If you’re not familiar with the term “Dropshipping”, this means that you are letting your suppliers handle the shipping of your customers orders.
Dropshipping is a growing demand of webshops today, and it means that you can cut down expenses for warehouse and storage dramatically.
The setup can be fairly simple, as long as you have only one supplier and all your orders are sent from that same supplier. However when having more than one supplier, perhaps even a stock of your own too, it will quickly grow in complexity and need of administration.
Taking the simple first, this will be a matter of redirecting orders, this could perhaps be done manually, meaning that you would do the ordering with your supplier by hand, adding the address of the customer to the order with your supplier, and then let the supplier handle the rest.
You would probably get noticed about shipment when the order is sent from the supplier, and you could then set order status and notice your customer yourself through Prestashop.
However, such a simple setup is seldom the case, actually you may have more than one supplier, even of the same goods, and that is where things gets a little more complicated, or perhaps where it turns out to be too much administration.
Having more than one supplier or shipping location involved, means that one order can result in two or more shipments, and that the customers order will not complete before all shipments are sent.
You will probably have to inform your customer that the order is being shipped from more than one supplier on checkout, and this probably also means that shipping prices will increase, at least for you.
You would have to be informed from more that one supplier about shipping for the same order, and you would have more than one tracking number to inform your customer about.
As you get more orders, you will probably have to automate some of these processes somehow, to free yourself from the administration. Perhaps your suppliers have an API or another kind of interface by which you can send orders directly from your system. You would then have to utilize this interface to automate the ordering process.
Automated dropshipping with Prestashop, having multiple suppliers.
Picture the following situation; You have an online coffee shop.
You are selling coffee and espresso machines, you have one supplier for coffee and another supplier for espresso machines.
Both of the suppliers expose an API that you can use for placing orders, and also to get order status and tracking.
You hire a programmer to make a module by which you can send orders automatically to the individual suppliers, and by which you can get status for your orders.
But there is one problem remaining; what to do when the customer orders both coffee and an espresso machine on the same order? How do you send only part of that order to each supplier, and how do you keep track of the two shipments on a single order, and how will you inform the customer that part of the order is shipped?
This makes the task a bit complicated to solve, since Prestashop has only one shipment per order.
Splitting orders with Advanced stock management
You can solve this issue by using some of the features (if not all) from Advanced stock management.
You have to setup your products as being managed by a specific warehouse, so in this case, each of your suppliers should actually be considered a “warehouse”, which is also perfectly true.
What happens as an effect of this, is the same that happens in effect of using the “Delayed shipping” feature. A single order containing products from more than one warehouse, will force the order to be split into two orders, each having its own order number, but both still having the same order reference.
Now the automated ordering program can look at the first product on an order to determine the supplier, and send the order to that specific supplier. You can also have individual shipping details and tracking number on each order.
To keep things simple, I would recommend only offering a specific product from one supplier at a time.
I would also recommend that you carefully consider the consequences if you use “Delayed shipping” together with a multi supplier – dropshipping setup, that could result in yet another split on an order.
You do not have to use all features from Advanced stock management for this scenario, for instance you should probably not let product quantities be handled by advanced stock management, since you may not have information about specific stocktransactions at your supplier, so you could just stick with entering quantities manually – or leave the off.
I may make a more comprehensive example of this whole scenario in the future.
(This setup has been tested with Prestashop 1.6.1.1 )