Fill or Kill is a term for acknowledging or rejecting the request to fulfill an order (and similar to how it is used in equities trading). When a ecommerce fulfillment instruction is accompanied with a fill or kill mandate, the recipient must respond with either a confirmation that the entire order will be fulfilled (usually in its entirety) or a rejection that the order will not be fulfilled. In some instances this means that even if a part of the order could be fulfilled none of it will be fulfilled by the fulfillment channels connected to Pipe17. Many 3PLs also operate this way; if they cannot ship the entire order they will cancel it.
Use Cases for Fill or Kill
Customers are often concerned when they receive a portion of what they ordered. They contact the seller and ask for explanations which increases the merchant’s support costs. If an order is sent in separate shipments the shipping costs are usually higher than if they were sent together. So to avoid these problems merchants want orders with multiple line items to ship together.
Pipe17 is often connected to a subset of the merchant’s fulfillment options. For example, many merchants have their own warehouse that is not integrated through Pipe17.
And some merchants may have an upstream order routing capability in an OMS or ERP but need Pipe17’s integration capabilities to Deliverr, Amazon MCF or other fulfillment channel integration. These merchants can use fill or kill as a way of integrating Pipe17 into that upstream order routing system so that Pipe17’s fulfillment channels become an extension of that upstream order router.
Concept
Here is a diagram to understand how orders are ‘filled’ or ‘killed’
Pipe17 supports fill or kill by
- Checking inventory availability
-
Split-order management
- Merchant selectable option to enable split orders (by card)
- To minimize shipping costs and customer confusion, when the option is active Pipe17 only splits orders when no single location can fulfill the entire order
-
Kill (Cancel)
- Option to cancel the Pipe17 order when inventory cannot be found
- Option to cancel the order when all shipping requests are cancelled
-
Cancel propagation
- For selling channels that have API support for tag or meta-field updates, we tag the order with a merchant-determined string to indicate it’s been canceled and/or sent to fulfillment
- For ERP systems like Netsuite we move the order to a different ERP location when it’s killed by Pipe17
- For selling channels that do not support tags and have API support for custom statuses (e.g. WooCommerce) we update the status to a merchant-determined string
How It Works
Ok, so how do I make this work in Pipe17?
-
You use the order routing automation settings and integration settings to configure fill or kill.
- For order routing you want to turn on the option to cancel orders that cannot be routed
-
We do not directly cancel orders in the selling channel as this could cause automated notifications to the merchant’s customer. We instead add tags to the order or change its status or location. We use whatever option is best support by the third party API, here are a few examples:
- Shopify (tags)
- Netsuite (location change)
- Woocommerce (state change)
- Chord (metafields change, coming soon)
- OrderHive (tags)
What practices should the merchant adopt?
- The merchant should have some manual or automated process to watch for canceled orders in Pipe17 or examine their selling portal orders for tags and status changes.
- The merchant could use some automation in their selling channel or OMS that would trigger on the tag or custom state and reroute the order to a fulfillment channel outside of Pipe17’s scope.
Need Help?
If you need additional assistance:
Use Ask Pippen, our AI agent, located at the top of the app page.
Submit a support request with as much relevant detail as possible. Learn how to submit a request.
For urgent issues, email us directly at support@pipe17.com.
We're here to help you succeed with your operations.
Comments
0 comments