Plan Your Dropship Implementation
This guide outlines key decisions and configurations you must prepare before integrating with fabric’s Dropship platform. Use this as a planning document to align your business processes with fabric’s requirements.
Initial Configuration and Policy Decisions
Before the setup, you must decide on operational standards that define your dropshipping approach. The following information is required to customize your configurations and policies.
Fulfillment SLA
Decision: Ensure your suppliers and fulfillment systems can consistently meet your defined SLA.
Suppliers must ship orders within a defined time window. The industry standard is two business days from the time an order is received. You can enforce this SLA globally or define exceptions for specific suppliers or products.
Payment Terms
Decision: Choose your default payment term, such as NET30, NET45, or NET15, and communicate it during supplier onboarding.
You must define how and when payment is issued for orders you fulfill. The default industry standard is NET30; however, you can configure custom terms as well.
You can also change the payment terms on a supplier basis if needed.
Cost Method
Decision: Decide how product costs will be managed and communicated to Dropship.
The cost model is used to provide your item costs to the Dropship platform. fabric provides the following default options, which can be changed for each supplier:
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Specified dynamically on each order: You are responsible for maintaining item costs for suppliers. When an order is sent to fabric, Dropship references the cost associated with the SKU on that order. This cost is shown to suppliers on the order and reflected on the invoice they generate in Dropship.
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Specified on the Dropship platform: fabric stores and manages item costs. When suppliers submit products, you review and approve the items and their prices. Once approved, the cost is recorded in fabric, and this is the amount suppliers will see on orders and invoices.
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Custom Commissions: If you’ve established a commission split, such as 60/40, fabric can automatically calculate the item cost based on the final sale price and your specified commission rate.
Returns
Decision: Decide how returns will be handled—whether you, the merchant, will receive and restock returned items, or if the supplier will manage them. If returns will be managed by Dropship, specify whether returned items should be automatically restocked and reflected in available inventory. Inform fabric if any return-related fees should be included on supplier invoices.
You need to determine who handles returns and how they should be processed. The available options include:
- The merchant handles returns.
- The supplier handles returns.
- fabric manages returns: fabric stores and manages return data including stock levels. fabric needs to know whether returned items should be restocked and reflected in available inventory or if different methods are required.
Order Management
Decisions:
- Decide whether multi-supplier orders should be automatically split and how this should be handled.
- Determine if your operation will allow orders to be reopened, and if not, request fabric to enable rejection of reopened orders.
- Choose whether to accept backorders for out-of-stock products, and ensure your catalog and systems reflect this decision.
- Confirm whether any of your items are customizable and, if so, define what data needs to be captured during order placement.
- Decide whether to support gift messages and ensure this feature is implemented in your order workflows.
Managing orders involves making decisions around how orders are split, reopened, customized, and how you handle backorders and gift options. Use this section to help define your order behavior and policy preferences.
- Splitting Orders: You can split multi-supplier orders automatically to streamline fulfillment and reduce complexity for suppliers.
- Reopening Orders: Reopening is typically used to correct errors, such as accidental fulfillment or inventory mismatches. Some platforms offer settings to prevent reopening.
- Backorders: You can allow backorders to secure future sales, but this requires clear communication on fulfillment timelines.
- Customizations: Customizable products usually require additional data fields and might have longer lead times.
- Gift Messages: These are commonly supported during peak seasons and require structured data capture within the order system.
Shipping
Decisions:
- Decide who will be responsible for shipping costs—your business or your suppliers.
- If using your own shipping accounts, work with fabric to set up account credentials and define which suppliers will have access.
- Identify the shipping speeds your dropship program will offer, and ensure all fulfillment partners can meet those SLAs.
- Determine your preferred carriers and prepare for their specific account setup processes.
Decide who is responsible for shipping costs—either you as the merchant or your suppliers—and whether suppliers will use your shipping account to fulfill orders. It also covers which shipping speeds, such as Ground, Next Day, LTL, your dropship program will support.
- Responsibility: You can let suppliers handle shipping costs entirely or control costs by using supplier shipping accounts.
- Shipping Accounts in fabric: If you’re paying for shipping, fabric can store and manage your shipping account details. You can control which suppliers are allowed to use your account for fulfilling orders.
- Carrier Setup: Setting up a shipping account depends on the carrier, such as, UPS or FedEx, and might require advance coordination.
- Shipping Speeds: You can offer shipping options like Ground, 2-Day, Next Day, and LTL. Make sure your choices align with your product types and what your customers expect.
- Platform Use: This setup is only relevant for suppliers who are not integrated with fabric and plan to generate shipping labels directly within the platform.
