What is a fulfillment order, and what do its statuses and fields mean?

A sales order is what the customer bought. A fulfillment order is the part of it that one building will ship, with its own status. A sales order can have several, and its status follows theirs.

• Draft: created, with nothing reserved. Items can still change.
• Allocated: inventory for every item is reserved in the building.
• Ready: cleared to send, with a shipping address and carrier service.
• In Progress: sent to the warehouse, or marked as being worked.
• Fulfilled: shipments cover every item.
• Failed: Endless could not send it after several tries, or the system handling it reported a failure. Fix the cause, then select “Resend for fulfillment” or “Retry Fulfillment.”
• Canceled.

With processing enabled, advance a fulfillment order manually or use a Fulfillment Created automation with Process Fulfillment. Choose allocate only, allocate and mark ready, or allocate and send. Retired fulfillment processing rules cannot be created or assigned.

“Mark as Ready” moves an Allocated fulfillment order to Ready. “Mark as In Progress” moves a Ready fulfillment order to In Progress and accepts an optional External ID. It does not send anything to the warehouse. Use “Send for fulfillment” for that.

“Blocked” beside the status, or “Blocked from next step” on the action, means a requirement for the next step is unmet, such as covering inventory, a shipping address, a carrier service, no active hold, or a rule condition. Open the status to see which fail.

A fulfillment order becomes Fulfilled through shipments. Marking it fulfilled by hand records a shipment for the remaining items. Fulfillment orders imported from a sales channel such as Shopify can arrive already Fulfilled.

In Metadata, Source External ID is the matching fulfillment order’s ID in the sales channel the order came from. Fulfillment External ID is the warehouse partner’s order ID, used to link shipments. Fulfillment Integration is where it is sent, which comes from the building unless set on the fulfillment order. Shipments Expected From names who reports its shipments. Process in Endless shows whether Endless is expected to process it.