Create a dropship request

A dropship request turns the lines you choose on a sales order into a supplier purchase order (PO) that ships directly from the supplier to your customer, instead of from one of your own warehouses. Use it when a product is stocked and shipped by a supplier rather than held in your inventory.

Because the supplier ships the goods, dropship lines skip your normal allocation and fulfillment — no on-hand stock is reserved or deducted, and no COGS is realized on your side. The supplier PO carries the demand, and you record the supplier's tracking when it ships.

Before you begin

A dropship request runs from a supplier warehouse on the order's Fulfillment tab. You need these in place first:

Requirement	Why it's needed
Fulfill sales orders permission	The Dropship action on the Fulfillment tab is gated by it.
An approved order (Open or Reserved)	You can't dropship a Draft. On a draft the Dropship button is disabled with the tip "Approve the order before creating dropship PO." See Approve, reserve, and allocate stock.
A dropship-enabled supplier warehouse	The line must be routed to a warehouse that has a supplier attached and has dropship turned on. This is the warehouse the PO is placed against.
The line's product is mapped	The dropship PO is built from the product and its supplier cost, so each line needs a resolved product. See Map an unmatched line.
A customer shipping address	The goods ship straight to the customer, so the order's ship-to must be set.

tip

The examples below use order SO-DOCS-0001 for customer Blue Bottle Retail, dropshipping the Reusable Straw 4-Pack from a supplier warehouse.

How dropshipping is organized

Each warehouse an order routes to gets its own card on the Fulfillment tab. A card for a supplier (dropship) warehouse shows a Dropship action instead of the usual Fulfill button, and every dropship request is scoped to that one warehouse card.

This has two consequences worth knowing before you start:

• Route the lines you want dropshipped to the supplier warehouse first. Assign each product's warehouse to the supplier's dropship warehouse — set it on the line, or use Split a line across warehouses to send part of a line there. Lines routed to your own warehouses stay on their own cards and aren't part of the dropship request. See Warehouse routing and the warehouse lock.
• One PO per supplier warehouse. If lines are spread across two different supplier warehouses, each produces its own dropship PO from its own card.

Steps

Create the dropship purchase order

1. Open the order — for example SO-DOCS-0001 — and go to the Fulfillment tab.
2. Confirm the order is approved. If it's still a Draft, approve it first (the Dropship button stays disabled until you do).
3. Find the supplier warehouse card for the lines you want to dropship and click Dropship. The Create Dropship Purchase Order dialog opens.
4. Check the Ships directly to customer panel — it shows the customer's shipping address the supplier will send to. If it's wrong, close the dialog and fix the order's ship-to first.
5. Set a Shipping Method for the supplier. Pick one from the list, or, if the method you want isn't there, leave the list empty and type a name into Or enter manually. This step is optional.
6. Review the Items table and adjust the Qty column per line. Each line defaults to its full remaining quantity; lower it to dropship only part of a line. The table also shows each line's Stock at the supplier, its Sell price, the supplier Cost, and the resulting Margin, with running totals in the footer.
7. Add Notes for Vendor if you want instructions to appear on the supplier's PO (optional, up to 255 characters).
8. Click Create Dropship PO.

What you'll see: the dialog switches to a Dropship PO Created confirmation. SKU.io creates the purchase order, submits it to the supplier immediately, and sends the supplier notification automatically. From the confirmation you can click View Purchase Order to open the new PO, or Done to return to the order.

The PO is submitted right away

Creating the request both creates and submits the PO to the supplier in one step — there's no separate approve-and-send action as there is for a manual PO. The dropship warehouse card now shows a purple PO chip linking to the purchase order, and the order's fulfillment status moves to awaiting tracking until the supplier ships. For the full status picture, see How sales order status works.

Record the supplier's tracking

Once the supplier ships, record their tracking so the order is marked fulfilled. Recording tracking creates the shipment for this order exactly as receiving the goods against the dropship PO would.

1. On the Fulfillment tab, open the supplier warehouse card. Its primary action is now Enter tracking.
2. Click Enter tracking. The Enter dropship tracking dialog opens.
3. Type the supplier's Tracking number.
4. Click Record shipment.

What you'll see: SKU.io creates the fulfillment for the dropshipped lines, increments their fulfilled quantity, and advances the order's fulfillment status. Because dropship goods never enter your warehouse, this records the shipment notionally — it doesn't write inventory movements or COGS on your side.

Recording tracking, another way

Recording tracking here is the same operation as receiving the shipment against the dropship PO on the purchase-order side — both run the same path and produce the same shipment. Use whichever surface you're already on.

Partial and mixed dropshipping

You don't have to dropship a whole order — or even a whole line.

• Dropship part of a line. Lower the Qty for a line in the dialog. The remaining quantity stays on the order to fulfill another way. Set a line to 0 to leave it out of this PO entirely.
• Dropship some lines, ship others yourself. Route only the lines you want the supplier to send to the supplier warehouse; keep the rest on your own warehouse cards and fulfill them normally. One order can have both dropship and in-house shipments.

Dropship lines never draw on your on-hand stock, so mixing the two doesn't reserve or deduct inventory for the dropshipped portion.

After the PO is placed, change it on the PO

Once the dropship PO exists, the fulfillment order is committed to the supplier and locks in place — you can't Move or Split it from the order's Fulfillment tab anymore. The message you'll see points you to the real lever: cancel the dropship PO to change the fulfillment.

To change or cancel a placed dropship, work on the purchase order

The dropship PO is a real supplier order that has already been submitted. To revise quantities, change the supplier, or back out entirely, open the linked PO (via the purple PO chip on the warehouse card) and cancel or edit it there. Cancelling the fulfillment order from the sales order side will also cancel a not-yet-submitted dropship PO, but a PO that's already gone to the supplier needs to be handled on the PO.

Troubleshooting

"Warehouse '…' is not configured as a dropship warehouse." The warehouse you routed the line to has a supplier but doesn't have dropship enabled. Turn on the dropship setting for that warehouse in Settings → Warehouses, then try again.

Turning dropship off later

A supplier warehouse won't let you disable dropship while it still has lines on Open orders — SKU.io blocks the change so live dropship demand isn't stranded. Close or reroute those orders first, then update the warehouse setting.

Next steps

• Approve, reserve, and allocate stock — get the order to Open so the Dropship action unlocks.
• Fulfill a sales order — ship the non-dropship lines from your own warehouses.
• Split, move, and merge fulfillments — route part of a line to the supplier warehouse.
• Warehouse routing and the warehouse lock — how a line's warehouse is chosen and locked.
• Two-tier fulfillment: intent vs execution — how the fulfillment order and the shipment relate, and where the dropship PO fits.
• Sales orders overview — the full order lifecycle.