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.
Before you start¶
- The house needs Enabled and Drop-ship ticked on the Distributors hub.
- 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.
- The customer must have paid. An unpaid order never reaches the distributor.
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, 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 dealer account's own address.
How a web order becomes a distributor order¶
When a paid web order contains a line the store does not stock itself, the system 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 use different accounts at the house, so they never share an order.
- A person confirms it. On the Pending Order page a counter order shows a pill per leg and a Release order legs button that confirms every draft leg at once. A web order's draft is confirmed from the Distributor Order form with Confirm & Queue.
The Release order legs confirmation says placement is real and that RSR has no cancel API once an order is live. Read it before pressing the button.
When routing cannot proceed¶
The order parks with a drop-ship status of Pending Route and operations are alerted. A sweep re-tries every thirty minutes 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 FFL verification |
| 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 |
The drop-ship status then walks to Ordered, and to Complete when the distributor work is finished, or Error.
The automatic listing engine¶
Drop-ship stock is not something you list one item at a time. Rules decide what from the wholesale catalog appears on your web store, and at what price.
The records¶
| Record | What it is |
|---|---|
| Distributor Listing | One per Item. Holds the house, the distributor SKU, the listing status, the fulfilment mode, and the last price and quantity pushed |
| Distributor Listing Rule | Which of the catalog to list. Include and exclude by brand, department, SKU and UPC, plus cost bounds and a minimum quantity |
| Distributor Markup Rule | A table on the Distributor record. How to price what is listed, by department or brand |
| Distributor Listing Cost Range | A table on a listing rule. A per-department cost band that replaces the global one for that department |
| Distributor Rule Run | The record of one rule evaluation. Its status, its counts, and its failures |
Listing status¶
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Draft | Not yet published |
| Active | Live on the store |
| Paused | Held by an operator. Never resumed automatically |
| Blocked | No price could be derived. Still scanned, and recovers to Active once it can be priced |
| Delisted | Removed |
Fulfilment Mode is Direct or To Store. A brand or SKU the house will not drop-ship flips to To Store rather than being delisted, so it stays on sale and is procured in after the sale.
Three fields on a listing protect a human decision from the engine.
- Price Locked with Locked Price holds a price. Cost changes and rule edits do not move it.
- Markup Override % prices this one item outside the house's rules.
- Rule Exempt (manual pin) is set whenever a person lists, delists or overrides an item by hand. Rule re-evaluation then leaves it alone.
Rules and their brakes¶
A rule with nothing configured selects nothing. A blank dimension is ignored, not read as empty, and it is never shorthand for the whole catalog. Exclusions beat inclusions, so an item named on both sides is excluded.
Every rule carries two safety limits, and the strictest configured value wins across all of a house's rules.
| Brake | Default | What it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Mass-Delist Brake % | 25 | A re-evaluation that would delist more than this share of the house's active listings |
| Mass-List Brake (count) | 1000 | A re-evaluation that would create more than this many new listings. 0 or blank switches it off |
The delist brake is your store, not the catalog
The brake counts against your active listings, not against the wholesale catalog. A rule edit is one text box away from emptying your store. When a brake fires nothing is applied at all: no run is started and an alert goes out instead. Read the plan before you override it.
A rule evaluation is planned first and applied second, and applying consumes the plan you were shown rather than recomputing it. Applying is refused server-side when the feed is stale or the rules changed after the plan was made. The run is recorded as a Distributor Rule Run with counts of Listed, Delisted and Switched, and a status of Queued, Running, Complete or Error. Work runs in batches of 25, and a run whose worker died is swept to Error each hour rather than sitting on Running forever.
Keeping listings current¶
Every fifteen minutes a job scans drop-ship listings and pushes what changed. A listing whose price and published quantity are unchanged is skipped rather than re-pushed. The same fifteen-minute tick runs the feed staleness watchdog. See the Catalog Service page.
The quantity published is the live quantity less the safety buffer, capped at the display cap. State Restrictions on the Item ride along to the store and are enforced at checkout.
When a drop-shipped sale goes wrong¶
Everything in this section is manual on purpose. Three facts force a person into the loop.
- There is no cancel or return API. Once an order is Placed, stopping or recalling it means a phone call. A placed order stays Placed and raises an alert.
- 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. 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.
- 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.