Ready to connect your first sales channel? Normally this is painless but there are a few things you can think about before connecting your sales channel to Prime Penguin.
Preparing your products
Article numbers
Your SKU (“Stock Keeping Unit” or “Article Number”) is important. When you connect multiple systems this is normally what will act as the “primary identifier” for your product. This is what you need to keep in mind:
- Each product and / or product variant really should have a unique SKU.
This will make life a lot easier in the long run, trust us on this. If you already have EAN codes (or indeed GTIN codes), feel free to use those as SKU’s as well, but be aware that some sales channels or WMS’s might balk if they are the same, so you may need to have two different, but still unique, number.
Changing your SKU’s is problematic, never do this without talking to us first. So it pays off getting this right from the start.
Product Attributes
Prime Penguin will regularly read your products and forward data to your connected logistics providers. Normally you can change any attribute at any time, however:
- SKU and EAN should not be updated since it is very seldom supported by logistics providers or other auxiliary systems. Please reach out to us before doing so.
Here’s some other things that might be helpful to keep in mind:
- If your sales channel supports HS and COO codes you may want to add those directly.
- Dimensions and weight is important for logistics, don’t skip it.
Order routing
What’s this “order routing” everyone keeps talking about? It’s simple: it’s the rules that determines which logistics provider should get which order. If you only have a single logistics provider this is simple, the order routing will forward all orders to that provider (usually), but with multiple providers you will want to setup rules.
- Integration / Product Mapping – This is the page in Prime Penguin were you can setup rules depending on products and order values.
- Integration / Order Mapping – Here you can re-assign orders to logistics providers, this is especially useful in combination with the Dropship provider (see below).
The “dropship” logistics provider
In Prime Penguin you will find a “dropship” logistics provider already installed. It will be named something like “Dropship_YourNameHere”, and this is where all your orders will go if they cannot be forwarded to a real logistics provider. If an order is assigned to the dropship provider, you can go to Integration -> Order Mapping and assign it to another, real, logistics provider. This is useful for a number of reasons:
- If you want to test Prime Penguin but not (yet) connect your 3PL, you can still receive orders and they will automatically be assigned to the dropship provider. You can then change state on the order, and assign tracking details, and this will be propagated back to you sales channel.
- If you want to halt certain orders before forwarding to the “real” provider, you can order route them to dropship and then forward them at your leisure. You can even cancel an order not to forward it at all.