How Do I Connect to a Drop Ship Supplier with Mothership Retailer?

Finding a Drop Ship Supplier

The instructions below assume that you have already found a supplier that wants to enter into a drop shipping partnership with you.

Connecting to a Drop Ship Supplier using Mothership Retailer

In order to connect to a drop ship supplier on Mothership, you'll need the key found in the invite email sent by your supplier, that looks something like this:  09b5b62e-155f-4561-ad10-d7677e01a24c . 

If you are setting up Mothership Retailer for the first time, you'll be automatically redirected to the new supplier page after you go through the initial setup. If you're adding a new supplier to an established account, you can click the 'Suppliers' menu option in the 'Mothership' drop down in the menu bar. Next, click on the purple 'Connect to a supplier' button in the upper right. In either case, you should end up on a page that looks like this:

Once you're there, you'll need to enter the key found in the invite email into the form. After you click the Submit button, you'll be taken to a page where you manage your relationship with this supplier. 

This page contains several important pieces of information that you should review:

• To import products and collections, click the Manage Product Imports button at the top. You'll be taken to a new page that lets you select the products and collections you want to import. You can find instructions on how to import products and collections here. Additionally, you will want to review the settings under the Imports and Margins section to ensure that Mothership is correctly configured to import product data according to your particular needs. You can find more information about the Import & Margins section below. 
• The supplier's shipping destinations are listed in the first section. You want to ensure that you do not ship to a location that is not supported by the supplier. 
• Information about how frequently the supplier invoices you for orders placed in their store can be found under the Invoices and Orders section. This section also contains links to review invoices and orders you've placed with the supplier. 

• The Import & Margins section allows you to configure how Mothership imports and synchronizes data between your store and the supplier's store. 

  

• • Default Markup: When Mothership imports a product, it can markup the price of the product over the cost charged to you by supplier. The default markup is the value that is applied to all imported products from this supplier and makes it so you don't have to specify the markup for each product individually. That said, the default markup can be overridden at the product-level, so you do not need to markup all of the products imported by the supplier by the same amount. Mothership uses the following formula for the markup: 

    Retailer Retail Price = Supplier Cost * (1 + markup)

    e.g.

    Supplier Cost = 10.00

    Markup = 30%

    13.00 = 10.00 * (1 + 0.3) = 10.00 * (1.3) = 13.00

  • Track supplier's pricing: Do you want Mothership to update prices in your store whenever the supplier updates product pricing in their store? If so, you can choose to use any markup values available or opt to track whatever the supplier's MSRP is.
  • Import new products: Do you want Mothership to automatically import new products from the supplier whenever the supplier publishes them to Mothership? 
  • Update product content: Do you want Mothership to update the product descriptions and images whenever the supplier makes changes? You will not want to do this if you write your own product descriptions and are concerned about SEO. 
  • Import new collections: Do you want Mothership to create new collections in your store whenever the supplier publishes new collections to Mothership? 
  • Remove collections: Mothership can delete a collection in your store if the retailer deletes the collection in their store. You many not want to do this if you add products to collections imported by Mothership that are not supplied through Mothership. One thing to note, is that deleting a collection does not remove the products contained within the collection. 
  • Update collection content: This is identical to the update product content setting, but for collections. 
  • Update whenever a collection's product membership changes: Do you want Mothership to automatically add and remove products from a collection whenever a supplier makes a membership change in their store? This will ensure that the products in your Mothership-related collections are also in the corresponding collections in the supplier's store.