Drop-shipping¶

Drop-shipping means the distributor ships the goods, not you. An accessory goes to the buyer's own address. A firearm goes to the buyer's transfer FFL, never to a doorstep. Operations staff confirm each order. Nothing is placed with a distributor automatically, with one exception explained below.

Web orders reach a distributor through the OSA Dropship extension. The same extension decides which distributor products the website lists, at what price. That side is on the Drop-ship Center.

Before you start¶

The house needs Enabled and Drop-ship ticked on the Distributors hub.
Web orders are routed only while OSA Dropship is installed and switched on under Settings → Extensions. With it off, new web orders are not routed and nothing changes on the orders already made.
A drop-shipped firearm needs the buyer's transfer license captured on the order and resolved against the ATF directory before an order can be raised.
For a drop-ship leg the customer must have paid. An unpaid drop-ship order never reaches the distributor. A ship-to-store leg may be placed on a deposit, or unpaid, because the goods come to your own shelf.

The order types¶

Order Type	Ships to	Used for
Dropship Accessory	The buyer's address	Anything that is not a firearm
Dropship Firearm	The buyer's transfer FFL	A gun, always
Procure To Store	Your store	Brands or items the house will not ship direct, a counter pickup's gun, and anything you choose to handle yourself

Each order carries only the destination it is allowed to know. An accessory order carries the buyer's address. A firearm order carries the receiving license and not the buyer's street address. A procure-to-store order carries neither, because the goods come to your store's address on file with the house.

Three kinds of product always go Procure To Store:

A brand whose Dropship Brand Policy is To Store.
An NFA item, such as a suppressor. It is never drop-shipped, whatever a brand policy or a setting says. The customer completes the transfer at the store.
A part the house ships to dealers only, such as a barrel or an upper. At the counter it is planned to the store. On a web order it is tried direct first, and when RSR refuses it, it is ordered again to the store automatically. The refused order is cancelled, both orders and the web order get a note, and operations get an alert. This re-order is the one distributor order the system confirms by itself, because a person already confirmed the refused one.

How a web order becomes a distributor order¶

When a paid web order contains a line the store does not ship itself, OSA Dropship routes it.

The lines are split into lanes. Lines you ship yourself stay local. Lines a distributor fulfills become one of the three types above.
Two gates are checked. The order must be paid, and a firearm lane needs the buyer's transfer license already on the order.
A Draft Distributor Order is created for each lane and house. Different lanes may use different accounts at the house, so they never share an order. Each web order line keeps the house and SKU it was sourced from.
A person confirms it. Open the Distributor Order and press Confirm & Queue. See Distributor orders.

Routing runs when the order arrives or changes, and a sweep tries again every thirty minutes.

From the WooCommerce admin¶

The order screen in the WooCommerce admin carries a drop-ship panel. It lists each line's candidate distributors, cheapest first, with what blocks any of them.

Send to the distributor creates Draft orders for the lines you selected. It never places them. Confirming stays a separate step in the POS.
Ship from store sits on the store-stock row when your shelf has enough. Press it, then Confirm: ship from store. The line moves to the store: you ship it through ShipStation and the unit leaves your shelf like any web sale. A draft distributor order drops the line. It is refused for a gun, for a line the shelf cannot cover, and for a line a distributor already has.

Counter orders¶

An order built on Create Order makes its own draft legs. They are confirmed from the Pending Order card with Place order, or one by one from the Distributor Order form.

Placement is real. Cancelling an order here never reaches the distributor, so once an order is live with the house, undoing it is a phone call and a return. Read the confirmation before pressing the button. The order form, its buttons and its statuses are on Distributor orders.

When routing cannot proceed¶

The web order parks with a drop-ship status of Pending Route and operations are alerted. The thirty-minute sweep retries while it sits there. The reason is one of these.

Reason	What to do
Not paid on WooCommerce yet	Nothing. It routes when payment lands
The buyer's transfer FFL has not been captured	Capture the receiving dealer on the order
The transfer FFL could not be resolved to an ATF record	Run FFL verification. See Verifying an FFL
The transfer FFL has no valid unexpired license	Get a current license. A gun must not ship to an expired FFL
The transfer FFL is missing a complete premise address	Fill in the street and a valid state
The buyer's shipping address is incomplete	A direct shipment needs a full destination

An order that has sat in Pending Route for more than 30 days is no longer routed automatically, and operations get one alert listing such orders. It is most likely abandoned or unpaid.

