Before you use dropshipping

Dropshipping in Qoblex starts from the Sales list. You select one sale order, choose the Drop Ship action, pick the lines to drop ship, and Qoblex creates a drop-ship purchase order for each supplier so the goods ship directly from the supplier to your customer. For the action to find items and create those purchase orders successfully, a few things must be set up first.

This article lists the prerequisites and the conditions that make an order line drop-shippable. Work through it before your first drop-ship order, and check back here whenever the Drop Ship dialog shows no items or the purchase orders will not create.

Mark variants as dropshippable

The only thing that decides whether a sale order line appears in the Drop Ship dialog is the variant’s dropship setting. Qoblex lists a line when its variant is set to anything other than Do Not Dropship.

To set it:

1. Go to Inventory > Products.
2. Open the product, then open the variant.
3. Set the Dropship field.

The available options are:

• Do Not Dropship – the variant is never offered for dropshipping and its lines do not appear in the Drop Ship dialog.
• Always Dropship – the variant is eligible and its lines appear in the dialog.
• Optional Dropship – the variant is eligible and its lines appear in the dialog.

In the current dialog, Always Dropship and Optional Dropship behave the same way: both make the line eligible. When the dialog opens, every eligible line is pre-selected, and you can clear the ones you do not want to drop ship. The Drop Ship action never selects lines automatically at the Sales-list level.

If a sale order has no eligible variants, the dialog shows No dropshippable items in this order. with the reminder to Mark variants as “Dropship” in the product page to enable this.

Assign a supplier to each dropshipped variant

Marking a variant as dropshippable is enough for it to appear in the dialog, but Qoblex needs a supplier to actually create the purchase order. When you confirm the drop ship, Qoblex looks up the supplier linked to each selected variant.

If a selected variant has no supplier, Qoblex cannot create the purchase order and reports that the product cannot be drop shipped because it does not have a supplier. Nothing is created for the whole order until every selected line has a supplier.

If the selected lines come from more than one supplier, Qoblex creates a separate drop-ship purchase order per supplier.

For each dropshippable variant, confirm before you start:

• a supplier is linked to the variant
• the variant’s purchase price is current, because it becomes the purchase order line price
• the supplier’s currency is correct, because it becomes the purchase order currency (Qoblex falls back to your base currency when the supplier has no currency)
• the supplier’s purchase tax class is correct (see below)

Check purchase tax settings

Qoblex sets the tax on each drop-ship purchase order line from the supplier’s purchase tax class. A supplier’s tax class is used only when it is a Purchases tax class; otherwise the supplier is treated as having no purchase tax class. When a supplier has no usable purchase tax class, Qoblex falls back to your company’s default purchases tax class.

If a supplier has no purchase tax class and your company has no default purchases tax class configured, Qoblex cannot determine the tax and blocks the drop-ship purchase order. Set a default purchases tax class, or a purchase tax class on the supplier, before creating drop-ship orders.

Set up the locations

Drop-ship purchase orders are received into a dedicated location and billed against another. Both must exist for your tenant.

1. Go to Account Settings > Inventory & Warehouses.
2. Create a drop-ship location if you do not already have one (a location flagged as drop ship).
3. Make sure your tenant has at least one billing location (a location that does not hold inventory).

Qoblex uses the drop-ship location as the receiving location on the purchase order, and your first non-inventory location as the billing location. Both are chosen automatically, so you do not pick them in the dialog.

If no drop-ship location exists, the Drop Ship action fails with No drop ship location found. If no billing (non-inventory) location exists, it fails with No billing location found. Create the missing location before trying again.

Sale order conditions

The Drop Ship action lives on the Sales list as a bulk action, but it works on one order at a time. Before it will open the dialog and create purchase orders, confirm:

• Exactly one sale order is selected. Selecting none shows Select a sale order to drop ship; selecting more than one shows You can drop ship one sale order at a time.
• The order is not a quote. When you confirm the dialog, Qoblex rejects a sale order in Quote status with Cannot drop ship a sale order that is in Quote status.
• The order contains at least one dropshippable line, so the dialog has something to show.

You choose which eligible lines to drop ship inside the dialog, so an order can mix warehouse-fulfilled lines and dropshipped lines. Fulfil the warehouse lines through the normal allocation and shipment workflow.

What happens after setup

Once the prerequisites are in place, confirming the dialog creates one or more purchase orders in an approved state, each linked back to the sale order. Those are ordinary purchase orders of a drop-ship kind, managed in Purchasing. Sending them to the supplier and recording the goods when they ship is covered in the fulfilment article and in the Purchasing section, not here.