Orders and fulfillment

The central concept within OrderCloud.io is (not surprisingly) the Order. This is where Buyers, Sellers, Products, Addresses, and just about everything else come together to form business transactions. A feature that is somewhat unique to this area of the API is that you'll use the same set of endpoints regardless of whether you're a Buyer, Seller, or Supplier. What's important is the order *direction*, which is either incoming or outgoing. Order IDs are guaranteed unique within that context. As a seller, this means you can aggregate lists of incoming orders from many Buyers, or outgoing orders to many Suppliers. You may filter a list by Buyer or Supplier, but it's not required to uniquely identify an Order. (Buyers typically only deal with outgoing Orders; Suppliers with incoming.) Buyers add Line Items to Orders by specifying a Product, Quantity, and (optionally) Spec values. Shipping is applied at either the Order level or Line Item level. Shipments are independent of Orders; you can ship a partial Order, or aggregate items from multiple Orders onto a single Shipment.