The drop-ship status then walks to Ordered, and to Complete when the distributor work is finished, or Error.

What the website hears¶

Order status and tracking. Once Outbound status webhook secret is set in WooCommerce Settings and on the website, the website hears each distributor order's status (placed, held, shipped, cancelled, error) and its tracking numbers. The order screen, the tracking page and the customer emails follow the leg without anyone opening the POS. Events the website did not acknowledge are sent again every hour. Blank means the events are off. See Integration settings.
Who ships each line. OSA Dropship tells the website which lines a distributor ships and which the store ships. Every hour it re-sends what an outage may have lost.
Delivery time. A drop-ship product page shows the house's Lead time (business days, from) and Lead time (business days, to) from the Distributor record. See the Distributor record.

Website listings¶

Which distributor products appear on the web store, from which house, at what price and with how much stock, is managed per product in the Drop-ship Center. In short:

Listing rules decide what is listed. A person can list, take off, pause or pin any product by hand.
A product sells from its cheapest allowed source. A source can be ruled out for one product with Never sell from here.
The website price comes from the markup rules, with MAP enforced per brand.
The website shows each house's stock less a hold-back, up to a cap. A product that runs out stays on the site as out of stock rather than disappearing.

Every fifteen minutes a job pushes what changed to the website. See What runs automatically.

When a drop-shipped sale goes wrong¶

Everything in this section is manual on purpose. Three facts force a person into the loop.

Cancelling here never reaches the house. Once an order is Placed, stopping or recalling it means a phone call. Cancelling the Distributor Order in this system changes only your record, and alerts operations unless you record that the house has confirmed.
The gun was never in your bound book. It went from the distributor's inventory to the receiving dealer's. There is no acquisition and no disposition of yours to reverse. Your record is the web order, carrying the distributor's serial number, plus the Distributor Order.
You may still owe for it. Whether the cost reverses depends on whether the house takes the goods back and issues a credit. Reversing the purchase invoice on your own initiative erases a debt that still exists.

The buyer's 4473 is denied at the transfer dealer¶

Record it on the Distributor Order. Put the reason and the dealer's name in the hold reason, with the date and who you spoke to.
Refund the customer. The revenue side is safe to reverse, because there is no disposition behind it. Use the web refund path, cancelling, or cancelling and amending to the net amount if you are keeping a restocking fee. Never add a line for minus one firearm. That corrupts the Sales Report quantities.
Settle the gun's fate with the distributor, then handle the cost.

The distributor accepts the return¶

Get the credit memo number and amount. The house charges its own restocking fee, separate from your store policy, so the credit is usually less than you were billed.
Book a purchase return against the original purchase invoice for the amount actually credited. The difference between what you were billed and what you were credited stays in cost of goods sold. That difference is a real cost of the failed sale.
Record the credit number on the Distributor Order so the month-end review can close the line.

The distributor refuses the return¶

Do not reverse the purchase invoice. You bought the gun, and the cost and the payable are both real.

Then decide where the gun goes.

Brought back to the shop. It is now your inventory and must be acquired into the bound book from the receiving dealer, as an ordinary FFL acquisition at the cost you paid. Tell your bookkeeper, because the cost has to move out of cost of goods sold and back onto the balance sheet. Otherwise you have expensed a gun you are still holding.
Sold by the receiving dealer, or otherwise disposed of. No acquisition. The cost stays in cost of goods sold and whatever you recover is recorded against it.

The house shipped fewer units than you ordered¶

Common when fill or kill is off. The system alerts once per order, and the cost invoice bills only the units acknowledged, so the ledger and the Sales Report are already right. Sports South credit memos for short units are read each night and folded onto their orders, with an alert for the refund. The customer paid for the full quantity, so refunding the short units is a manual step through the web refund path. No cost adjustment is needed.

The buyer never collects¶

Chase it as an abandoned transfer with the receiving dealer, then follow the return path the distributor agrees to. Whether you refund is store policy, not an accounting rule.

Month-end review¶

Two short lists go with the month-end close.

Refunded but not credited. Orders with a cancelled or amended sales invoice whose purchase invoice has no matching return. Each line is either a credit still pending, which is fine if you note the date, or a refusal, which is fine because it stays in cost of goods sold. A line with no explanation is the one to chase. Web refunds take tax and shipping off their own invoice lines. See Web orders.
Guns that came back to the shop. Confirm each one has a bound-book acquisition, and that its cost moved out of cost of goods sold and into inventory.