Shipments

The shipment object and the allowed CRUD operations on the related resource endpoint

In general, the combination of stock locations and shipping categories determines the number of shipments. Each shipment gets fulfilled separately.

In case the inventory model strategy is left as default – no split – shipping categories are ignored: just one shipment is created with no specific category associated.

Manual shipments management

If you're happy with the selected inventory strategy, there's no additional action required from your side. All the the necessary resources are automatically generated according to a predefined logic, based on the strategy of your choice. If you need to modify those resources or build custom / more complex inventory strategies, you still have the option to do it. Speaking about shipments, they keep being generated and re-built according to the selected inventory strategy logic for the first part of the order lifecycle, but as soon as the associated order's fulfillment status moves to in_progress you have the possibility to manually manage the shipments (e.g. change what is going to be shipped after the order approval). Specifically:

  • Update any existing shipment's shipping_category, inventory_stock_location, and shipping_address relationships.

  • Create new shipments.

  • Delete already generated shipments (in this case any related stock reservation is removed and the corresponding stock is automatically released, unless you have chosen to manually manage these actions too by setting the related flag at the inventory model level).

Shipments are still manually creatable and updatable even when the associated order's fulfillment status is fulfilled.

Manual stock management

If you choose not to rely on the automatic shipments management that comes with one of the available inventory strategy and manually manage shipments, you need also to consistently update the involved stock. To do that, you can leverage some specific trigger attributes:

  • _reserve_stock — set it to true to check if the shipment is associated with one or more stock line items and (if so and if the related stock quantity is enough) create the necessary stock reservation(s) directly in pending status (i.e. with no expiration date).

  • _decrement_stock — set it to true to decrement the quantity of the stock item(s) associated with the stock line item(s) and remove the related stock reservation(s).

  • _release_stock — set it to true to remove the related stock reservation(s).

All the trigger attributes listed above take effect only if sent when patching the shipment and if the fulfillment status of the order associated with the shipment is in_progress. They are all atomic so that any accidental repeated action on the same stock line item (e.g. reserving/decrementing/releasing the stock multiple times) is prevented (unless you manually modify the stock line item). The very same triggers are exposed also at the stock line item level, in case you need more granular control on your manual stock decrementation process.

Data model

Check the related ER diagram and explore the flowchart that illustrates how the shipment resource relates to the other API entities.

How-to

Last updated