Introduction

In this article, we provide a setup guide about onboarding your vendors.

Getting started

Are you looking to start dropshipping or creating a multi-vendor marketplace? This article will show you how you can use Onport to onboard your vendors and automate your dropshipping process by following a few simple steps.

Your vendors will most likely only need to provide you with API credentials, which many vendors are already familiar with doing (and shouldn't take more than a few minutes!).
The rest of the vendor connection settings can be completely covered by you, in the Onport account, by following the steps detailed here.

❗️All settings in a Dropship Provider setup should be reviewed and set accordingly to the reality of your agreement and ways of working.

1) Vendor login and notifications

Your first step is to add your vendor's emails so that they will be directly notified about orders and have access to their Vendor Portal. This will always keep your vendors in the loop of incoming orders, saving you the trouble of back-and-forth communication.

 

How to do this:

1. Navigate to the "Contact" tab on the left
2. Click "New dropship provider"
3. Add the name of the vendor and click "Save"
4. Add the email address and click "Invite"

❗️In order to be able to invite the vendors, you need to create a template to send this e-mail, as you will face an error if the e-mail description is blank.

 

🔎 If your vendor uses Shopify or another supported e-commerce platform, Onport can fully integrate with it, which means you don't have to invite your vendors to the Vendor Portal. Check out how the Shopify integration works, as well as our other integrations with different platforms. 
❗️The Vendor Portal can still be important for a vendor that has full order and catalog automation due to the fact that returns and invoicing are managed through the Vendor Portal.

2) Add your vendor's information

You can add the vendor information as shown in the picture below. Having done this once, you don’t need to worry about populating the address every time you want to create a shipping label. Once the vendor's email has been added, scroll down and fill in the following fields: 

3) Order setup

Your next step is to set up an order process that makes the most sense to you and your vendor, by deciding the settings on how orders will sync to the vendor - Full or Partial Order Automation.

Depending on your preference, you can define whether vendors receive order notifications, or whether the orders should automatically sync into their e-commerce store without a notification. If you enable the notifications, your vendors will receive an email with the order and the system will also send it to their store. This will ensure that orders are communicated in the most efficient way.

 

How to do this:

1. Click on the "Orders" tab
2. You will see different options for order automation. Depending on which store you connect to, the settings will differ. For instance, in Shopify, you can choose to enable the automatic order notification.
3. Click "Save"

4) Shipping setup

Now you will need to decide how you will handle shipping with your vendor. Go ahead and choose your preferences on whether shipping labels are provided to vendors, what shipping rate shows at checkout, and whether or not shipping revenue is passed to the vendors. By doing this setup once, you have defined how shipping will be managed and invoices to the vendor throughout their experience with working with your Marketplace.

 

How to do this:

1. Click on the "Shipping" tab
2. Choose your preferences and click "save"

5) Setting up returns

If you are looking to manage returns using Onport, the "Returns" tab allows you to define the vendor's experience throughout this process. Whether it is defining the return eligibility settings or if a return label will be provided, these settings can be found here:

6) Setting up inventory feeds

Are you looking to have your store directly synced with the vendor’s inventory? You have the option to import inventory feeds where products, stock, and prices are automatically synced. However, if you wish to do a manual setup, this is also possible. You can find these settings from the "Inventory Feed" tab:

 

🔎 Want to learn more? Check out this article for more information on the Inventory Feed settings.

❗️If you are looking to manually manage your stock levels, check out this article to learn how to do so.

7) Set up the commission rate and payment setup

One of the key features of Onport is ensuring that payments due to your vendors are automatically settled by simply setting up automated payments for each. These settings include determining the commission rate that you had agreed on, how payments will be processed, through what platform, and when should Onport automatically send out your payments. You can find these settings in the "Payment Setup tab" tab:

 

🔎 Read more about the payment setup here.

8) Set your vendor tax settings

9) Set your vendor's custom fields (optional)

10) Map brand names

In order to have a clear breakdown of all the relevant brands associated with each vendor, ensuring a seamless order routing process, these brand names must be mapped correctly. Routing all brand names to the respective dropship provider that will be processing the order fulfillment is an important process.

❗️If you want to route orders to a specific vendor based on a tag or shipping destination, regardless of the brand name, the option "map to any brand name" will allow you to define these alternative routing rules:

 

🔎 For more information on this, check out this article.

Have any questions?

You can contact our support at support@onport.com