Streamline Order Fulfillment and Payment Processing
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how to automate order fulfillment and payment processing.
- Identify the information included in a fulfillment order.
- Explain what an order payment summary is.
Manage the Fulfillment Process
The primary function of any order management system is to ensure accurate and timely order fulfillment. How efficiently you manage order fulfillment can make or break the shopping or buying experience for your customers. If you can’t consistently deliver what you promised, when you promised, at the price you promised, customer loyalty will start to erode. To keep your customers happy, and the business running smoothly, you need to make sure that orders stay on track.
Sounds easy enough, right? But, if you rely on a patchwork of disconnected systems and manual processes to fulfill orders, collect payments, and ship products, you leave the door open for costly mistakes. One too many botched orders, payment snafus, or shipping delays and your customers will start looking for other places to shop. Here’s a couple Salesforce Order Management features that help your fulfillment team manage and keep track of orders.
- Track and Manage Packing for Online Orders
You can use the Store Fulfillment App to add items to one or more shipments. If a product can’t be shipped, associates can set a reason for rejection before completing the order. After the order is packed, associates can print shipping labels and ship the order.
- Fulfill Orders Quickly with Pick Tickets
Use pick tickets to pick multiple orders at the same time. Fulfillment clerks can filter new fulfillment orders by delivery method, select and bundle orders with similar shipping types, and track the picking of all bundled orders.
You’ve already learned how the order summary can help you manage order data. Now, let's take a closer look at how workflow automation can help you streamline order fulfillment and payment processing.
Automate Order Fulfillment with Flows
You can keep orders moving—and maintain happy customers—by automating your fulfillment and payment processes. Automation ensures consistency and improves accuracy, making it more likely that you can deliver on your promises. Let’s see how this works.
As you learned in the previous unit, when Salesforce Order Management receives an order, it automatically creates order objects and populates them with order data. What happens to these objects next is up to you. Your goal is to move the order from submission to delivery as quickly and efficiently as possible. To make this happen, you can use a tool called Flow Builder, which you can access in Setup.
Flow Builder is a visual tool that lets you use intuitive shapes to define the business logic and actions that move order objects through your fulfillment workflow.
To get started, first identify:
- All the steps in your fulfillment workflow.
- The sequence in which the steps occur.
- The actions or decisions required to move from one step to the next.
- The steps that require integration with an external system or supply chain partner.
Once you’ve gathered this information, you can use Flow Builder to create a visual representation of the entire process. Salesforce Order Management then uses the steps and business logic that you defined to manipulate order objects and move orders through the workflow from start to finish.
Here’s a sample fulfillment flow in Flow Builder.
[Alt text: Sample Order Management flow]
To get you started, Salesforce Order Management includes sample flows and processes that demonstrate a basic order workflow from start to finish. You can modify and extend the sample flows and processes based on your business requirements. You can also create custom approval processes for things such as fraud checks and manual order reviews.
As an alternative to using Flow Builder, you can also configure fulfillment processes by using Salesforce APIs and Apex custom code.
Fulfillment Orders
Once you’ve automated your fulfillment process, you can sit back and relax, right? Well, not exactly. You’ll still want to keep an eye on things, so you need a way to keep track of where orders are in the fulfillment process. That’s where the fulfillment order comes in handy.
The order lifecycle begins when Salesforce Order Management receives an order, triggering the creation of the order and order summary records. At this point, your automated fulfillment workflow kicks in to create fulfillment order records for the products in the order and then assign those products to fulfillment locations.
- If all the products in an order can be fulfilled together, only one fulfillment order is created.
- If the products in an order can’t all be fulfilled together, Salesforce Order Management groups products that will ship together and creates separate fulfillment orders for each group.
- All fulfillment orders are automatically linked to the order summary.
[Alt text: Illustration depicting a general process for order fulfillment from order and order summary created to all products delivered.]
You can find the following information in each fulfillment order record.
- Fulfillment locations
- Fulfillment status
- Order charges
- Order products
- Order quantities
- Order recipient
- Shipping address
- Shipping carrier
- Shipping method
Details and statuses for each fulfillment order are summarized—and dynamically updated—on the order summary. This makes it easy for you to track order products throughout the fulfillment process.
