Every Mocka order starts life in a single Brightpearl warehouse but the reality of fulfilling it is rarely that simple. With two warehouses, bundled products and Australia’s notoriously expensive shipping costs, Mocka needed something far smarter than Brightpearl’s native rules could offer.
So we rolled up our sleeves.
Wholesome products
A lot of what Mocka sells is a ‘bundle’ in Brightpearl terms, even if the customer just buys one product. Think: a bed head and the slats, or a cot and its base. The one rule that could never be broken was that these bundles are never split across shipments. A customer waiting on a product should never receive only one of its flat pack boxes without receiving the rest. For large, bulky items, shipping components separately is also simply far more expensive. So, while furniture might arrive in pieces by design, a customer should always be able to build each product in full as it arrives.
Home is where the stock is
With warehouses in Melbourne and Brisbane and Australian shipping costs being what they are, the app always tries to fulfil an order from whichever warehouse is closest to the customer. A postcode hierarchy tells the system where to look first, prioritising the nearest location whenever stock allows. Simple enough when stock is sitting in the right place. Considerably less simple when it is not….
The waiting game
Furniture retail in underpinned on pre-orders and whilst Mocka prides itself on its industry leading levels of in-stock products, high demand and new products fall back to pre-order to ensure customers can secure the products they want as soon as possible. So when stock is not on hand in the priority warehouse, the app checks what’s coming. First, it looks for stock already in transit between warehouses and links the order to that transfer. If there is nothing in transit, it checks for an eligible pre-order PO using custom “wait days”. Setting these defines how soon a delivery needs to land to be worth waiting for. If it lands within the window, the order links to the pre-order. If it lands too far out, the app ships from stock instead. It’s the difference between a customer waiting a happy few extra days for their full order and being kept waiting for a delivery that is still months away.
In the event that neither warehouse has stock within its wait days and two pre-order POs are both away off, rather than default to whichever is arriving first, the app compares the two dates. If the incoming stock at both warehouses is due within a similar window of each other, it still splits the linking by warehouse priority so customers benefit from the postcode logic even when everything is on order. This helps to ensure stock is balanced, and fulfilled as quickly and efficiently as possible to customers across the country.
Only when one warehouse’s stock is outside of this window, does the app simply link to whichever PO is arriving first. This information is also passed to Shopify whereupon a customer is prompted to enter their postcode and then shown the correct stock levels or pre-order dates dependant on their location, ensuring customers are informed before purchasing.
The result is lower shipping costs, a smoother customer experience and much smarter use of inventory across both warehouses, all without any manual intervention from the Mocka team.
