Manage Products with Multiple Suppliers in Duoplane

Duoplane supports situations where a single product can be fulfilled by multiple vendors. This is often referred to as "redundant suppliers".

Common scenarios for this include:

1. Two or more different dropship distributors provide the same product
2. You have multiple warehouses in different geographic locations that maintain similar inventories
3. You maintain inventory of a product, but want to route the order to a drop ship vendor when you do not have sufficient quantities to fulfill an order.

To configure your account to allow multiple suppliers per product you can go to Settings --> Products & Inventory, and then flip "Multiple Suppliers per product" to yes.

It is important to note that if you enable this setting in Duoplane and then add multiple suppliers to a product, you will not be able to disable this setting while any products have multiple suppliers assigned to them.

Product setup

Each product can have an unlimited number of supply sources associated with it, with each supply source representing a single physical inventory location.

(In the standard setup, each product is associated with a single vendor.)

Like in the standard configuration, Duoplane tracks the supplier SKU, item availability, estimated lead times, and backorder dates at each supply source in a multi-vendor situation.

To add a supplier to a product in the Duoplane portal you can go to the product record and click Add another supplier. This will then add a supplier line to the inventory sources and allow you to select the supplier from the dropdown list. You can also add any additional details for that supplier that you might need.

You can also use your ecommerce platform to assign multiple suppliers or utilize Duoplane's product import to add multiple suppliers to a product.

Order routing

Duoplane can intelligently route orders to available vendors based on several criteria, and the relative importance of each factor can be customized. The main criteria include:

1. Wholesale cost (E.g. Ship from the lowest cost supplier.)
2. Estimated shipping cost. (E.g. Ship from the warehouse closest to the customer.)
3. Item availability (E.g. Ship from the warehouse that can complete the order faster.)
4. Cost of split shipping an order (E.g. Minimize the total number of shipments on this order.)
5. Geographic territories (E.g. US orders ship from a US warehouse, and Canadian orders ship from a Canadian warehouse.