CastleGate Fulfillment Updates
What's Changing?
New Multichannel rates: With our Multichannel service, you can use CastleGate’s warehousing and fulfillment to serve all of your customers – from other retailers or your own direct-to-consumer site. Starting June 1, we will reduce our Multichannel fulfillment rates for suppliers shipping on a non-Wayfair shipping account. A flat $1 (£0.80/€0.93) surcharge will be applied to your CastleGate Fulfillment costs for these orders. This previously was $1.50 (£1.20/€1.36) and $2.50 (£1.98/€2.27) depending on the size of the product. Please review our Operating Guide and fill out our survey for North America if you want to join our Multichannel program.
Removing shrink allowance: As of May 1, 2023 we have removed the shrink allowance from our Terms of Service, which means we are fully covering any loss or damages incurred in our fulfillment centers. Previously, we defined shrink allowance as the amount of damage or loss that can occur in our CastleGate fulfillment centers before we become financially liable to you. This allowance was 0.5% of monthly wholesale cost throughput in our warehouse. Now, we will credit you for all the losses and/or damages incurred in our facilities.
Incident prevention: Since January 1, 2023, CastleGate Fulfillment has been performing additional services for high-damage-rate items at an extra charge; more details can be found in the CastleGate Packaging Requirements Help Center article. Please review your product incident rates to understand the impact on your portfolio.
Coming Soon
We are expanding our Multichannel service: Launching in Canada and Europe: We will soon be launching our Multichannel offering in Canada (expected in late Q2) and Europe (expected in early Q3).
Improved integration and order management in Partner Home: By Q3, our API solution will allow you to send us orders automatically and in real time directly from your system via API. Additionally, we will release a new Order Management page, an improved bulk-order upload feature, and a new page for adding and editing retailer accounts for Multichannel.
Donating CastleGate goods: By the second half of this year, we will reestablish a process for donating excess inventory to improve your inventory health and to give back to our communities.
New fulfillment center opening in Vancouver, BC, Canada: In Q4, this new fulfillment center will improve your demand coverage in western Canada and the Pacific Northwest through better proximity to customers in this region. Learn more here.
CastleGate Forwarding Updates
In order to improve our services and become your freight forwarder of choice, we have implemented your Q4 2022 feedback on our forwarding service in the below updates:
What's Changing?
Flexible price offering: You can now sign up for a floating rate contract here or a three- or six-month fixed contract here.
Shorter booking and shipping lead times: We are now able to ship your container two weeks after an order is entered, shortening the booking and shipping process by half.
Coming Soon
Improved container visibility on Partner Home: In Q3, Partner Home will provide full self-service visibility into your CastleGate containers (FBCG) from Dedicated Break-Bulk Facilities (DBF) to fulfillment centers. By the end of Q2, you’ll be able to track each FBCG shipment’s location and status as well as select orders you want to send to a DBF. In Q4, we will launch this capability for containers shipped to your own warehouse.
Invoicing improvements: In 2023, we’re committed to improving the timeliness of billing, providing more information around the types of charges, and improving resolution time for invoicing tickets. Learn more here.
Launching new DBF visibility data in Partner Home: In the coming weeks, you will begin seeing new data within Inbound Order Management that will provide visibility into which CastleGate warehouses your inventory is headed to after being processed at the DBF, and when the inventory has been received.
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