Cancellations
Decisions:
- Decide whether to allow partial cancellations or require full cancellation of affected orders.
- Confirm if you want to enforce a time limit for suppliers to submit cancellations.
- If needed, ask fabric to disable the partial cancellation feature for specific suppliers or across your account.
You must define whether suppliers are allowed to partially cancel orders and whether there should be a time limit for submitting cancellations. The cancellation options are:
- Partial Cancellations: By default, fabric allows suppliers to cancel specific line items. This is useful if one item is out of stock but others are still available for fulfillment.
- Customer Experience Impact: Partial fulfillment can create service challenges if the customer expected a complete order.
- Control Option: If you don’t want to allow partial cancellations, fabric can disable this feature for your suppliers.
- Cancellation Windows: Some merchants require suppliers to submit cancellations within a set period, for example, within 24 hours of order receipt to ensure timely communication with customers.
Invoicing
Decisions:
- Review your supplier base and determine if automatic invoicing is feasible for all connections or if manual invoicing needs to be allowed for some suppliers.
- If you opt for automatic invoicing, enable the feature in fabric and configure it to use the platform’s cost and invoice total. Customize this setting for specific supplier connections as needed.
- If the Merchant pays for shipping, ensure that Invoice Integrity is enabled to prevent any discrepancies in shipping costs from being invoiced incorrectly.
- Define clear guidelines around manual adjustments to invoices. If manual adjustments are allowed, establish a process for verifying and reconciling these discrepancies.
- If automatic invoicing or any customization settings are enabled, communicate these changes clearly to your suppliers, ensuring they understand how to work with the system such as using PO numbers as the invoice number.
Dropship allows you to choose whether invoicing will be managed manually by the suppliers or automatically generated within the system. The options are:
- Invoice management within fabric: Decide if invoicing will be handled within fabric or managed by the supplier independently. Invoicing within fabric can prevent common discrepancies by using the platform’s standardized costs and invoice totals.
- Supplier submissions of manual adjustments: Will suppliers be allowed to submit manual adjustments to invoices? Allowing this can create flexibility, but it also opens the door for potential financial discrepancies if not properly managed.
- Automatic invoicing option: Consider enabling automatic invoicing, which removes the step of manual invoice submission from suppliers. This option helps streamline the process but means suppliers must adapt to using the PO number as the Invoice number, which might not align with their internal systems.
- Invoice integrity: If the Merchant is covering shipping costs, enabling Invoice Integrity is crucial to prevent discrepancies. This setting ensures that the platform overrides any supplier-generated invoice with the correct values, avoiding any confusion around shipping or pricing errors.
- Supplier-specific customizations: While you can enable automatic invoicing at the platform level, customization at the vendor connection level can help tailor this to specific needs. For example, you can allow certain suppliers to submit manual invoices if necessary, while others rely on automatic invoicing.
Discovery and Planning
Before onboarding begins, align on the foundational data and structure that will define how your catalog, orders, and suppliers are managed.
SKU Management
Decisions:
- Decide whether your team will manage SKU creation in a PIM system or defer this to fabric.
- Determine whether you’ll use merchant-assigned SKUs or supplier-provided SKUs for supplier products. If using merchant SKUs, define your desired prefix format or prepare a list for upload.
- Communicate your preferred SKU strategy with Dropship to ensure alignment across systems.
SKU management determines how products are identified within your systems and across your supplier network and ensures product identification consistency.
Strategy options are:
- PIM strategy: Your current or planned method for SKU creation in a Product Information Management (PIM) system forms the foundation for downstream processes.
- Merchant vs supplier SKU: You have the option to use your own SKU, which is also called a BPN or merchant SKU, or adopt the supplier’s SKU.
- SKU generation: When using your own SKUs, you can configure fabric to auto-generate them using a set prefix or upload them manually.
- Identifier ownership: Using supplier SKUs might streamline onboarding but can cause conflicts if multiple suppliers use overlapping codes.
Product Merchandising
Decisions:
- Choose your default product import method, such as import requests, proposals, or Shopify imports.
- Decide if suppliers can use multiple import methods based on their setup.
- If using proposals, define your product data requirements and identify who will review submissions.
- Notify the Dropship team of your selected import method so they can configure your onboarding experience accordingly.
Product merchandising defines how products flow from suppliers into your catalog, and ensures product data is reviewed, approved, and published in a way that fits your internal workflows and quality standards. Import options are:
- Catalog Import Method: During onboarding, you will select a default method for how supplier products are brought into your system. This can be customized per supplier as needed.
- Import requests: Suppliers send product data to you first for review. Your team imports approved products into your PIM manually, ensuring tight control over assortment and data quality.
