The moment you add dropship to wholesale and direct-to-consumer, one number has to be right in several places at once. Where brands get hurt is not the integration. It is having more than one version of what is available to sell.
Dsco, now part of Rithum after the CommerceHub merger, is the platform several major retailers use to run their dropship programmes. Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Saks Off 5th, Kohl's and Zappos among them.
Mechanically it sits between you and the retailer. You send catalog and inventory into Dsco. Retailers pull that availability. When a customer orders, the retailer sends a purchase order back through Dsco to you, and you return shipment confirmation with tracking, then an invoice. Dsco measures your performance against the delivery date on each order and flags every one that misses.
Two details catch brands out. Every SKU on an order must already exist in Dsco or the purchase order is rejected outright. And orders can be placed for out-of-stock items, which means a stale inventory feed does not just cost you a sale, it creates a commitment you cannot meet.
A single unit of a style in size medium can be promised to a wholesale order, shown as available on your own site, and published to a dropship retailer at the same time. Only one of them can have it.
This is not a dropship problem specifically. It is what happens when each channel reads from a different source. The wholesale allocation lives in the ERP, the website reads a Shopify inventory number, and the dropship feed is generated from an export somebody scheduled months ago. All three are technically working. They just disagree.
The symptoms are recognisable. Oversells on the retailer's site, which damage your scorecard and sometimes your programme standing. Cancellations you have to explain. Safety stock buffers that grow every time someone gets burned, quietly reducing what you can actually sell. And a weekly ritual where somebody reconciles three numbers by hand.
Most inventory platforms think in SKUs. Apparel thinks in style, colour and size, with prepacks and assortments layered on top. A dropship feed that flattens your matrix into individual SKUs will drift, because the mapping has to be maintained by hand every time you add a colourway. Ask specifically how style, colour, size and prepack structures survive the trip into the dropship platform.
Log into Dsco, upload inventory, download orders, key them into your system, upload tracking. Works at low volume and needs no integration project. Breaks the moment volume rises or you add a second dropship retailer, because it is entirely manual and the feed is only as current as the last upload.
A connector platform sits between your ERP or ecommerce system and Dsco, moving data both ways. Pre-built, quick to go live, and vendor-agnostic if you later change ERP. The costs are a further subscription, another vendor in the chain, and a sync interval, which means your availability is accurate as of the last run rather than right now.
The ERP connects to the dropship platform directly and serves availability from the same pool that feeds wholesale and DTC. Removes the sync interval and the extra vendor, and keeps one system of record. The constraint is that few apparel ERPs offer it, and it ties you to that vendor's roadmap for the connection.
Among apparel systems, AIMS360 publishes native connections to Dsco, Rithum and Mirakl. Most apparel ERPs currently route dropship through middleware or a portal, so it is worth asking directly rather than assuming, and worth asking which retailers are live today rather than which are technically supported.
The last one is the question most worth asking early. Brands that build a one-off connection for their first dropship account usually rebuild it for the second.
We map where your inventory truth actually lives, what it takes to publish it accurately, and whether your current systems can carry it. If the answer is that your existing setup is fine, we will say so.
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