What is Fulfillment?
In the simplest of terms Fulfillment is a promise that all parties involved in a Frequent Buyer Program will be rightly reimbursed the cost of a free good or discounted item. In a Distributor Fulfilled Program the Distributor you chose to enroll with is fulfilling that promise of reimbursement made by the Brand Manufacturer to you. In a Retailer Fulfilled Program you are responsible for securing that promise yourself.
Here at Astro we offer a couple of different fulfillment types to meet the needs of our manufacturers and retailers. Fulfillment types indicate how your credits will be reimbursed and who is responsible for ensuring the retailer gets their credits. Our two most common fulfillment types are Distributor Fulfilled and
Retailer Fulfilled.
Distributor Fulfilled
This is Astro’s most common fulfillment type and used for all Official Astro Frequent Buyer Programs. Under this fulfillment type the Manufacturer is who has promised to secure reimbursement for credits owed, and in most cases it is the distributor who is responsible for issuing credits to the retailer. You may also see a Direct Fulfillment option for some Official Frequent Buyer Programs where the Manufacturer is directly monitoring the fulfillment of their program.
Distributor fulfillment works like this
- Your customer comes in and redeems a free good and the cashier records that redemption in Astro.
- This free good is then automatically sent to your Distributor Free Goods Credit Status report and is now visible to your chosen distributor as a New Reward.
- Your distributor then can roll all of your pending New Rewards into Batch Reports and begin to review and compare them to your past invoices with them.
- Distributors checks these batches and issues credits weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly.
- Once a Distributor is finished reviewing a Batch Report they will Mark it as Fulfilled or Credited.
- You will then receive your credit automatically from your selected distributor for the redeemed good- this credit will appear on your next invoice, or it will be states in an email from your distributor, or it will arrive on a credit memo, or so on.
- You will be able to compare the credit memo sent to you by your distributor to your Credited Batch Report in Astro and Reconcile it. The act of Reconciling a Credited Report is your way of telling the Manufacturer that you received the credits the Distributor sent you and you are happy with them.
It’s that easy. As an added benefit you can check the status of your credits at any time by checking Distributor Free Goods Credit Status under Reports.