- Proposals: Suppliers proactively propose products using Dropship. You can set product data requirements, receive notifications, and approve or reject products before they’re added to your catalog.
- Shopify imports: Suppliers with Shopify connected to fabric can import their products directly. These can be full catalogs or curated collections, which are then made available to you in fabric automatically.
Merchandising Templates
Decisions:
- Identify if different product categories or departments require distinct templates or attribute requirements.
- Define which product attributes are required versus recommended for your suppliers.
- Provide the Dropship team with any custom field definitions or template configurations that you want to implement.
- Align your product onboarding process so suppliers clearly understand your data requirements from the beginning.
Merchandising templates define the structure of product data you expect from suppliers. Setting up category-specific or department-level templates helps ensure products are submitted with the right level of detail, which improves data quality and speeds up onboarding.
- Category-based requirements: If you plan to onboard products across multiple categories or departments, you might need different templates with distinct required fields.
- Template flexibility: fabric supports unlimited import and export templates, allowing you to configure templates that align with both your catalog and purchase order export formats.
- Attribute requirements: While some product attributes are mandatory, you can recommend or require additional fields to ensure your merchandising needs are met.
Required supplier attributes
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Unique Supplier SKU | A unique identifier for each purchasable or stock item. |
| Item Name | A specific and clear name for the item. |
| Cost | The cost of the item to the merchant if cost tracking is used. |
Recommended supplier attributes
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Brand | The brand or label of the product |
| Product Number | Identifier for a parent product |
| Product Name | Name for the parent product |
| Retailer SKU | Merchant-specific SKU, if applicable |
| UPC | Universal Product Code |
| Color | Item color |
| Size | Item size or quantity |
| Image #1 | Primary product image |
| Suggested Retail Price | MSRP or suggested retail price |
Supported custom supplier attributes
| Attribute | Description |
|---|---|
| Category | Product classification or taxonomy. |
| Detailed Description | Marketing copy. |
| MAP | Minimum advertised price. |
| CA Prop 65 | Disclosure information for California Prop 65 compliance. |
| Country of Origin | The country where the product is manufactured or assembled. |
| Additional Attributes | Custom fields, such as text, string, number, or boolean, as needed for your assortment |
Packing Slip
Decisions:
- Provide a high-quality logo, 360x120px PNG with transparent background, to be used on your packing slips.
- Choose a custom message, if any, to appear at the bottom of the packing slip.
- Share both the logo and message with the Dropship team to enable branded packing slip generation. Once configured, fabric can automatically generate packing slips with your branding for each order.
Packing slips are included with every shipment and serve as a key customer-facing touch point. Customizing these with your logo and messaging reinforces your brand and helps communicate important information to your customers. The options are:
- Custom Messaging: You can include optional copy at the bottom of the slip, such as return policies, contact info, or customer service instructions.
- Logo Requirements: The ideal format is a 360x120 pixel PNG with a transparent background to ensure optimal quality on printed slips.
Notifications
Decision: Choose which notifications you want to enable and send the list to fabric.
We recommend enabling key notifications to help your team manage supplier onboarding, order management, and merchandising more effectively.
You can configure the following notifications to send real-time alerts to an individual or a distribution list:
Onboarding Notifications
| Notification | Description |
|---|---|
| Supplier Invite Accepted | A supplier has accepted your invitation to join the platform. |
| Supplier Completed Onboarding | A new supplier has finished the onboarding process. |
| Connection Notifications | New connection activity or connection notes. |
Transactions Notifications
| Notification | Description |
|---|---|
| Order Canceled | A supplier has canceled an order or submitted a cancellation request. |
| Order Backordered | A supplier has marked an order or specific items within it as backordered. |
| Message Received | A new message is posted by the supplier on an order. |
| Return Received | A new return (RMA) is submitted on an order by a supplier. |
| Return Approved/Rejected | An RMA is approved or rejected by the supplier. |
Digest Notifications
| Notification | Description |
|---|---|
| Late Order Digest (Highly Recommended) | A regular summary of any supplier orders that are overdue based on your expected SLAs. |
| Inventory Stockout Digest | A digest alert for supplier products currently out of stock in the system. |
| Items Discontinued Digest | A notification that summarizes items that suppliers have marked as discontinued in fabric. |
| Orders Failed to Sync Digest | An alert for orders that failed to sync with a supplier’s connected plugin store, such as Shopify. |
| Late Invoice Digest | A summary of outstanding supplier invoices that are past due based on your SLA expectations. |
Proposal Notifications
Proposal notifications are merchant-specific, and you can enable these notifications to receive alerts whenever a supplier submits a new proposal.