Distributors¶
Purchasing staff order stock from wholesale houses here, and a person confirms every order before anything is placed. Managers set the houses up.
A distributor is a wholesale house you buy from, such as RSR or Sports South.
The POS holds one Distributor record per house, with its own credentials and
its own switches. Everything you order from a house, whether it lands on your
shelf or on a customer's doorstep, becomes a Distributor Order you can
follow from Draft to Complete. Order numbers look like DO-2609-0001: the year
and month the order was made, then a running number.
Two layers¶
Ordering from a house, tracking the order and receiving what arrives are part of the POS itself. Listing distributor products on the website, and sending a paid web order's lines to the house that ships them, is the OSA Dropship extension. With the extension switched off under Settings → Extensions, the counter can still quote, place, receive and invoice distributor orders, and nothing from a distributor is listed on the website.
Three ways stock reaches a customer¶
| Route | Order Type | Where the goods go | When you use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stocking order | Stocking | Your store, into inventory | Restocking the shelf. You choose what and how many |
| Procure to store | Procure To Store | Your store first, then the customer | The customer has bought it, and the goods must pass through your hands |
| Drop-ship | Dropship Accessory or Dropship Firearm | Straight from the distributor to the buyer, or to the buyer's transfer FFL | A sale of something you do not stock. An accessory goes to the buyer's address. A gun goes to the receiving dealer, never to a doorstep |
Some things always come to the store first:
- Firearms the distributor will not ship direct, and brands with a To Store policy. See Dropship Brand Policy.
- NFA items, such as a suppressor. They are never drop-shipped.
- Parts a distributor ships to dealers only, such as a barrel or an upper. On a web order, when RSR refuses to send one to the buyer, it is ordered again to the store automatically.
A gun is never shipped to a consumer. When a drop-shipped item is a firearm, the destination is the buyer's transfer FFL, and the order will not be created until that license is captured and verified.
Where to find it¶
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Ordering and tracking | Sidebar → Purchasing → Distributor orders |
| What is on its way | The Arriving card on the Dashboard |
| Setting up a house | Settings → Distributors |
| Website drop-ship products | Settings → Drop-ship Center (OSA Dropship only) |
The pages¶
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Distributors hub | One card per house. Switches, feed health, connection test, priority, brand policies, and the Catalog Service health page |
| Distributor orders | Searching every house at once, building a cart, creating draft orders, tracking open orders and invoices, and receiving what arrives |
| Drop-shipping | Routing a paid web order to a distributor, and what to do when a drop-shipped sale goes wrong |
| The Drop-ship Center | Which distributor products the website sells, at what price, and how much stock it shows |
What the POS will not do for you¶
Cancelling a distributor order in the POS never reaches the house. The system has no way to cancel an order with a distributor. Once an order is live at the house, stopping it means a phone call or an email, and the POS says so rather than pretending otherwise. That is why every order waits in Draft until a person confirms it.