Connect your first 3PL

When your sales channel is set up and connected, it is also time to connect your 3PL. When that’s done you’ll be ready to ship real orders, end-to-end.

Preparations

Logistics Provider

First, you need a 3PL to work with. If you don’t already have a logistics provider, get in touch with us as we have an extensive network of partners across the globe and might be happy to help you, or you can fill in our procurement and directly get offers from our 3PL partners.

Then you need to get the connection details from your logistics provider. What those details are will differ between the providers depending on what Warehouse Management System (WMS) they are using. But for example, if your 3PL is using Ongoing WMS, then these are the details you need: Warehouse URI, username and password, and goods owner code and ID.

Setup the connection

1. Go to Integrations -> Warehouse Connection and click “Add new”
2. The first thing you need to do is to select your “logistics provider” from the first drop down list, this will change the form to connection details needed.
   1. Help! My logistics provider isn’t on the list! That’s easy to fix, contact us and we’ll set it up.
3. Fill in the details you got from your 3PL.
4. Click “Validate connection” to check if we can successfully connect to the provider.
5. Select the sales channel that should be used as the main product database. If you have multiple sales channels this is the one from which we will read product data and send along to the logistics provider.
6. There are a number of check boxes and normally you should check them all, however, there might be instances when you should leave one or two unchecked:
   1. Active – Leave unchecked if you want the connection to be dormant for the time being.
   2. Sync Inventory – Leave unchecked if your provider does not yet have the correct inventory and you do not want it to be written to your sales channel. When your provider have scanned all your product your can enable the sync if you want to update the exact inventory to your sales channel. You have the possibility to disable the sync for any SKUs you want.
   3. Sync Orders – Leave unchecked if your logistics does not yet have the correct inventory or carrier contracts in place.
   4. Overwrite Order Changes – Only leave unchecked if your provider does not permit order changes.
   5. Process Orders – Leave unchecked if you do not want to forward order changes to your sales channels.
   6. Sync in-orders – Leave unchecked if your logistics provider does not support in orders via their connection.
      
7. Click “Save”

Map products

In order for the product data to be synced to the warehouse you need to add a mapping. Since this is your first 3PL connection this is simple: Go to Integrations -> Product Mapping and click “+ Default Mapping” then select your sales channel and your logistics provider.

Existing Orders

If you have existing orders that are IN_PROGRESS when you map the products, the orders will automatically be assigned to the logistics provider. If this is undesired you can cancel the orders by assigning them to the dropship provider.