Allocations

Allocation is the process of assigning physical product Items from Inventory to shipping orders and then fulfilling the order from the appropriate fulfillment site, such as a retail store, warehouse, virtual site,or drop-ship vendor.

Allocations can be configured in the following ways:

• Site Ranking Rules: Provides either default or configurable allocation rules:
  • Default allocation rules that can prioritize how items in an order is fulfilled. Your allocation rules and ranking might vary based on your system configuration. For example, a merchant might not want to split the items in an order, and instead want all items in the order to ship from a single fulfillment site.
  • Configurable allocation rules that enable customers to configure rules based on their preferences and route and allocate orders to a site type, such as warehouse, distribution center, or store
• Company Shipping Hours: Provides the ability to configure (create), edit, or delete the company's shipping availability dates and times. The company-level settings function as a default value for all sites. For example, a company-level setting could define the shipping hours from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday, with open-ended start and end dates. The company-level hours are the default shipping hours if site-level hours are not configured. See Fulfillment Site Manager for details on configuring site-level shipping hours.
  Note: A scheduled allocation job is run to use the allocation ranking rules and company or site availability shipping hours for processing the allocations. Contact the Support team for details on scheduling the job.

  You can also configure allocation settings in the Retail Center provider to specify the number of allowable attempts to fulfill an order as a single or short shipment, as well as specify the range (distance) from the shipping address that can fulfill the order. See Configuring Retail Center Provider Settings.

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