About shipping
Shipping can be understood as a two-step process that consists of:
- Offering shipping options: During checkout, shipping options are calculated and offered to the customer, to allow them to choose how and when they want their order delivered.
- Booking a delivery: During fulfillment, a specific delivery time-slot is booked based on an estimate from the shipping provider confirming when the shipment can be delivered. At this point, the associate fulfilling the order can specify the shipping dimensions of the shipment and can confirm the final delivery slot. For more information on how to use the API to implement this, see Booking a shipment .
NewStore sends an email confirmation to the customer when all the items in a fulfillment request have been shipped.
How shipping options are calculated
When a customer enters their shipping address, NewStore sends
fulfillment locations where ATP exists for the products, to your
shipping provider. The shipping provider creates shipping offers based
on the information sent and returns shipping options for the order.
This is the workflow for calculating shipping options:
The shipping providers you integrate must be added as carriers in NewStore. If you work with multiple providers, NewStore Omnichannel Cloud offers integration capabilities via EasyPost. For help with this configuration, contact the support team. Also see Integrating a shipping provider .
For information on how to add shipping providers for a retailer, see Configuring shipping settings .
Shipping options are calculated based on a number of settings in NewStore Omnichannel Cloud.
Fulfillment configuration
Shipping options are determined by the properties defined in the fulfillment configuration:
Provider rates: This is how NewStore identifies your integrated shipping providers and the rates they offer. For example,
FedEx Overnight,UPS Next Day,DHL On-demand delivery.noteYou can configure NewStore to either use this provider rate or the quote from the shipping provider. For more information, see Provider rates .
Service levels: This is how provider rates are displayed (as part of the shipping option) to the customer. However, the focus, here, is on the level of service offered, and not on the shipping provider offering the service. For example, if two of your integrated shipping providers offer
same day delivery, and the provider rates areFedEx Same DayandDHL Same Day, the service level that you want displayed to your customers can be defined asSame day delivery.For each service-level:
- You can define a delivery time to indicate the estimated time of the delivery. For example, 2-3 days.
- You can configure a
grace period. For example,Same day deliverycan have a shorter grace period, where asTraditionalcan be set to a longer period. The grace period set for the service level overrides the one set at the order level.
noteUse the same service levels that you define here to ship transfer orders .
Service-level priorities: This is the order in which you want NewStore to select service levels during order routing.
Routes that you define include:
- ZIP codes to which you want to deliver.
- Destination regions or countries that are mapped to a combination of fulfillment locations and provider rates.
For example, a route can be defined for US with zip_codes 10001 to
10300 assigned to location FF1 with provider rates FedEx Overnight
and FedEx Next day. In this example, the shipping options Overnight
and Next day can be offered to a customer with a destination address
in ZIP code 10001. However, these shipping options may be narrowed down
further based on the store's business hours.
For information about how to create a fulfillment configuration, see Tutorial: Setting up a fulfillment configuration (Legacy method) .
Store configuration
When NewStore Omnichannel Cloud requests shipping options from the shipping provider, the time when an item can be ready for pickup is also sent to the provider.
To ensure that shipping options and delivery times promised during checkout can be met, NewStore Omnichannel Cloud calculates the cut-off time using the earliest pickup time and the latest pickup time set for the store. If packing time duration is defined for the business, this is also used.
For example, if a store closes at 20:00, the latest pickup time for the
store is 18:00, and the cut-off is calculated as 17:00, only orders
placed before the cut-off might be offered Overnight delivery as an
option. Orders placed after 17:00 might only be offered
Next day delivery.
If orders are routed to a store that has closed for the business day, these orders are fulfilled the next business day and not re-routed to another store that might still be open.
For shipping options to be displayed correctly during checkout, ensure that the store has a valid physical and shipping address.
For more information on how to create your stores, see Tutorial: Setting up a store .
Shipping returns
Your shipping configuration can include different shipping providers to handle delivery and returns. For example, shipping providers may offer expensive return shipping solutions, or may not offer return shipping at all.
For help with this configuration, contact .
To configure a different shipping provider for returns, See Configuring shipping settings .
If printing return labels is enabled for your business, NewStore books a return shipment by default when booking the delivery for an order. For help with this configuration, contact the support team.
To enable or disable return labels to be printed for the tenant, see Configuring documents for print in a store or warehouse .
Automatic shipping cost refunds
When all items of an order are returned, the shipping cost for the order is automatically refunded to the customer. The refund is processed when the last item from the order is returned. Shipping options are not considered when calculating the shipping cost refunds for an order.
