Downloading Shipments – AB Commerce Online Help

This works very similar to Downloading Orders and is only used by websites that Group Multiple Orders into Single Shipments.

Summary

For importing shipments into your system, you take the following steps:

Web Orders are grouped into single shipments in AB Commerce.
Set a batch job to run every 15 minutes which calls the AB Commerce web service ExportShipments which downloads all orders with a status of Assigned Shipments..
Upload each shipment into your system.
Each time you upload a shipment into your system, call the web service SetShipmentsToCompleted to move the status of the shipment from Assigned Shipments to the next status Completed Shipments (so that shipment does not download the next time ExportShipments is called)..
For failover, in case your batch job falls over, each time you are about to upload a shipment, check your system to see if that shipment has already been uploaded (the SHIPID is the unique reference for each shipment BUT you can also use the SHIPNUMBER as this is also unique for each shipment) and if it has, go straight to the next step to update the shipment’s status from “Assigned Shipment” to “Completed Shipment” – i.e. if the shipment is inserted into your system and the batch job falls over, it wont matter as the next time the batch job runs, it will still move the shipment to it’s next status..

Shipment Workflow

A shipment goes through the following stages:

Change in Order Status	Description
UNASSIGNED ORDER	When new orders are made
UNASSIGNED ORDER -> ASSIGNED SHIPMENT	When the user groups orders into shipments in AB Commerce
ASSIGNED SHIPMENT -> COMPLETED SHIPMENT	When the order is downloaded to your system, the shipment status changes to COMPLETED SHIPMENT