What is the Difference Between Automatic and Manual Shipments?

Overview

SoStocked gives users the option to have their shipments (POs or Work Orders) either Automatically tracked through the Order Tracker, based on that shipment's lead time, or to manually change the shipment status.

What is an order tracker?

An order tracker shows you the current status of every order that you have inside of SoStocked, whether it's a Purchase Order or Work Order (transfer from a warehouse).

From SoStocked, if you go to the Orders page, the default display is the Order Tracker dashboard.

Now, if you click into one of your POs, you can see that the default setting is "Card Will Change Order Status Automatically" and what that means is that it's always based on the lead time. In this example, from the day you place your purchase order to the day that it arrives on Amazon, it will take 50 days.

For you to edit and see more details about your lead time, click "EDIT ORDER".

From here, click into your Lead Time so you can start editing it.

In this case, as you can see, there are 15 days of production, ocean freight for 25 days, 5 days on the ground, and also 5 days direct to the FBA.

When you go back to your order tracker, what you will see is that your purchase order will follow along with that lead time. It will eventually show up at your FBA Check-in at the end of its lead time and it even gives you an Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA).

Manual Shipments

Some sellers don't want their POs to automatically move through the order tracker and want to get a message from their supplier or a message from their warehouse before it moves, so they manually change it. Choosing between automatic or manual shipments depends on your personal preference.

In case you want to manually change the order status, just click one of your POs, and set it to "Manually". This will give you access to the drop-down button (which is not available when it's set to "Automatically"), and you can use this drop-down menu to manually change the status of the shipment from each of its individual statuses. Make sure to save changes.

For example, you want to change the order status to ground freight, simply click "Ground Freight" from the drop-down menu then click "Save".

As you can see, the same shipment shows that it's in a ground freight status and now it has a lock, which means that it's locked in place and you have to click the lock to edit and change it to its next location.

Now, try to click "FBA Check-In" from the drop-down menu, and click "Save".

You will notice that it changed and moved from "Enroute" over into "FBA Check-In". It says "Waiting For Reconcile" because there are no actual FBA shipments attached to it. It's just a purchase order that you've put into SoStocked so it will stay there until the FBA actually checks in this inventory and scans those barcodes at the FBA fulfillment centers.

To learn more about reconciling FBA shipments, click here.