Suppliers¶

Suppliers (vendors) represent the companies that supply your products. Each supplier owns one or more warehouses, and warehouses in turn define the stock and shipping origins used at checkout.

Suppliers matter most for multi-vendor stores. When vendor-based order grouping is enabled, baskets are automatically split so each supplier receives only their portion of a multi-vendor order -- each group can have its own shipping options and be fulfilled independently.

When to Use Suppliers¶

Single-vendor stores -- you can ignore suppliers entirely. Warehouses are all you need.
Multi-vendor marketplaces / drop-ship stores -- assign each warehouse to a supplier and enable vendor order grouping so each supplier gets its own shipment and fulfilment workflow.

Configuring Suppliers¶

Suppliers are managed in the Merchello backoffice. Each supplier has:

A display name and contact details.
An optional address (used for supplier-side paperwork).
A collection of warehouses they own.
Optional Supplier Direct fulfilment settings (CSV/FTP/email delivery for purchase orders).

See the DTO contracts in SupplierDetailDto.cs and related CreateSupplierDto / UpdateSupplierDto for the full set of fields.

Vendor Order Grouping¶

To enable vendor-based grouping, set the strategy in appsettings.json:

{
  "Merchello": {
    "OrderGroupingStrategy": "vendor-grouping"
  }
}

The vendor grouping strategy groups basket lines by the warehouse's SupplierId, producing one OrderGroup per supplier. Each group can have its own shipping options, fulfilment provider, and order lifecycle.

See Order Grouping for the full contract (context inputs, group outputs, metadata requirements) and how to author a custom IOrderGroupingStrategy.

Supplier Direct Fulfilment¶

Suppliers can also act as fulfilment providers -- purchase orders are delivered to the supplier (via email or FTP CSV), the supplier ships the items, and they report back tracking numbers.

The trigger policy is important: lower priority runs first, and Supplier Direct has two modes:

OnPaid -- auto-submission from the payment-created flow.
ExplicitRelease -- staff-triggered only via POST /orders/{orderId}/fulfillment/release (paid-gated, Supplier Direct only).

Dynamic or non-Supplier Direct providers are unaffected by this policy. See the fulfilment docs for full details.

Next Steps¶

Warehouses -- how warehouses attach to suppliers and drive shipping origins.
Order Grouping -- enabling vendor-based grouping and writing custom strategies.