Commerce & Supplier Workflows
How Distributor Orders Move from Storefront to Supplier
The customer clicks Submit.
For some orders, that is the point where another company needs to start working.
A supplier may need to produce the item, decorate it, fulfill it or ship it. To do that, the supplier needs more than the fact that an order exists.
They need the right item, the right quantity and the details that apply to the work they are expected to complete.
For the distributor, there is another question after that:
Did the supplier actually receive it?
What happens when a supplier transmission fails?
The order can remain intact while the failed handoff is identified and sent again.
One original order sits at the start and one supplier at the end. When a transmission succeeds it moves from pending to success and reaches the supplier. When it fails it does not reach the supplier; the failed line can then be sent again from the existing transaction.
If the transmission succeeds
Transmission is still pending.
Transmission completed successfully.
If the transmission fails
Transmission failed.
Send the failed line again.
The storefront knows things the supplier may need
By the time a customer finishes an ecommerce order, the storefront can contain a surprising amount of useful information.
The customer selected a product.
They may have chosen a size, color or another variant.
There is a quantity.
There may be shipping information, customer references or other details associated with the order.
Some of that information is useful primarily to the distributor.
Some of it needs to continue to the supplier.
The challenge is deciding what belongs in that handoff and making sure the meaning survives when the order leaves the storefront.
"Blue shirt" may not be specific enough
Variants make this easier to see.
A customer can choose a particular size and color from a promotional product without ever thinking about how the supplier identifies that combination.
The supplier does have to think about it.
Commerce promotional products can use variant and option codes associated with the vendor, creating specific combinations for products such as size and color.
Commerce can also transmit the specific promotional variant item code in vendor print-order email and XML workflows rather than relying only on a base item code.
That is a small distinction from the shopper's perspective.
For the supplier, it can be the difference between knowing the product family and knowing the exact version the customer ordered.
For more on why variants and other customer-supplied information matter before this point, see When an Ecommerce Product Isn't Finished Until the Customer Orders It.
Different suppliers may receive orders differently
A supplier handoff does not have one universal format.
One vendor may work through email.
Another may receive files through FTP.
XML can be part of the transmission where configured.
Commerce vendor settings allow distributors to configure transmission methods and control aspects of the information included in vendor order files. Vendor transmission can also be paused when a vendor is experiencing email or FTP issues and reactivated afterward.
That flexibility is useful because the distributor does not control every supplier's technical environment.
The important part is knowing what the supplier expects and configuring the handoff accordingly.
Purchase-order information has to survive too
Product details are only part of what a supplier may need.
The order can carry references that help the vendor understand and process the work.
Commerce vendor-delivery formats can include purchase-order information and other applicable order details where configured.
Not every vendor needs every available field.
The transmission should contain the information that particular handoff requires rather than becoming a dump of everything the distributor knows about the order.
Sending something is not the same as knowing what happened to it
A transmission can fail.
It can remain pending.
A vendor connection can have a problem.
Without visibility into that handoff, the distributor may not discover the issue until someone notices that the supplier never started the work.
Current Commerce includes an Item Transmission Status report that shows vendor-transmitted order lines as Success, Pending or Failed. Administrators can filter the results, inspect transmission information and review a line's retransmission history.
The useful information is no longer just whether a transmission was attempted, but what happened to it.
A failed line should not require rebuilding the order
Once a problem is visible, somebody needs a way to deal with it.
The Item Transmission Status workflow can allow failed lines to be retransmitted from the existing transaction.
That matters because the customer order itself may be perfectly fine.
The problem is the handoff.
Recreating the order to solve a transmission problem would introduce another opportunity for the information to change.
A better recovery path works from the transaction that already exists.
Problems need to become visible somewhere
Vendor transmission isn't the only place where an order can fail to cross a system boundary.
Commerce also supports notification around orders that enter an error state while moving toward the distributor environment.
The destination is different, but the lesson is similar.
Automated movement between systems still needs exception handling.
If the normal path works, nobody should have to watch every transaction manually.
When it doesn't, somebody needs enough information to know there is a problem and where to start looking.
Supplier handoff is part of the customer experience, even when the customer never sees it
The customer doesn't care which XML format a vendor uses.
They probably don't know whether the supplier received the order by email or FTP.
They care whether the item they ordered is the item that gets produced and whether the work moves forward when it should.
That makes supplier transmission an invisible part of the ecommerce experience.
The storefront collects the order.
The supplier executes part of it.
The distributor has to keep the meaning intact between the two.
For a broader look at how information crosses the other systems around an order, see ERP Integrations: What Connects to What?
After Submit, visibility matters
Once supplier transmission is automated, the distributor should not have to watch every order leave the system.
The normal path should be uneventful.
What matters is what happens when it isn't.
The team needs enough visibility to distinguish a successful handoff from one that is still pending or has failed, understand which order line is affected, and recover without recreating customer work that was already correct.
That's what turns supplier transmission from a delivery mechanism into a process the distributor can actually manage.
Commerce supports configurable vendor-transmission workflows and visibility into the status of order lines sent to suppliers.