i would like to know.. someone please answer this

Can you explain what Drop Ship is?

drop ship is a service where, for example, i set up one e-cart and let it go online with a list of product, but i dont have those product. once a purchase is made, a distributor will deal with the shipping process, not me.

alibaba.com provide hundreds of company willing to do drop-shipping

with this option, we might just select any product we want to sell and focus on, then market the product worldwide while those company will do the dropshipping. what we do is just market the product and increase the company’s sales, and we sell it in market price, while we pay cheaper to the company.

so we dont have to worry about shipping the product or build a factory if sales is high.

So what do you require from shopify to use this kind of service?

perhaps you can provide a list of product or suppliers with lots of product we can chose, and we do the marketing. once buyers make a purchase, the system will notify the supliers then they will ship the product.

once the buyers recieve the product, money will be deducted from buyers account, and the system will seperate my collection and the supliers collection, then bank-in.

it’s simple by thoughts, so i hope shopify can do something.. through this way, i dont mind paying more than 3% to shopify

I am glad someone brought this up. It’s a huge topic on webmasterworld also and combine this with the tax structures and you have a lovely thread.

Drop-ship is a more popular practice now with the cost of fuel and shipping from a single source/warehouse that deals with inventory.

Yahoo! Stores has a nice feature that allows the order to be faxed (or emailed) to the distributor so there is less room for error and I can sip my Corona and use the Treo as a coaster while on vacation.

I agree, this would be worth the 3%.

It’s not just drop-shippers but also fulfillment centers as well. I have several e-commerce comapnies and with some we drop-ship, and with others we have an inventory that we keep at a fulfillment company. They both work the same though.

And in some cases, you could have different drop-shippers and suppliers for each store. One product might ship directly from the manufacturer and another from the drop shipper.

It would be cool if we could just add a few fields to the “supplier” information to include their contact and email. When an order was approved, we could just click a button to send the order(s) to the suppliers via email.

Well one way to accomplish this is to fill in the SKU’s of your drop ship supplier and subscribe to the orders RSS feed. When a new order comes in you can check the skus of the line items and create the required emails automatically.

This should be a fairly straight forward perl or ruby script

Interested you just posted that yesterday. I was looking for the answer to the same question just now.

I guess I need more information on how to automate this process.

Would the ruby application 1) peridiodically download the xml feed 2) extract email address for vendor and message 3) send message

I think it is faily easy to do 2 and 3 in ruby (parsing the xml and then sending an email) but I haven’t tried to subscribe to an xml feed in ruby (maybe using http://simple-rss.rubyforge.org/ and cron). Anyways, if it is a simple script, this sounds like the right direction, and you can provide me with a sample order’s xml data, I’ll write it and put it up here for others to use.

Also if you are faxing orders, there are services that send email attachments to fax numbers in the body.

If you guys find a solution to this problem, we would love to know. I’m not a programmer so there isn’t much I can help with in Ruby, I do have a friend that is looking into the problem. Please email me and let me know if you find anything! Thanks, Mel

hey mel, could you post the format for a typical xml order on from your store? you can change the data, just need the format. See yoursite/admin/feed/orders (i can’t create orders yet on my site). Make sure the order has a supplier’s e-mail or fax field.

hi5, not sure if I follow. Here is anexcerpt from the xml feed:

