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Vendors & Drop-Shipping

Vendor Management

Adding Vendors:

Navigate to Inventory —> Vendors, and click the ADD tab to begin adding Vendors

Each of your vendors should be listed in this Vendors table, which provides the complete details of the vendors, including all the necessary information to generate Purchase Orders when needed. Most of the information that is filled out in this table is information which will be displayed on the Purchase Order's that you generate.

Setting up Vendor Rules:

The Vendor Rules table is what ties a product(s) to various vendor(s). It is flexible enough to even support multiple vendors supplying a single product.

The Vendor Rules section is located at the bottom of the EDIT product detail page. This needs to be filled in to specify which vendor(s) are associated with this product.

1. In the VendorID field, enter the VendorID for the vendor
2. In the VendorPartNo field, enter the Part Number for this product as required by your Vendor. Often this is the same as your ProductCode
3. In the MinQty field, enter 1, and leave the MaxQty field blank
4. In the Price field, enter the price you pay your vendor for this product
5. Click Save Changes to Vendor Rules

Purchase Orders

Generating Purchase Orders:

Purchase Orders can be generated in the following ways:

1. Through Automatic Drop-Shipping (as described below)
2. Through the Low Inventory tab at the top of the View All Products page
3.  Manually creating POs from the View All Purchase Orders page and then clicking the ADD tab

How to use the Low Inventory and Queued for PO tabs:

These tabs are located on the top-right of the View All Products page. The purpose of these tabs is for your purchasing department to be able to quickly order inventory for products that are running low on stock. The following fields of the Products table must be filled in:

• Stock Low Qty Alarm - If the StockStatus of this product goes below this Stock Low Qty Alarm number, this product will show up on the Low Inventory tab
• Stock Re-Order Qty - This number specifies the product quantity to order, each time it runs low

If the above fields are filled in, along with the Vendor Rules as always, this product will show up on the Low Inventory tab when it's running low on stock. In the Low Inventory tab page, display the AddToPO_Now field(Click on Customize this view, and check the AddToPO_Now field). If this box is checked, the product will be moved to the Queued for PO tab.

In the Queued for PO tab page, cross-reference the data including the vendors and costs for each product, and choose a vendor you'd like to use this time, or just leave everything according to the Vendor Rules, which will choose the cheapest vendor for the Quantity you're ordering.

How to create a Purchase Order manually:

Note: Before creating a PO manually, make sure to Add the Vendor and fill in the Vendor Rules for the product.

1. Navigate to Inventory -> Purchase Orders in the home page of the admin area, and click the ADD tab
2. Choose the Vendor from the drop down list, Click Continue
3. On the Build New Purchase Order page, verify the PO information and Click Build New PO
4. Enter the product code and Qty, Click ADD. Note: To Edit products that have been added to the PO, click on Edit Items currently associated with this PO
5. Once all products have been added to the PO, click on Yes, send the PO now

Sending Purchase Orders:

When sending purchase orders to Vendors, the following are the available options:

SendVia	Description
e-mail	E-mails the PO to the specified vendor's e-mail address
fax	Faxes the PO to the specified vendor's fax number
none	Allows you to print the PO to send it manually.

Receiving Purchase Orders:

Once you get the inventory from your vendor, you will want to receive the PO.

Navigate to Inventory —> Receiving, from the home page of your admin area and follow these steps:

1. From the first drop down menu choose PO#, and in the field next to it type in the PO number such as 1089 and click the Prepare button
2. You should now see all of the items listed that were ordered through this PO. As you count the tangible inventory to verify that you received the complete quantity of products that you ordered, you'll want to fill in the Quantity Received boxes on this page, and click the Save Changes button
3. Since 90% of the time your vendor's never tell you the actual shipping cost until this point, now is the time you can input the Shipping Cost in the field right above the Distribute button in the lower right corner of this screen.
4. Once you are finished, click the Distribute button at the bottom right corner to update the stock status of the products that you received.

For example, if you enter $59.91 for the shipping cost and click the Distribute button, it will distribute $59.91 evenly throughout the items on the order based on the weight of each product.

After clicking the Distribute button you can then easily adjust/edit the shipping cost for an item(s) as you see fit. The reason for the distribution of shipping charges per item is to help you run more accurate Cost/Profit reports to get the TRUE cost of your goods.

For example, you might be paying $5.00 for an item and selling it for $12.00 and assuming your profit is $7.00 per sale. However, the item might be costing you $10.00 after shipping it to your warehouse because of its size & weight, therefore the Distribute data feature is able to calculate the true Cost/Profit of your inventory.

Customizing Purchase Orders:

Purchase Order templates can be customized for each vendor:

1. Navigate to Inventory —> Vendors, from the home page of your admin area
2. Click the VendorID of the individual vendor you wish to customize
3. The Vendor_PO_Template field is by default set to po.asp. This file is located in the following directory of your website /wwwroot/admin/emails/po.asp. You can edit this file by logging in via FTP, or you can use the LiveEdit File Editor feature by simply clicking the pencil icon on this page, which opens the file to allow editing the existing po.asp template

However, you could create a NEW template for a purchase order and upload it via FTP. The following are the instructions to add a NEW template:

1. Login via FTP, and navigate to the following directory /wwwroot/admin/emails/
2. Duplicate the po.asp file and rename it. For example: VendorABC.asp
3. Open the new file VendorABC.asp to edit it

Automatic Drop-Shipping

How to setup a product for automatic drop-shipping:

1. Navigate to Inventory —> Products, click to edit one of your existing products
2. You must fill in the Vendor Rules for each of your products as specified above
3. Next verify that the following fields of this product are set as follows:

In this Drop-Shipping scenario, POs are sent as soon as payment is received for the order. In most scenarios you'll want to only authorize payment first, which sends the PO, and then when your vendor says ok, it's shipped, then you can capture the payment. If you authorize + capture at the same time, that's fine too. POs are sent automatically only the first time payment is authorized/captured. POs will never be sent twice.