Shipping Overview

Shipping & Fulfillment covers the outbound path: the Order arrives, ShipStream decides how and from where it should ship, a packer builds the packages, and a carrier collects them. If you read one page first, make it the Order Processing Loop - it explains the decisions everything else in this section configures.

The screens are under Shipping in the Admin UI, with the carrier and custom-field setup under System > Shipping. The floor work of picking and loading is in Floor Operations.

Order data

• Orders - what an Order is, how it is created, and what you can do to it.
• Custom Fields for Orders and for Shipments - your own fields for sorting, filtering, exporting and scripting.
• Reference Numbers - normalized and carrier-specific codes carried on the label or sent to the carrier.
• Other Shipping Options - the advanced per-Order shipping instructions ShipStream supports.

Order processing

• Order Allocation - how ShipStream chooses the Warehouse and inventory for each Order.
• Ready to Ship and Service Levels and Target Ship Dates - when an Order becomes workable, and the date you promised.
• Backorders and "Unable to Process" Order status - what happens when inventory or data is missing.
• Packing Solutions - how ShipStream answers "which container do these items go in?"
• Address Validation and Classification - catching bad addresses and identifying residential ones before they cost you.

The packing station

• Packaging Features - supplies, instructions and data collection applied during packing, plus Containers, Infill and attaching features to Orders.
• Packing Instructions and Packing Slip Design - what the packer is told to do, and what prints with the package.
• Packing Weight Check - stop a packer when the scale disagrees with the expected weight.

Carriers and accounts

• Shipping Accounts - your carrier credentials, and the groups that assign them to Shipments.
• External Shipping Methods - your own methods and label APIs alongside the supported carriers.
• Third Party Billing - ship on one account and bill the fees or duties to another.
• Manifest Couriers - the pickup drivers that Shipments and Manifests are assigned to.
• Tracking Numbers for Offline Shipments - recording tracking for packages shipped outside ShipStream.

Retail, B2B and international

• Retailers - the trading partners you fulfill for, and their routing and labelling requirements.
• Outbound SSCC Barcodes - GS1-compliant identifiers for pallets and cartons.
• International Shipping - customs documents, duties and the fields carriers require.