Order fulfillment

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Overview

Order fulfillment is the process of picking, packing, and shipping the international orders that came from e-CROSS. This guide walks you through the complete fulfillment workflow.

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Order fulfillment workflow

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Identifying orders to start the picking

When an order is ready to be handled by fulfillment (picked and packed), its status changes to READY_TO_SHIP. This status indicates that all the required cross border documents are available and the order can start the fulfillment process. Invoke the List Orders API with status=READY_TO_SHIP to identify the orders ready to be picked and packed.

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Retrieving the order documents

The order documents can be retrieved using:

• Get Order Documents API, using e-CROSS order ID, or
• Get Order Documents by Sales Channel Order ID API using the sales channel order ID. This is specially useful if your ERP/WMS already retrieve the order directly from the sales channel.

Documents are found in the documents array:

• Invoice (document.name == "Invoice"): The Commercial Invoice automatic generated by e-CROSS for the order. This document should be printed and placed in a plastic envelope attached to the package. This document is not mandatory to be sent printed, but is highly recommended to mitigate possible questions or doubts from the customs authorities.
• Labels (document.name starts with "Label"): Package Labels (can be one or many) that must be printed and attached to the external side of the package. These labels are recognized by logistic operators involved in the order’s linehaul. If each label document has multiple pages, then the first page must be attached to the package and the rest of the pages must be placed inside the plastic envelope with the invoice.

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Identifying the parcel ID

To interact with the next topics (tracking events and shipments), you’ll need to identify the order’s parcel ID. The parcel ID is available within the order, through: order.statusHistory[status="READY_FOR_SHIP"].eventData.parcelId.

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Fulfillment tracking events

The following are specific events that should be monitored during the fulfillment process to give buyers the best visibility of the parcel status:

• AWAITING_PICK_UP - The parcel was picked and packed and is ready to be picked up by the first mile operator.
• LEFT_FULFILLMENT - The parcel was picked by the first mile operator and left the fulfillment facility.

Use the Update Parcel Trackings API to send these events.

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First mile shipments

During the pick & pack process, by default, you generate the first mile label to dispatch parcels to e-CROSS’ consolidation hub, usually grouping more than one parcel into a “master box”. The address of the consolidation hub is available in the order.shipping.freightForwarderAddress field. Once this process is finished, create a Shipment on e-CROSS using the Create Shipment API to inform which parcels are contained in this dispatch and which is the first mile tracking code. The first mile tracking code is the number printed in the first mile label, that will be used to a) track the first mile dispatch and b) inform the consolidation hub about the code that physically in the box that contains the upcoming parcels. If you operate with a pickup coordinated by e-CROSS, the Shipment must be created with the goal to schedule the pickup of the parcels, following the same approach of grouping the parcels available for the pickup into a single Shipment.