Preorders / Backorders

What is a Preorder?

Preorder is a type of order within an order management system that allows customers to place an order for a product before it becomes available in inventory or before it is officially released by the supplier. This means that the customer is essentially reserving the product, and the seller will ship it as soon as it becomes available.

Preordering allows customers to secure their place in line and be among the first to receive the product when it becomes available.

What is a Backorder?

Backorder is a type of order within an order management system that occurs when a customer places an order for a product that is currently out of stock or unavailable for immediate shipment. This means that the customer's order is temporarily on hold until the product becomes available again.

Backorders can occur due to various reasons, such as unexpected demand, delays in the supply chain, or manufacturing issues.

How does FFT cover this topic?

Via API it is possible to define a listing whether it is pre-orderable and backorderable. If now an order comes in and there is no stock available for a requested item but the item is marked as pre/backorderable, the system does not route to a facility but let the order wait till the requested stock got stowed. If this is the case all "waiting" orders are brought into the routing - if there is not enough stock for all waiting orders, those orders become unroutable again. Currently there is no prioritisation rule for those orders.

For this feature the fence “complete stock” must be active.

A fence can be a static fence or a reactive fence.

A static fence is a fence where there is no event trigger. If an order becomes unroutable because of a static fence this order will remain in the unroutable order section.

However, a reactive fence has an event trigger, and we check for events which might dissolve this fence and the order ist routed.

For now the “complete stock” fence can set as a reactive fence which means, that if an order becomes unroutable due to an out of stock situation (and the items are backorderable) and stock then becomes available this order gets routed automatically and there is no need to manual intervene.

Technical info:

In order to know which reactive fences would have made an order unroutable (one fence would be enough to make an order unroutable but we need to know which other reactive fences would have been activated) we sort the sequence of fences from Static to reactive and we make sure that all reactive fences are processed with all entities. By this we collect information about all filter reasons.

For now all toolkit fences are static. Only the complete stock fence can be set to reactive

If an order split (initial or after short pick) is allowed and there are items missing, the missing part is split and is handled like a separate order and brought into the waiting room section.

This is only the case, if the remainder consists of preorderable and/or backorderable item ONLY

The non pre/backorderable item of a remainder would “stay” in the initial PJ (and will be shortpicked)

Items which are bundled so that they are not split within routing (see: Custom Service) are considered as one. Meaning that if one item is missing in such a bundle all items within this bundle are brought into a pre- or backorder if the setting is set accordingly.

How to make a listing Pre-/Backorderable

curl --location --request PATCH 'https://your.api.fulfillmenttools.com/api/facilities/{facilityId}/listings/{tenantArticleId\

--header 'Authorization: Bearer TOKEN'

{
  "actions": [
    {
      "action": "<Use the corresponding action, see documentation>",
      "outOfStockBehaviour": "BACKORDER"
    }
  ],
  "version": 1
}

How to make the complete stock fence "reactive"

curl --location --request PATCH 'https://your.api.fulfillmenttools.com/api/configurations/routing

--header 'Authorization: Bearer TOKEN'

{
  "version": 33,
  "actions": [
    {
      "action":"ModifyFence",
      "id": "4711",
      "activeMode": "reactive"
    }
  ]
}