Concepts

Merchants and fulfillment providers

	Merchant	Fulfillment provider
Owns	Products (inventory)	Warehouses
Creates	Inbound shipments, orders	—
Does	Buys shipping labels (by default)	Receives stock, counts stock, packs and ships orders
Invoices	Receives invoices	Issues invoices

A merchant and a provider work together through a partnership. The provider sets the fees for the merchant in the partnership. A merchant can only send stock and orders to warehouses of providers with an active partnership, and can have as many partnerships as needed, for example one provider per region. Each provider sees only the stock and orders that are sent to its own warehouses.

Stock

Stock is kept per product and warehouse. microfulfill shows four numbers:

Number	Meaning
On hand	Physically in the warehouse.
Reserved	Needed for orders that have not been shipped yet.
Available	On hand minus reserved. This is what new orders can use.
Incoming	Announced in inbound shipments that have not been received yet.

Every change of the stock is recorded as a stock movement: received inbound shipments, shipped orders and stock counts. The on-hand stock is always the sum of these movements, so you can trace every number.

If an order needs more than is available, microfulfill shows a warning. You can still save the order; the warehouse ships it once the stock has arrived.

Inbound shipments

An inbound shipment is stock you send to a warehouse.

1. Open: you created the shipment and chose the products and quantities.
2. In transit: you sent it and entered the carrier and tracking number.
3. Received: the provider counted the goods. The received quantities are added to the stock of that warehouse.

Orders

1. Open: the order was created (by hand or through the API) and can still be changed.
2. Ready to pick: the shipping label has been bought. The warehouse is notified by e-mail.
3. Picking and Packed: optional steps of the warehouse.
4. Shipped: the warehouse handed the parcel to the carrier. The quantities are removed from stock.

Until an order is shipped, its label can be cancelled (the order goes back to Open) and the order can be cancelled. See Orders.

Fees and invoices

Each partnership has a fee schedule:

Fee	Charged for
Per order	Every order (packing and handling)
Per order line	Every different product in an order, minus the lines included in the order fee
Each additional unit	Every further unit of the same product
Receiving per unit	Every unit received in an inbound shipment
Per return	Every customer return received and inspected
Storage per unit and month	Average units stored in a month (charged at the start of the next month)

Fees are added automatically to the provider's invoice for the merchant for the current month: order fees when the order is shipped, receiving fees when a shipment is received. Cancelled orders cost nothing. See Partners for examples.