What is the "Shipment Hold" feature in Shipvine Logistics?
When you're shipping e-commerce orders to regular customers (also known as "B2C" or "retail" customers), your shipping prices that you define in your e-commerce store are typically based on monthly averages, or you offer free shipping and absorb the cost in your product margin. It's typical for Shipvine merchants to let these kinds of orders sail through to Shipvine as regular fulfillment requests, leaving the picking, packing, and shipping to be a fully automated process.
When you're shipping big orders to companies (also known as "B2B" or "wholesale" customers), it's typical to charge the exact shipping charge to the customer. However, for large orders that contain lots of products of different shapes and sizes, it's hard to predict what the final shipping charge will be until it's actually picked and packaged into a box. If you want to get paid before releasing the shipment to your customer, this leaves you in a catch-22: you don't want to release the order to Shipvine as a fulfillment request until you get paid, but you don't know how much you need to get paid until Shipvine packages it up. Enter the "Shipment Hold" feature.
When the "Shipment Hold" checkbox is checked on a candidate request (or passed through to a fulfillment request based on some things we've set up for you in the Shipvine Sync system), then Shipvine will proceed to pick and pack the order as usual. However, when Shipvine goes to actually ship the order, a "Shipment Hold" label comes out and the package is set aside in the warehouse. You'll receive an automated e-mail indicating the shipment is ready, and also see the exact cost of the shipping. (To make sure you get this e-mail, set up your Notification Preferences for Shipvine Logistics.)
You can then charge your wholesale customer's credit card. When the payment goes through, just click the link in the automated e-mail (or find the original fulfillment request via the Shipvine Logistics website) and click the "Release Shipment" button at the bottom of the screen.
We'll get notified automatically to print out the real shipping label and hand it off to the carrier, marking the fulfillment request as Shipped.
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