Introduction to Consignment

We'll cover

• What is Consignment?
• Tracking Consignments with Craftybase
• Managing Locations
• Transferring stock to a consignee
• Transferring stock back to your location
• Creating Consignment Price Lists
• Recording sales from the consignee

This tutorial should take approximately 18 minutes to complete.

What is Consignment?

Consignment selling essentially involves providing your goods to an agreed-on external party (consignee), where the consignee then agrees to try to sell your product in exchange for an agreed-on commission fee.

With consigning, until the product is sold, the product remains yours and is still considered part of your inventory. For this reason, it must be tracked accurately while in the external location.

Tracking Consignments with Craftybase

The Consignment feature tracks inventory sold from consignment locations and consists of four concepts that work together: Locations, Pricing Tiers, Transfers, and Orders. Let's briefly introduce these concepts before we move to how they all work together.

Firstly, Locations are used to record details about your consignment locations, such as the name and address of the shop.

Transfers are for moving stock between different locations. The most common scenario you'll be using is moving stock from location to external location to provide stock for sale to a consignee.

Stock Transfers are also used when unsold stock is returned to you. Whenever a transfer is created, the stock is allocated to the location. If the location is a consignee, you'll also notice it will be removed from your Available stock inventory totals.

Pricing Tiers allow you to set custom price points for your products for any location - in doing so, you will be creating price lists for your consignees.

Finally, Orders are the way that you record sales made at the external consignee location. These orders are almost identical to the ones you will have been creating for your direct sales - the main difference being that a location needs to be entered in order to reconcile the sale with the stock.

Managing Locations

Your default home inventory is called the Main location. By default, your stock is assumed to reside in your main location. Stock can be transferred both to and from the Main location to any location you create.

Locations can be added directly via your Locations list page, which can be accessed via the quick menu option.

To speed up your workflow, you can also add new locations via the Transfer Stock process, as outlined in the next section.

Transferring stock to a consignee

Stock can be transferred to a location by creating a Stock Transfer. The stock transfer details the locations involved in the transfer, the date on which the transfer was actioned, and all stock involved.

On the Transfer form, the first fields you'll see are for setting the locations you wish to transfer to and from.

Your main location will be the place where you take the stock. Your available stock at this location will be reduced by the amount you are moving to indicate that this stock has been removed from your accessible stock. This is the location where you want to move the stock. This action will increase the Available stock at this location.

In order to transfer stock from your own location to a consignee, you'll want to make sure that your From Location is set to the default of Main. This is the default location for your inventory and indicates your own stock warehouse.

If you have a new location to add at this point, you can do so by clicking inside the search box and then selecting the + button that appears.

The next section is for selecting the products and quantities you are sending to this location. You can add as many products as you need here: just click the Add Product button to add new rows when required.

Transferring stock back to your location

The process of accounting for stock returned to you from a consignee is exactly the same: you'll want to create a Stock Transfer again, but only this time with your consignee location and your main. All stock returned will need to be added under the Transferred Products section.

Creating Consignment Price Lists

To create custom prices for your consignment products, you can create a Pricing Tier and then associate this tier with one or many locations. From here, each of your products can then have a unique price set for the tier. This will appear automatically when logging new orders and will also be factored into your consignment reporting.

Recording sales from the consignee

When a consignee sells stock, an order for the location should be created containing the sold stock. This will decrease the available stock on hand and also increase the sold count for the location. If a price point has been configured for the product(s) sold, the price for the location will be populated automatically.

Have some questions?

If you have any additional questions, please get in touch, and we'll be happy to help.