Fulfillment centers

Stores use fulfillment centers as both inventory warehouses and shipping and receiving centers. One store can have one or many fulfillment centers.

WebSphere Commerce can designate a fulfillment center as being `Drop Ship'. This involves requesting a fulfiller to ship the items directly to the customer rather than from the seller's own fulfillment center. A fulfillment center requests a pick batch (a group of releases that are managed as a unit) for a specified fulfillment center and store. The default behavior is to group up to 25 releases in the pick batch. But even when fewer than 25 releases are present in the database, a pick batch will be created for those releases.

From a WebSphere Commerce Server perspective, a FulfillmentCenter object is separate from the Store object. It manages product inventory and shipping. To ship an order, the fulfillment center relies on a ShippingMode object that is specified by the customer. The ShippingMode object indicates the shipping carrier and method of shipping for fulfilling the customer's order.

In a fulfillment center, the ShippingArrangement object indicates that a Store object has arranged with a FulfillmentCenter object to ship products using a certain ShippingMode, within a certain time range. For example: a store has an arrangement with its fulfillment center to ship an order within 24 hours if the customer selects an express shipping option.