<rss version="2.0">
−
    <channel>
<title>Orders for Pennington & Bailes</title>
−
    <link>
http://penningtonandbailes.myshopify.com/admin/orders
</link>
<description>Recent orders</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<ttl>40</ttl>
−
    <item>
<title>Order #1073</title>
−
    <link>
http://penningtonandbailes.myshopify.com/admin/orders/show/1234
</link>
<guid isPermaLink="false">62ac46d3d09edc0473f3831a47d798b9</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Jul 2006 01:48:27 +0000</pubDate>
−
    <description>
Order by JANE Doe placed at 2006-07-11 05:48PM
</description>
<shopify:order_id>1234</shopify:order_id>
<shopify:guid>62ec46d3d09edc0473f3831a47d798b9</shopify:guid>
<shopify:email>jdoe@sc.rr.com</shopify:email>
<shopify:status>paid</shopify:status>
<shopify:closed_at/>
<shopify:created_at>Wed, 12 Jul 2006 01:48:27 +0000</shopify:created_at>
<shopify:updated_at>Wed, 12 Jul 2006 02:25:10 +0000</shopify:updated_at>
−
    <shopify:note>
Click on the Edit link to your left to jot down your notes about this order.
</shopify:note>
<shopify:shipping_title>Standard Shipping</shopify:shipping_title>
<shopify:total_price>149.67</shopify:total_price>
<shopify:subtotal_price>135.00</shopify:subtotal_price>
<shopify:total_tax>6.17</shopify:total_tax>
<shopify:total_weight>680</shopify:total_weight>
<shopify:shipping_price>8.50</shopify:shipping_price>
<shopify:payments_total>149.67</shopify:payments_total>
−
    <shopify:billing_address>
<shopify:first_name>JANE</shopify:first_name>
<shopify:last_name>Doe</shopify:last_name>
<shopify:address1>123 Outtamy way</shopify:address1>
<shopify:address2/>
<shopify:phone>800-555-5555</shopify:phone>
<shopify:city>AnyCity</shopify:city>
<shopify:zip>29555</shopify:zip>
<shopify:province>South Carolina</shopify:province>
<shopify:country>United States</shopify:country>
</shopify:billing_address>
−
    <shopify:shipping_address>
<shopify:first_name>JANE</shopify:first_name>
<shopify:last_name>Doe</shopify:last_name>
<shopify:address1>123 outtamy way</shopify:address1>
<shopify:address2/>
<shopify:phone>800-555-5555</shopify:phone>
<shopify:city>ANYCITY</shopify:city>
<shopify:zip>29555</shopify:zip>
<shopify:province>South Carolina</shopify:province>
<shopify:country>United States</shopify:country>
</shopify:shipping_address>
−
    <shopify:line_items>
−
    <shopify:line_items>
<shopify:sku>10000409936</shopify:sku>
<shopify:line_title>University of Georgia</shopify:line_title>
<shopify:variant_title>36 X Unfinished</shopify:variant_title>
<shopify:quantity>1</shopify:quantity>
<shopify:price>135.00</shopify:price>
<shopify:tax>6.17</shopify:tax>
<shopify:vendor>Product</shopify:vendor>
<shopify:grams>680</shopify:grams>
</shopify:line_items>
</shopify:line_items>
</item>
−

I’d like to see a service like shipwire.com, where you can automatically send orders right to them.

I believe there are some modules for osCommerce and the CRE loaded osCommerce templates (I’m sure there others) that tie directly to shipwire.

I think Shopify’s interface and concept is much nicer, and I realize it’s new and will evolve.. but a shipping supplier, and hooks into fed-ex, ups, etc., for tracking would be nice as well.

I have some code in ruby that will email your orders and fax them if you pay for a email to fax service. if you want to try it out email me at twopair at gmail dot com. works pretty well for me but need some people to chek it out before i post it…

Also need to write something to prevent e-mailing an order more than once. Once you check the rss feed, is there a way to remove entries you have processed? (Or do they expire themselves after a certain time?) If there isn’t a way to remove entries, the program might have to keep track of what orders it has processed.

I’ve commented on drop shipping here (not to double post, here is the link:) http://forums.shopify.com/categories/1/posts/11485#comment-11514

Good point.

I would be interested to see how such a script would work.

www.myshopkart.net is a service similar to shopify but where everything from your dropshippers sites are in sync live time. I used to have it but it had horrible designs, shopify is better in that regard.

This is how americommerce does it:

Drop Shipping
AmeriCommerce features Drop Shipping capabilities to automatically break up orders containing products from multiple drop shippers and sends customized email notifications to the fulfillment warehouses.

http://www.americommerce.com/store/pg/19-Order-Processing-Fulfillment-Shopping-Cart-Features.aspx

WoWzers