Blog: purchasing

Does your company store handle orders that get fulfilled by multiple outside vendors? For instance, do your stocked hard goods come from a fulfillment warehouse, while your name drop apparel gets routed to a embroiderer? Good news: Using Vendors in storeBlox CS, you can handle any kind of order routing, from simple to complex.

A Vendor in storeBlox CS is any entity that fulfills a product for your store. There are two types of vendors: “Manufacturer/Supplier” and “Warehouse”. In practice, you’ll want to use the former for drop-ship (custom) orders and the latter for in-stock (fulfillment) orders.

Setting up a product to use a vendor is a two-step process.

Create the vendor

First, you create the vendor in the dashboard, entering the relevant contact information:

Assign Products

Second, you assign your product a vendor on the product edit page:

And that’s it! The rest of it is done automatically for you – when a customer places an order, storeBlox CS automatically sends the relevant document to the vendor for each product in the order. Manufacturer/supplier vendors get a Purchase Order while Warehouse vendors get a Pick Slip.

Best of all, it doesn’t matter how complex an individual order is; even when a customer orders items across multiple vendors (say, a dozen custom-decorated polos and a couple mugs from the warehouse) storeBlox CS automatically breaks the order down and sends the appropriate documents to each vendor.

One other cool benefit: By using vendors, your shipping rates will be calculated accurately from the vendor facility to the shipping address for each item in the order. This means accurate shipment rates for every item in an order, regardless of how it’s split up. If you’re not using vendors to streamline your fulfillment processes, give it a try now!

Categories: How-to

Tags: company store company stores 101 e-commerce purchase orders purchasing storeBlox CS supply chain vendors

You probably know that you can highlight products and categories using banners on your storeBlox CS company store home page (all easily managed in your dashboard), but there are a few other methods for showcasing specific products throughout your site. Need to promote a brand new product or move a product that isn’t selling? Give these a try!

Any product in your company store can be put on sale using Specials. Specials have a number of cool features that make them easy to set up and run. First, you can group multiple products into a special and then apply certain rules to all those products at once, like start and stop dates and discount percentage.

Second, specials allow you to set pricing at the product level if you don’t want a global discount. So, while you may want to put all your in-stock hats on sales for 10% off, you might also want to set a specific special price for your custom-ordered golf towels, since your customers can order them in larger quantities and you have to use column breaks. Either way, Specials has got your company store covered.

In addition to all the special pricing and messaging on the product page, products on special get highlighted in your search listings and category listings:

Another nifty way to highlight products is to use the New feature. By checking the New box on a product in the dashboard, you highlight the product with a special flag on the site, similar to the Special flag. This is a fantastic way to call out products you’ve recently added to your store.

Of course, don’t forget to use the storeBlox CS Product Activity Report to find out which products are moving and which ones are gathering dust. This report is a great way to target products to put on special and move them out of that warehouse!

Categories: How-to

Tags: company store company stores 101 e-commerce purchasing storeBlox CS

Let’s say you want to require approvals for certain payment methods in your company store – for instance, when a buyer wants to use a purchase order instead of a credit card – but the user account isn’t already in place. Previously, the only way you could enforce approvals on payment methods was to set up the buyers and assign approvers to them.

Global Approvers can approve any user for specific payment methods

No more. Now with storeBlox CS, you can make any payment method require approval for any user at all – no need to set up user accounts and approvers. If you need specific users and assigned approvers – say, Jenny in Sales needs all her purchases against a marketing budget approved – you’ll still want to use the standard method. But if you just want to make sure that anyone who comes to the store and wants to use a purhcase order goes through an approval process, then this new feature is for you!

Categories: Launches

Tags: approvals company store e-commerce payment purchasing storeBlox CS