Hello does anyone have any thoughts on setting shipping carriers and service levels on sales orders? We have many customers that have contracts with carrier (ie SAIA, YRC, Old Dominion, etc) and we want to put that onto Sales orders so the warehouse knows what carrier to use Natively NetSuite gives you the option of UPS or FedEx/other. I’m thinking of making some custom fields to represent the carrier and service level and almost “ignoring” the standard fields. Any thoughts on if this is a bad idea? Or maybe what would be a best practice in this scenario?

To avoid additional fields that serve the same purpose, I'd consider utilizing "Other" as the Shipping Carrier and the "custom" carriers in the Shipping Method field. This will also help avoid form customization.

Hi @Rich Keller thanks this is a good idea. I had thought of this too but it seemed silly to set the carrier to FedEx/other but then put carrier-service level in the ship method Also I haven’t found a way to import Shipping Items which is pretty annoying and makes setting up a hundred shipping methods pretty hard

Is the shipping item really that important when you're not responsible for it and it's just LTL/TTL? What would having a shipping item accomplish? The customer should be billed directly through their contract with the carrier, I'd imagine you're not even seeing it.

I think your suggesting to make one LTL shipping item to use regardless of carrier. Is that true? I think I’d still need at least 1 or 2 extra fields to let the shipping team know to bill collect and what the shipping account number for each customer is. Right?

You can import shipping items via webservices. Otherwise, depending on 1,000 other variables that we wouldn't know here about your exact operations, using a defaulted shipping item (default//inhouse/customer) and the associated carrier/method, sounds decent.

Thanks @mightyd3 do you mean like through Celigo data loader? Also yea it’s unfortunately not as simple as a default. For instance if the order can go parcel then the customer has a UPS account but if it goes LTL then they have a Old Dominion account But thanks for the advice on using web services Maybe I’ll just stick to the native fields and try to keep the list as consolidated as possible

Celigo data loader probably could import those.

We use shipmethod and have a script set it based on customer parameters. Yes, loading the shipping items I’d a pain