Dropshipping but not via Ali etc...

MTG

We are trying to migrate our in-house systems to WooCommerce with ATUM. We hold stock in multiple places but also we have quite a few suppliers who we use to dropship (we get an order, we auto-send the supplier a PO and they deliver to our customer - mainly for larger things like tables).

I found a couple of discussions that implied ATUM does not support this process (although it would seem quite easy for it to designate a particular supplier/location as a dropshipper). I've looked through a bunch of 'Dropshipping' add-on apps but they seem to be all about connecting to linked suppliers such as Ali Express etc. None of our suppliers will offer automatic connections to such apps and the apps don't mention 'off grid' suppliers so it looks like they don't support such things. And yet dropshipping like this is very common indeed and I'm sure hundreds of WooCommerce customers must do it. So what's the usual way? Is it just done with basic WooCommerce functionality somehow?

many thanks for any advice,

James Masters.

japiera

Hi MTG ,

If what you need is to create a Purchase Order from an incoming WooCommerce Order, you can use Purchase Orders PRO to do so.

Hope this helps,
José Andrés

MTG

Dear José
Thank you for your answer. That sounds promising but I read in a forum that if we did this, we would need to manually type in the customer address - it would not be automatically put into the purchase order to our supplier. Is that correct?

japiera

Hi MTG ,

Where did you read that? How old is that thread?

You can enter your supplier's address from the edit suppliers page.

The info will be automatically copied to the PO when it's created.

Best Regards,
José Andrés

MTG

japiera Dear José,

I think you misunderstood my question there. It's good that the supplier's address will automatically be on the PO. But I was concerned about the destination address - the customer address. Will that be automatically brought in from the Woocommer order and put on the PO to the supplier?

MTG

And not to overlook your question, I saw a couple of times people saying it wasn't possible. Here is one example from May 2022 : https://forum.stockmanagementlabs.com/d/3598-dropshipping-with-purchase-orders-pro

japiera

Hi MTG ,

Yes, sorry, I misunderstood your question.

The customer's info won't be automatically copied to the PO. That would need custom development.

However, you can create a thread with the "Suggest a Feature" tag, and if enough people are interested in it, we'll consider adding the feature for future PO Pro versions.

Best Regards,
José Andrés