In step 9 of Onboarding, you will preview and configure your order routing. Orders are routed by leveraging routing groups, routing priorities and potentially shipping policies.

Configuring Mapping Templates for Your Suppliers

As part of configuring order routing, Flxpoint makes sure each fulfillment source is ready to send and receive order data correctly. What you need to do here depends on the type of supplier you are routing to.

• Prebuilt suppliers — no manual mapping template setup is required. Flxpoint already manages the data mapping for these suppliers, so you can continue through this step without any additional configuration.
• File-based suppliers — you will be prompted to configure mapping templates before you can finish this step. These templates tell Flxpoint how to translate your order data to and from the supplier's files.

For file-based suppliers, two mapping templates are required:

• Outbound mapping template (Send Fulfillment Requests) — configure this so Flxpoint knows how to format and send your fulfillment requests to the supplier.
• Inbound mapping template (Get Shipments) — configure this so Flxpoint can read the shipment and tracking details the supplier returns.

Note
For file-based suppliers, this step is not complete until both the outbound and inbound mapping templates are configured. If a required mapping template is still missing, the step will keep returning you to the mapping template setup. Once both templates are configured, you can continue to preview and finish configuring your order routing.

Order Routing Preview

The order routing preview tool allows you to see the impact your routing groups, order import workflows, and routing priorities will have on an order before you generate a fulfillment request.

The Benefits of Order Routing Preview:

• You can adjust your order routing strategy before generating a fulfillment request.
• The preview will display any errors or warnings you may encounter with each routing group, thus allowing you to troubleshoot before generating a fulfillment request.
• A financial estimation summary also allows you to preview potential profit/loss earned upon order completion.

Routing Groups

A routing group represents a group of routing priorities, eligible sources, and decisions if an order cannot be routed.

Routing groups are applied to orders at the time of generating fulfillment requests/fulfillment orders. This allows the system to determine how it should properly generate FR/FOs for specific orders.

Routing Priorities

Routing priorities are the prioritized list of rules that are evaluated (from top to bottom) after each order is imported and is being routed to a fulfillment source.

They can be found in Settings → Orders → Routing → selected routing group.

After an order is imported and is set to be routed to a fulfillment source, Flxpoint will evaluate each routing rule starting from the top of the list. If there are multiple remaining options after evaluating a rule, it will continue to the next rule below it.

Routing Estimations & Workflows

Routing estimations are derived at the time of routing orders. These primarily consist of:

• Estimated shipping cost
• Estimated dropship fees

During order routing, one of the routing priorities is lowest cost. To properly estimate the lowest cost fulfillment solution, these estimated costs/fees should be factored in so the best fulfillment solution can be chosen.

There are two main mechanisms to derive estimations:

• Rate shopping (only for shipping costs)
• Workflows

Generally speaking, rate shopping is for determining real-time shipping estimates and workflows are for determining predefined costs and also serve as a fallback if rate shopping fails to find a valid rate for a fulfillment requests/fulfillment orders.