When Pipe17 routes an order for fulfillment, it creates a Shipping Request. The shipping request holds the data that gets sent to your 3PL or fulfillment channel. At times you may have to create or cancel shipping requests.
In this article
Overview
When Pipe17 receives an order, after any merchant determined hold expires, Pipe17 creates a shipping request based on your Order Routing configuration. The shipping request contains the data that is sent through the fulfillment integration tied to the location chosen by Order Routing. The shipping request also commits inventory for any line items it contains.
Shipping requests cannot be edited, so if the shipping request has bad information or you want to return the committed inventory to be available for orders, it must be cancelled.
Cancel a shipping request
If there are existing shipping requests on the order that you need to delete, follow the steps below.
| Deleting a shipping request in Sent for fulfillment status does not delete it in the fulfillment channel (3PL) application. You must delete/cancel the shipment directly with your fulfillment center, otherwise the items will still ship. Read our help guide on order cancellations for best practices around this process. |
- Find the order in your Pipe17 Orders page, and click on it to view the order details page.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the order page: any shipping requests will display under the order price total.
- Click the "X - Cancel" button in the shipping request card. Do not click the cancel at the top of the screen unless you also want to cancel the order.
When you cancel a shipping request, you'll be presented with a pop-up with the option to "Restock items". If you leave this checked, any SKU(s) that were committed due to the shipping request will be un-committed, and the available stock for that SKU will increase by the same amount. This will display as a shipCancelRestock event in your Inventory Ledger.
Create a shipping request
| After you make any edit to an order, Pipe17 will automatically try to route any un-routed items on the order. If you are trying to re-send an order for fulfillment after changing some order information, make sure to wait a minute before creating a shipping request manually, since one may be created for you automatically. If you don't wait and check, you may be at risk of double-shipping. |
- You can have Order Routing create another Shipping Request automatically using the Rerun routing button. If the button does not show it is because Pipe17 does not believe the order has any more items that require shipping.
- You can also run routing across multiple orders from the order list page.
- There is also a setting to tell Pipe17 to rerun routing on all open orders every three hours. To enable this open the Order Routing Automation from the Integrations page.
You can also do the routing manually using the New Shipping Request button.
- On the order page, click the "New shipping request" button at the top right of the page.
- Select the Location at which you want the item(s) to be fulfilled.
- Type in the Shipping Method you want to use for the order.
- Specify the quantity of each item that you want to include in this shipping request.
- Enter an optional shipping note
- Click Save and a new Shipping Request for any non-zero line items will be created
Troubleshooting
Once a new shipping request is generated, the order and shipping request should move to Sent for fulfillment status within a few minutes. However, on occassion we will have a problem building or sending shipping requests through the integrations.
Pipe17 may not be able to generate a shipping request because of problems with the integration or order routing rules you have set up to ignore some orders or because you are out of stock. Review other guides about exceptions for more information on resolving those issues.
If we do create a shipping request but the third party fulfillment application does not successfully process the shipping request the first time, we may retry sending it. If we cannot retry or the retry fails, we will update the status of the Shipping Request to Failed status. In this case, do the following:
- Check your order page for any exceptions or other errors and review our documentation on Order Exceptions.
- If you cannot immediately resolve the issue, consider cancelling the failed shipping request and generate a new one using the Rerun Routing or New Shipping Request buttons. Until the shipping request is cancelled we are committing inventory for every item in the failed shipping request.
- Review your events page in Pipe17 and check if the outbound Shipping Request event to your 3PL integration is in Acknowledged or Completed state. If it is in Failed state, check the event details for an error message.