The dealer portal¶
Your partner dealers get one web page of their own. It lists the guns you sent them, lets them confirm each one arrived, and lets them tell you when one sells. This page is written so you can walk a dealer through it over the phone.
There is no screenshot here because the portal is the dealer's screen, not yours. Everything below is described in words.
Before you start¶
- The dealer needs a login. See Onboarding a dealer.
- The address is your site's
/consignmentpage. Tell them to sign in at/loginwith the shared store mailbox and their own password. They land on the portal automatically. - Set the Consignment Contact Email in FFL Settings. The portal shows that address to the dealer whenever something fails, so they write to a monitored mailbox instead of guessing.
What the dealer sees¶
At the top: your store's name, the word Consignment, their own store name, and a count reading something like "4 guns on your rack". Under that, a line saying "Mark a gun sold and your store bills you for your price. Nothing else changes." There is a Search serial # box, and a checkbox reading Show guns sold in the last 90 days which is off by default.
Below that, their guns, split into up to three sections.
| Section | What is in it |
|---|---|
| Arriving | Guns you shipped that they have not confirmed receiving |
| On your rack | Guns they have confirmed and can sell |
| Sold · last 90 days | Their own recent sales, only when they tick the checkbox |
On a phone each gun is a card. On a desktop it is one table with the columns Serial, Firearm, Status, Your price and Retail.
Every gun shows four things that matter on a call: the Serial, the firearm's name with its manufacturer and caliber, Your price, and Retail.
- Your price is what they will owe you when that gun sells. It is the dealer price you set on the shipment.
- Retail is the MSRP you suggested. It is a reference only. If you left it blank they see a dash.
They never see what you paid for the gun, whose gun it is, your internal shipment numbers, or anything about your other dealers.
A dealer never sees, and never needs to know, whether a gun belongs to a private consignor. That question cannot arise in the first place, because consignor-owned guns can never be sent out on consignment.
The buttons¶
Confirm receipt sits on every card in the Arriving section. Tapping it opens a small panel headed "Confirm receipt?" naming the serial and the gun. They tap Confirm receipt again to commit. The gun moves to On your rack with a green "✓ Received" and today's date.
Confirm all received appears at the top of the Arriving section when two or more guns are waiting. It does the same thing for the whole box in one tap, and lists every serial so they can check the box against the screen first.
Mark sold sits on every card in the On your rack section. Tapping it opens a panel headed "Mark this gun sold?" showing the serial, the gun, and a line reading "You'll owe your store" with the amount. There is an optional Sale price box. They tap Mark sold to commit, and get a confirmation saying the store has been notified. The gun moves to the Sold section with the date and a note saying there is nothing left to do.
Copy appears inside the tracking details of an arriving gun. It copies the tracking number to their clipboard and briefly reads "Copied".
Receipt comes before sale
A gun cannot be marked sold until receipt is confirmed. If a dealer says the Mark sold button is missing, they are looking at a card in the Arriving section. Have them tap Confirm receipt first.
About that optional sale price¶
Tell dealers plainly: the sale price box changes nothing. What they owe you is the "Your price" figure, whatever they type. The box exists so you can see what your guns fetch on their shelf. Leaving it blank is the normal path, and the portal's own hint says so. Blank and $0.00 are treated identically, and both read as "not recorded" on your side.
What the dealer cannot do¶
The portal does one job: see my rack, confirm it arrived, say when one sold. There is no ordering, no browsing your inventory, no requesting a return, and no statement of account. If a dealer wants a gun sent back, they call you and you recall it from the Consignment Out page.
Tracking, and how it gets there¶
When you push a shipment to ShipStation and buy the label, the tracking information finds its way to the dealer's screen without anyone typing it.
- A background job checks ShipStation every ten minutes for shipments still waiting on a label.
- As soon as a label exists, the tracking number, the carrier and the tracking link are written back onto the consignment, and its shipping status flips to Shipped.
- That shipment stops being checked. Nothing is polled twice.
- A shipment still waiting after 30 days drops out of the checks so it cannot spin forever.
On the dealer's arriving card this shows as "In transit", the carrier, a Track ↗ link, and a Details ⌄ toggle. Opening the details reveals the full tracking number, the ship date, and the Copy button. Before a label exists they see "Preparing to ship · tracking coming soon" instead.
When ShipStation is not in the loop¶
Use Mark Shipped (no ShipStation) on the At dealer queue when you bought the label somewhere else, when the integration is off, or when a shipment aged out of the automatic checks. Type the tracking number and the carrier into that dialog and the dealer sees them exactly as if they had come back automatically. You can also add a number later to a shipment you already marked shipped. See Shipping a consignment.
When something goes wrong on their end¶
The portal shows a banner across the top rather than a cryptic error, and it tells the dealer that nothing changed.
| What they see | What it means | What to tell them |
|---|---|---|
| Couldn't load your consignment list | The page could not reach your system | Reload. If it persists, it is your side, not theirs. |
| Couldn't mark … sold. The gun is still on your rack. | The sale was not recorded | Try again. Nothing was billed. |
| Couldn't confirm … received. Nothing changed on your rack. | The receipt was not recorded | Try again. |
| Confirm you've received this firearm before you can mark it sold. | They skipped the receipt step | Tap Confirm receipt on that gun first. |
| Your account is not linked to exactly one dealer. | Their login is misconfigured | A manager checks the contact record behind that login. It must link to exactly one dealer. |
| Not Permitted | They are signed in as someone without the dealer role | Check they used the store mailbox, not a personal account. |
The banner includes your Consignment Contact Email when one is set, so their next step is to write to you rather than to keep tapping.
One login per store, not per employee
Whoever is at the dealer's counter uses the same login. That is deliberate, and it means the portal cannot tell you which of their employees marked a gun sold. When their staff changes, reset the shared password rather than opening a second account.
What happens on your side¶
The moment a dealer taps Mark sold, that fact is recorded and cannot be lost. A settlement invoice is then built in the background and the gun appears on the Dealer Orders queue. See Settlement and payout. If the invoice cannot be built, the dealer still sees a clean success. That is on purpose. A billing problem on your side is not the dealer's to solve.