Introducing Assisty Dropship POs: one purchase order per supplier, from every paid order

The order is paid. Now three suppliers need three different emails.

A dropshipping order rarely comes from one place. The mug ships from a ceramics studio in Europe, the coffee from a roaster in Portland, the candle from a maker two states over. Shopify records one paid order; you owe three suppliers three purchase orders, each with only the lines that supplier ships, priced in that supplier's currency, and addressed not to you but to your customer.

Most merchants do this by hand: copy the address, copy the lines, attach it to an email, remember to mark the order fulfilled when the tracking number turns up. It works until Tuesday afternoon, when eight orders land at once and one of them has a changed address.

Assisty Dropship POs is the app we built for exactly that afternoon.

Paid order in, purchase orders out

When a customer pays, the app reads the order's lines and groups them by supplier. Each group becomes a purchase order that carries the customer's name, address and phone number as the ship-to, marked blind-ship by default so the supplier packs with your slip and none of their own branding. Every purchase order waits on one list, held for your review, until you act on it.

Create. One purchase order per supplier from every paid order, with the lines that supplier ships and the cost in the supplier's currency.
Send it your way. Download the branded PDF, send it as you already do, then mark the purchase order as sent with a note for your records.
Enter tracking. When the supplier ships, choose the carrier and type the tracking number. The order is fulfilled in Shopify and your customer gets the shipping notification.

The third step is the one that matters. Fulfillment lands in Shopify with the tracking number attached, so the customer's notification, the order's status and your own timeline all agree, without anyone opening the order to type it in again.

Watch it once, start to finish

The screencast below walks the same seven steps a reviewer follows: install, onboarding, the list of held purchase orders, the PDF, marking one as sent, entering tracking, and the suppliers and settings pages. Two minutes and twenty seconds, subtitled, no audio needed.

Open the screencast on its own

Suppliers come from the vendor field you already fill in

There is no supplier import. The vendor field on your products already names who ships what, so the app reads it and lists every supplier it finds. Setup is one screen: add the email you order from, and you're done. Where a product needs a different supplier than its vendor field says, override it per product; where a supplier uses its own code for your product, add a Supplier SKU and it prints on the purchase order beside yours.

What the app holds about your customers

The customer's name, address and phone number, and only to print them on the purchase order so the supplier can ship to them. Nothing is sold or shared, and Shopify's redaction requests are honoured. The details are in the Assisty Dropship POs privacy policy.

Free, and separate from the inventory app

Assisty Dropship POs is free, with no charges and no trial, and it installs on its own. It is a different app from Assisty, the inventory planning app most of this blog is about: that one forecasts demand and plans what to buy for stock you hold. Dropship POs is for the merchant who holds none. Run either, or both.

Read more on the Assisty Dropship POs page, or install it from the Shopify App Store and place a paid test order: the purchase orders will be waiting when you open the app.