Shipments and shipping categories

Shipment creation and splitting logic, stock line items, and how shipping categories affect order fulfillment

A shipment groups one or more parcels for delivery to a customer's address. The inventory strategy controls how many shipments an order generates. Shipping categories can further split an order when items require different delivery methods.

Shipments

A shipment is a group of one or more parcels ready to be shipped to a customer's address. Every order is associated with two addresses:

• Origin address (FROM) — the stock location or warehouse the items ship from.

• Shipping address (TO) — the customer's destination.

The inventory strategy determines whether and how an order is split and how many shipments are created. The default strategy is no split, which always produces a single shipment from a single stock location. With a different strategy, orders can be split into multiple shipments when:

• Items come from more than one stock location.

• Items belong to more than one shipping category.

All necessary resources are automatically generated based on the chosen strategy. If needed, you can still manually create, modify, or delete shipments after the order has been approved.

You can integrate any fulfillment service and provide real-time tracking updates to customers from the associated carrier account.

Stock line items

Stock line items are the SKUs in an order distributed across one or more shipments. When an order is not split, all SKUs belong to a single stock line item. When split, line items are distributed across multiple shipments. A single line item can also be split into more than one stock line item.

You can create new stock line items or modify existing ones as long as the chosen quantity is available in one of the market's inventory stock locations. You can also add stock line items for products not originally part of the order — for example, to include a free gift or replace an unavailable item.

Shipping categories

Shipping categories are one of the reasons an order can be split into multiple shipments. Unless the no split strategy is in use, orders containing items from two or more shipping categories are split into one shipment per category.

A shipping category lets you define the specific shipping methods available for its associated SKUs. The category and the shipping zone an item belongs to together determine the delivery options shown to customers before shipment.

Association with a shipping category is mandatory for all SKUs, except those marked as do not ship.