Fulfilments

What is a fulfilment?

Let’s cover some key concepts about fulfilments:

In Print Trail, a fulfilment can be thought of as a sub-order.
When order processing begins, each valid order has at least one fulfilment.
Each fulfilment is from one fulfilment location.
Each fulfilment is given one production method – either print-on-demand or inventory.
Often, an order will only have one fulfilment. But some orders can result in multiple fulfilments, for example where stock is held across two locations.
Therefore, Print Trail will sometimes split some orders into multiple fulfilments.

👉 Note: we use the British spelling of ‘fulfilment’.

Fulfilment locations

Fulfilment locations are sites where orders are processed and shipped from.

Print Trail uses several fulfilment locations worldwide.

There are two types of fulfilment location, based on how goods are fulfilled:

Print-on-demand location - each fulfilment is printed to order, no stock is held.
Inventory location - each fulfilment is shipped using stock held in a physical warehouse.

👉 A single order can ship from multiple fulfilment locations. Each location is responsible for a separate ‘fulfilment’, which is a part of the main order.

You control how your products should be produced

You have fine-grained control of how each of your products will be fulfilled. This control extends not just to products, but to how each product is fulfilled per shipping address.

For each product, you can: * Add inventory locations where you wish to store the product and ship from * Assign each inventory location a set of shipping zones * Enable global print-on-demand

These settings allow you to set each product to one of these configurations: * Print-on-demand only * Inventory only * A mixture of both

This combination of options allow you to target each product to a production method based on your chosen shipping zones. And this configuration of each product is editable at any time.

The configuration of each product directly affects how each order will be fulfilled. This is detailed in the section below.

👉 You can enable a single product to be shipped from warehoused inventory for some countries, and printed on-demand for everywhere else.

How Print Trail chooses how to fulfil an order

If all order lines can be processed from one fulfilment location (therefore one fulfilment), Print Trail will choose this option, to reduce overall costs.

Where more than one fulfilment location can fulfil an order, Print Trail decides how to fulfil an order on this basis:

If multiple fulfilment locations can fulfil the entire order, the location situated nearest to the shipping address will be selected.
Where a product is available for both print-on-demand and inventory, the inventory stock takes priority as long as these conditions are met:
- The product must be configured by you with a fulfilment location to serve a shipping zone
- The inventory location must have sufficient stock to fulfil part or all of the order.
- The inventory location must be assigned a shipping zone that covers the order’s destination.
If the order’s shipping address does not match an ‘in stock’ shipping zone rule for the product, then that product (order line) will be printed on-demand, as long as these conditions are met:
- The product must have print-on-demand enabled and its print-on-demand settings must be ‘approved’
- The nearest print-on-demand location that can fulfil the PoD product type will be selected for the fulfilment.
The nearest fulfilment location to the shipping address
Minimising the number of shipments, to keep your shipping costs low.

An example

To better understand this, consider the following example:

Product A sells well in North America and less well in the rest of the world.
- You decide it is most cost-effective to stock Product A in a US inventory location, which you decide should ship only to North American customers.
- ‘Rest of world’ orders for Product A are produced via print-on-demand, automatically from the nearest location.
Later, if Product A starts to also sell well in Europe…
- You wish to also stock pre-printed products in Print Trail’s UK inventory location, and for that location to supply only to European addresses. All countries outside North America and Europe are now served by print-on-demand.
Later still, perhaps Product A’s sales volume drops in all regions and the stocks are depleted in the US and UK inventory locations…
- You now switch Product A to print-on-demand only, worldwide.
- Product A is therefore never out of print.

👉 Use each product’s production settings to respond to changing levels in demand, per country.

Summary

The settings you configure per product are used by Print Trail’s fulfilment algorithm to automatically determine the optimal way to fulfil each order.

Benefits include:

Reduced costs, as inventory (physical stock) is given the highest priority, where you have configured shipping zones.
Increased sales as shipping from the closest fulfilment location lowers shipping costs to customers (reducing the need for expensive international shipping).
Reduced shipping time to your customers, because fulfilment locations nearest to the shipping address are given the highest priority.
Books with print-on-demand enabled can remain permanently available to purchase (‘in stock’) globally, without holding any physical stock.
You can react to changing demand in markets and regions around the world, per-product, using fine-grained control of how each product should be fulfilled.