The shipping costs are refunded only when all items are returned. The refund is not processed if some items in the order are returned and the rest are canceled.
When shipping costs are refunded, they are indicated in the NewStore
platform as returned line items with the type specified as shipping.
These line items cannot be mapped to the actual product items that
were returned as part of the order.
Before enabling automatic shipping cost refunds, ensure that your current integration can manage such refunds when enabled. Check your integration in a test environment after enabling the feature, before going live. For more information, see the BPM documentation .
If enabled, this feature applies globally for a retailer, and cannot be configured for a specific country or region.
You can configure templates in your business to display the shipping cost refunds in the return receipts and refund notes for the order. To verify if your template contains shipping cost refunds, see the integration guide .
For information about configuring shipping cost refunds for a retailer, see Configuring automatic shipping cost refunds .
Shipping orders internationally
If you want to ship orders internationally from stores in your business, NewStore enables you to do so using the EasyPost adapter. For more information, see *(Optional)* Booking an international shipment .
NewStore does not book a return shipment and does not print return labels for international shipments.
To enable international shipping for orders in your business, contact the support team.
To enable international shipping, see Configuring international shipping .
Shipping transfer orders
If inventory transfers are enabled for your business, you can configure shipping options to transfer inventory from your store to other locations. see Shipping transfer orders .
Shipping pre-orders
To ship pre-ordered products for your business, use the same order routing strategy and shipping options that you use to ship regular orders. The only differences from shipping regular orders are:
- Pre-orders are not shipped till the date from when the product becomes available to sell. See the tutorial .
- Fulfilling pre-orders have higher priority over fulfilling regular orders.
NewStore fulfills oldest orders captured in the platform first, and does not prioritize fulfilling pre-orders over regular orders. When products with pre-orders become available to sell, they are automatically shipped based on available inventory.
Be aware that if regular orders are placed online or via NewStore Associate App before pre-orders are routed, these orders will consume some of the inventory that was imported to ship pre-orders.
For more information about how shipping and fulfillment works at NewStore, see the integration guide or the
tutorial .Customizable provider rates
Sometimes, for business reasons, the provider rates returned by the shipping provider for an order may have to be customized. For example, the shipping options and prices you want to offer a customer buying a bicycle might be different from what you offer a customer ordering socks. At NewStore, to customize the supported provider rates for an order, create a customization adapter hook. For more information, see Retrieving custom shipping options . Also contact the support team, to ensure that the NewStore settings required to support this are configured.
For more information, See Configuring shipping settings .
Shipping split orders
Orders are split only when a single fulfillment location cannot ship all the items in the order. When shipping for an order is split, items are shipped from multiple locations as multiple shipments. Each shipment in the order might be associated with a different shipping option and a different shipping price.
You can also use NewStore Omnichannel Manager to limit the number of shipments that can be used to ship certain orders. See Managing shipment limits .
By default, the customer pays the complete shipping price for an order on the first shipment.
If some items in a split order do not have enough ATP, NewStore
fulfills the items that have ATP, and puts the remaining items on hold
or cancels them, based on how orders with insufficient inventory are
managed in your business.
If a manual intervention is required to fix an on-hold order due to stock unavailability at a specific location, such as swapping an order item, the order remains as a split order, overriding the shipment configuration limit.
For more information about this configuration, See Configuring order cancelation and On Hold settings .
Customizing the shipping price for split orders
You can configure NewStore Omnichannel Cloud to charge your customer only the shipping price for the most expensive shipment in the order. For help with this configuration, contact the support team. See the following examples:
Example A: An order is split into 2 shipments, one offered with
Standard shipping for 15 USD and the other offered with Next Day
shipping for 25 USD.
Shipment 1 | Shipment 2 | Default shipping price | Customized shipping price |
| ============== | ============ | ====================== | ========================= |
| 25 USD |
|
|
Example B: An order is split into 2 shipments, one offered with
Overnight shipping for 25 USD and the other offered with Next Day
shipping for 20 USD.
Shipment 1 | Shipment 2 | Default shipping price | Customized shipping price |
| ============== | ============ | ====================== | ========================= |
| 20 USD |
|
|
To enable this configuration, see Configuring customized shipping price for split orders .
In-store pickup orders
For in-store pickup orders, no shipping labels are generated in
NewStore. Retailers can print in-store pickup labels and other invoice
documents for the customer when they are in the store to pick up their
orders.
To set up in-store pickup options for your business programmatically via an API, see the configuration guide or the tutorial .
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