Fulfilment Center functionality is a way to automatically send orders to third party fulfilment warehouse or to a drop shipper. Open orders that are allocated to a fulfilment center, automatically exported to an external system and the fulfilment process can be tracked. The fulfilment warehouse or the drop shipper can update the status of the exported orders, so that the current status and shipping information is reflected in Linnworks.

In addition Linnworks is capable of synchronizing the stock levels from the fulfilment center and actively update them in Linnworks.

Functional overview

• Export orders allocated to a fulfilment center to FTP or URL post.
• Import order status from FTP or URL query (current status of an order, shipping information, tracking number, errors processing an order)
• Update stock levels from a fulfilment center from FTP or URL query.

How it works

• You can setup a separate location in Linnworks and set the location as Fulfilment Center
• Orders can be moved from Default (or your current location) to a Fulfilment Center manually or automatically based on a specified set of rules. 
• During the synchronization process, Linnworks exports all orders in the Fulfilment Center to FTP or posts them to URL, and; 
• Imports order status from a flat file on FTP or queries URL to update order status. The order status update is a way of the fulfilment warehouse or a drop shipper to keep you up to date about what is happening to an order and tell you that the order has been shipped. It is also a way to inform you of any errors or problems fulfilling the order.
• The stock levels of your products stored in the fulfilment warehouse synchronized. This enables Linnworks to keep up-to-date records of the stock levels in the external warehouse or part of the drop ship supply chain.

Moving orders to and from Fulfilment Center

After you have set a location to be a Fulfilment Center, you will be able to allocate orders to it. The Open Orders screen will have an additional filter drop down box which allows you to switch from Default (or your current location).

To manually allocate an order to a fulfilment center from a default location:

• Select orders you want to allocate
• Right click > Actions  > Bulk Change > Move to Fulfilment Center
• Select the location you want to move the order to

Once the order is moved to a fulfilment center and the order data is exported, you CANNOT move the order out of the fulfilment center, unless the order is Canceled by the fulfilment center.

Linnworks will mark an order as Label Printed when the order is exported successfully. If there is an error exporting an order the label printing flag will display an error.

Order status tracking

The order status that the fulfilment company provides for the exported orders will be recorded in the Audit Trail as FULFIL_STATUS type. 

Configuring Fulfilment Center communication

See Fulfilment Center and Drop Ship Configuration

Fulfilment By Amazon (Amazon FBA)

The same sort of principle, but the automation process is preconfigured (no need to setup Fulfilment Center communication between Amazon FBA and Linnworks manually). See Fulfilment By Amazon (Amazon FBA) documentation section.

Video: Amazon FBA, Fulfilment Centers and dropshipping - This webinar demonstrates how to configure Linnworks to work with Amazon FBA, setup generic fulfilment center communication or coms with the drop shipper and introduces to Scripting in Linnworks.