Objective

The following article covers the technical aspect of order processing and the allowed state transitions for order items within Seller Center.

Recap Shipment Types

“Drop Shipping”: Shipment is done by the Seller directly to the customer with the help of a shipment provider.

“Cross-Docking”: Shipment is done from the Seller to the Venture warehouse. From the Venture warehouse, the package can be repacked and sent to the customer.

“Own Warehouse”: Products are sent to Venture warehouse before an order is made. Once a customer buys a product, the order is fulfilled by the warehouse. Picking/packing and shipping is covered by the Venture.

State Machine

Based on the shipment type of the order items, a defined order status flow is in place that allows possible order status transitions. The following image illustrates the API calls used between Seller Center and the Venture’s order management system. Consignment orders are orders of type “Own Warehouse”

Seller Center supports the following state machine transitions for order items:

Manual order transitions possible by Seller:

All status changes that are not listed (e.g. shipped for cross-docking or own warehouse orders) need to be imported from Venture’s order management systems, either by the automatic status update from Seller Center or by pushing the information to Seller Center.

Cross-docking Orders and Manifest

As described in this article, it is possible to create a cross-docking manifest, which allows the Seller to put all cross-docking orders together so that they can be shipped at once to the Venture’s warehouse.

The state machine for cross docking orders and manifests is displayed below:

When processing cross-docking orders, Sellers are able to change the status by setting orders to “Ready to ship” or, if needed, they can cancel an order. Afterwards, no further actions are possible for the order items. Once the order items have the status “Ready to ship,” a manifest can be created.

If there’s any further processing within Seller Center, this will be limited to actions on the manifest by the Seller.