Overview of Drop Shipping
Drop ship is an order fulfillment strategy where the seller does not keep products in inventory.
Instead, the seller relies on suppliers or contract manufacturers to build, store, and ship orders to customers. When a customer places on order for a drop shipped product, the seller issues a purchase order for the item and provides instructions for shipping directly to the customer. The supplier ships the product to the customer.
The following figure illustrates the drop ship process flow.
You can generate shipping documents for your drop ship orders. Shipments are automatically created when an advance shipment notice (ASN) is created by the warehouse manager for the drop ship purchase order or by the supplier in the Supplier Portal. The shipping manager generates the packing slip, bill of lading, and commercial invoice as is applicable to the shipment. The generated paperwork is sent to the supplier manually, typically through email. The supplier can then ship the goods to the customer with the paperwork received from the seller.