Introduction

Pelcro's shipping features can assist you with managing your order fulfillment process smoothly, integrating shipment providers, customizing your plans to support your order fulfillment requirements, and creating segmented exports of your customers who fit specific criteria directly from the platform.

How it works

At a high-level, the order fulfillment process can be broken down to two parts: creating your lists, and creating your fulfillments. The List builder helps you build the list of subscriptions that match a specific criteria for a certain purpose, and the fulfillment builder allows you to choose or combine the lists which you have built.

Let's say that membership to your product offerings will need to include a specific amount of shipments per a given interval. After you've created your product, and while creating the product's plan through the platform, you can choose to add the amount of shipments required per interval in the corresponding field, as shown below:

Once your plan has been configured, and your customers have subscribed to said plan, each time an invoice is created as a result of a new/renewed subscription, the value which was provided in the "Shipments per interval" will be reflected on the subscription details under the "Shipments remaining" attribute within the "Shipments" section.

Fulfillments are managed according to your schedule requirements. Each fulfillment should typically be created, audited and uploaded ahead of the fulfillment date. From then, every time a fulfillment is created and approved, the "Shipments remaining" attribute is decremented by one.

When a fulfillment list is created, it creates a shipment row for each subscription that matched your criteria. This allows you to have a record in the future for auditing or reference purposes. Once a list or multiple lists have been created, you can combine them together into a fulfillment. This is useful when you are segmenting multiple lists but would eventually want to combine them together. This groups your shipments into a single fulfillment reference.

In the example below, we just selected the "August Issue - Digital Subscriptions" that we created in the previous step.

Approval process

Once you created a fulfillment, you can approve a fulfillment in order to decrement the shipments remaining by one in the subscription of customers that were included in the lists you combined into a fulfillment. You can always can back and download an export of the fulfillment and even download a summary report of the fulfillments, which can be used both as a summary and for audit purposes. The report will contain a breakdown of the complementary vs paid shipments that are included in your fulfillment.

Fulfillment for Memberships

You can create fulfillments for members that are part of your membership plan. In the 'List builder' tab on the Pelcro platform, simply target the membership plan that you created for the member-owner.

Once this membership plan is part of your fulfillment and you export it, you will see that the export will populate with information related to the members of this subscription:

The export will only include active members with an address tied to their membership.
The address details in the export will be the address that is tied to the member.
The 'subscription_id' will be the member-owner's subscription ID.
'shipments_remaining' for each member will be the same as the 'shipments_remaining' on the member-owner subscription. Once the fulfillment is approved, the 'shipments_remaining' on the member-owner subscription will be decremented by 1.

Since address information for your members is required for your Lists & Fulfillments, your admins are able to create and update an address for a member as indicated in the section above. You can also allow your members to manage the address tied to their membership by following our Open API endpoint: https://docs.pelcro.com/reference/api-sdk-member-update.

Notes

You will also be able to see the lists and fulfillment associated with each subscription by viewing any subscription that was included in the fulfillment and its associated lists.

Associated lists and fulfillments are important in order to understand what customers should have received. Note that although a fulfillment is shown to a customer, it does not necessary mean that the customer has received the shipment. Your support team should be aware of the different delays associated with a fulfillment.

Edit shipments remaining

You can at any time edit the shipments remaining attribute in the subscription as shown below. You can also do the following:

Suspend shipments: Sets the subscription on a suspension mode, this can then be filtered out when creating a list. This is helpful if customers are traveling and request a suspension till they are back for example.
Set as undeliverable: Sets the subscription on an undeliverable mode, this can then be filtered out when creating a list. This is helpful if this customer is not receiving the shipment for any reason, and you want to make sure future shipments are not lost.