Ideally, your automated workflow will keep orders moving along without any trouble. However, you can still jump in and manually update fulfillment orders as needed. You can:
- Update the status of a fulfillment order to move the order from one stage of the fulfillment process to another.
- Change the fulfillment location.
- Modify the shipping method or shipping address.
- Remove a product from the fulfillment order.
- Limit the number of fulfillment orders assigned to a location by specifying its capacity.
- Assign a reject reason when a fulfillment location rejects a fulfillment order item with the RejectReason picklist field on the Fulfillment Order Line Item object.
- Automatically Reroute Rejected Fulfillment Orders with the Distributed Order Management Flows
- Efficiently Handle B2C Commerce Orders When Omnichannel Inventory Is Unavailable
- Enhance your exchanges with post-fulfillment and uneven exchanges using flows
- Provide Exchanges for Fulfilled Items
- Process product returns and exchanges in a single flow by creating and implementing a custom exchange workflow using the new exchange APIs.
Any changes that you make to the fulfillment order automatically update the corresponding information on the order summary.
Salesforce Payments and Order Management
You can facilitate secure and convenient order processing with payment collection and refunds by integrating Salesforce Payments and Order Management. If your Payments merchant accounts are linked to a Stripe account, Order Management can capture payments and issue refunds.
For Salesforce Payments and Order Management to work together, enable these products on the same org. A Payments license and an Order Management license are required, or you can use a Connected Commerce license. Additional licenses or permissions might be required depending on the specific features and functionalities you want to use.
If you use a third-party payments provider, you can configure the payment methods, payment providers, and payment processors for your ecommerce site, when you set up Salesforce Order Management. You’ll need to consider how to integrate your payment processing into your automated fulfillment workflow.
In general, whatever methods, providers, and processors you use, order payments progress through three stages during order fulfillment.
- Funds are authorized for capture from the customer’s chosen payment method.
- Authorized funds are captured from the customer’s chosen payment method.
- Captured funds are invoiced and reconciled with an external financial management system.
You determine the timing for each of these stages. For example, you can choose to authorize funds when a customer submits an order, and then capture funds and generate an invoice when an order is fulfilled. Once you decide how and when to authorize, capture, and invoice payments, you can build the required payment processing steps into your automated fulfillment workflow.
Order Payment Summaries
To help you manage payment transactions, Salesforce Order Management creates an order payment summary for each order. The order payment summary simplifies order management by providing you with a single view of all payment transactions for an order.
Unlike other summary objects—such as the order summary—the order payment summary doesn’t represent an original payment record and subsequent changes to it. Instead, it represents a combination of payments that use the same payment method and are associated with the same order summary. With this approach you get payment method information for each order and see which payment method buyers are using to pay for their purchases.
When canceling a payment authorization, the order payment summary is automatically updated. When you call the Payment Authorization Reversal Service on an authorization associated with an order payment summary, it updates the order payment summary’s Available to Capture and Authorization Reversed values.
You can find the following information in each order payment summary record.
- Amount authorized
- Amount captured
- Amount refunded
- Balance due
- Credit memos
- Invoices
- Payee name
- Payment method
- Refunds
You can also access Payment Gateway logs on the order payment summary. Payment Gateway logs store all the information exchanged between your payment platform and your external payment gateways. When a payment transaction does not complete as expected, you can open the associated Payment Gateway log for help with resolving the issue.
Invoices and Credit Memos
Salesforce Order Management uses invoices and credit memos to let you reconcile order payment transactions with your external financial management systems.
- Invoice: An invoice represents funds captured as payment for an order. An invoice lets you reconcile the funds captured with your external financial management systems. You determine the timing for invoice generation within the framework of your fulfillment workflow. All captured funds are applied to an invoice before authorized funds, regardless of the amount.
- Credit Memo: A credit memo represents a payment refund resulting from a product return. A credit memo lets you reconcile refund disbursements with your external financial management systems. A credit memo is generated automatically when you process a return.
Invoice and credit memo generation occurs automatically. Accounting reconciliation requires an integration between Salesforce Order Management and your financial management systems.
Next Steps
In this unit, you learned about fulfillment orders, order payment summaries, invoices and credit memos. You also learned how to automate fulfillment and payment processing. Now let’s see how you can optimize fulfillment automation by implementing distributed order management workflows.