

 

Just keeping this topic alive as it seems to die and no one as yet has supplied a fix for drop shipping orders.

[radders]

I was hoping to use the Multi Vendor Shipping contribution. Is there a problem with doing it that way?

[hazer1]

I really don't think that will work after reading the contribution. It's going to take quit a bit of work to intergate this request as there are more factors involved than just setting a zipcode to mail from.

[Guest]

im seriously interested in this!! it would be a great help, thanks in advance!!!!

[Farrukh]

We should work on this together. I am willing to help.

[cgchris99]

We should make a list of the capabilities or features that are necessary to make this work.

 

Here's some of the items I think it should be able to do.

 

1) Ship From Zip code based on Manfacturer or individual item.

 

2) For orders containing multiple items from multiple manfacturers, allow it to calculate the full shipping amount for the items grouped by manufacturer zipcode OR select that it takes the farthest manufacturer away from the home zip and just adds weight for the others. (What are your thoughts on this one and I know it would only work for U.S.)

 

I'm sure there are more but I can't think of them.

[Starkness]

I am going to check out this suggestion:

 

Use the ship per item. It allows you to put a shipping rate on a per item basis with a few changes you can also add a cart fee. Plus you can add other fees if they choose say next day or second day etc.

It is in the contributions area

 

Thanks in advance to anyone who is working on this or will.

[Guest]

I agree with cgchris99. We drop ship from multiple companies and have defaulted to using a single 'average location' zip for shipping calcs ...this hurts sales for those near the supplier. I could use a multi-vendor shipping module that uses zip code of the supplier as the origination point. What would be easiest for me would be for the shipping module to calculate shipping totals by manufacturer, in a given order, for each manufacturer in the order, then sum the shipping charges and present just the one shipping page to the customer. The customer need not worry about the fact that different products came from different locations, although it would be easy to also have that in the sales confirmation email, e.g. Your fiberglass products will ship from our Sacramento warehouse, your resins from our Seattle warehouse.

 

Also, the multi-vendor shipping module should utilize existing shipping modules for the quotes because ...sometimes, the individual shipping modules are modified for various reasons. In our case, adding hazmat fees to some orders.

 

Brian

 

 

"We should make a list of the capabilities or features that are necessary to make this work.

 

Here's some of the items I think it should be able to do.

 

1) Ship From Zip code based on Manfacturer or individual item.

 

2) For orders containing multiple items from multiple manfacturers, allow it to calculate the full shipping amount for the items grouped by manufacturer zipcode OR select that it takes the farthest manufacturer away from the home zip and just adds weight for the others. (What are your thoughts on this one and I know it would only work for U.S.)

 

I'm sure there are more but I can't think of them."

[Guest]

forgot to check 'notify me when a reply is posted' (ignore...)

[Guest]

I to need something to this line of mod

I dont know enough to help code,, but have a test server and time to help test

[Goanna]

I also would need a modification/contribution to set up for my store, as I ship my own products, and I also sell products from a drop ship wholesaler.

[moonlitsun]

FYI...if anyone is trying to get the latest hack on Multi Vendor:

 

http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/index.php?act...ndpost&p=248729

 

Please let me know if anyone successfully integrates this into milestone 2.

 

Thanks,

-Codi