Does your sales channel have orders you know are already shipped but still show as unfulfilled?
When your business has many open orders for partially shipped or backordered products, it can present a major challenge while onboarding to new inventory and order management software like SKULabs.
The interface between SKULabs and your existing solution is limited exclusively to your Shopping Carts and Marketplaces. Ideally, we would have a guaranteed way to import your progress on orders that allows for migration between any software, but that is not the case...
Your existing software may not have communicated partial or complete mark as shipped statuses at the line item level on orders.
Your shopping cart or marketplace did not support partial shipment status updates at the line item level.
Your shopping cart or marketplace failed to process the mark as shipped request, much like Amazon did days before Thanksgiving 2020.
Your existing platform may have failed to process the mark as shipped request, especially when they fire millions of mark as shipped requests at day's end to Shopify.
The type of progress on your order could not be passed to your Shopping Cart or Marketplace. e.g. Backordered products.
How to handle partially fulfilled orders during onboarding
So with this in mind, you can continue the onboarding process with simple solutions to ensure inventory accuracy and order fulfillment accuracy.
Inventory accuracy
Simply import your true on hand inventory counts directly from your inventory management software into SKULabs. If you do not already have an IMS to import these, you can just keep the initial "Free" or "Available" inventory imported from your sales channel initially as the "On Hand" counts for items until you're ready to count your inventory to catch up.
Order fulfillment accuracy
You need an effective way to prevent your team from mistakenly double-shipping any items or orders which are already fulfilled. Here's an easy method we recommend:
Find the date of the oldest order which still has at least one item to be shipped.
Archive all orders older than that order's date on your sales channel, or change their status in SKULabs.
Next, find the oldest order which is completely unfulfilled.
Select and Tag all orders before that order number with a new tag of "Hold - Possibly Partially Fulfilled".
This solves two problems:
You can now filter all of these tagged orders from your employees view and just have them finish shipping the remainder of the items in your existing software.
If that is not an option and you must finish shipping within SKULabs, this tag will warn your team to double-check the order on your existing platform to determine whether any partial fulfillment progress has taken place before mistakenly double-shipping items which have already been fulfilled.
If you have questions or feel some part of these recommendations will not work for you please contact our support team to find out what your other options are.