A fulfillment service is a third-party organization responsible for fulfilling shipments for orders generated in ChordOMS. Examples of fulfillment services that ChordOMS supports are ShipHero, EasyPost, and OrderDesk.

Some products do not require physical or digital fulfillment. One example would be when a merchant collects donations for a charity. ChordOMS features a special fulfillment service called Auto-ship to handle these situations.

When an order is completed, shipments fulfilled by the Auto-ship fulfillment service will be automatically marked as shipped when the scheduled fulfillment job runs. Note that this means that shipment will not be marked as shipped immediately after the order is completed; it will remain in Ready state until the fulfillment job has run. Normal fulfillment workflows, such as sending an email notifying the customer that their package has shipped, will be completely bypassed.

The Auto-ship fulfillment service is compatible with all existing shipping methods. Merchants are not required to create a specific shipping method for auto-shipped products unless they wish to prevent customers from being charged the fee associated with the other shipping methods.

By default, orders will attempt to fulfill as much of the order as possible from the Primary/Default stock location and then will fulill the remainder from the secondary stock location and so on.

Typically, in cases where the primary stock location does not have adequate stock, this means that orders fulfilled from multiple stock locations will contain multpile shipments. This however, is not ideal if perhaps the secondary stock location (or any other) contains adequate stock fo fulfille all items within an order, reducing the number of required shipments

The introduction of optimized fulfillment changes this.

After enabling the SINGLE_SHIPMENT_PRIORITY store environment variable, the Chord OMS will first look at all availalbe stock locations (regardless of priority) and will determine if any stock locations house all available inventory to fulfill the given order.

If so, a single shipment will be created from the designated stock location (i.e. Could be the primary or any other) and the order will be fulfilled accordingly.

If no stock locations fit this criteria, the order fulfillment logic will return to its default behavior of fulfilling each line item from the first available stock location, with a priority set to the Default.

Let's say there is an order consisting of Carnations & Dahlias. Here is avilalbe stock and the stock locations.

The Carnations are avilable in 2 locations:

The Dahlias are only available in 1:

With SINGLE_SHIPMENT_PRIORITYenabled, the Chord OMS will only use the California Warehouse stock location to fulfill this order and only build one shipment:

When disabled, the HQ stock location (which set as the default) will first be used and multiple shipments will be created: