What is Consignee?
A consignee is a person or an entity who receives a product and verifies it from its seller. Customers and retailers are generally considered consignees, but the term encompasses everyone who shares the responsibility of receiving and verifying a product. Therefore, it also includes intermediate shipping mediators, warehousing units, and service-based brands that partner with a shipping company.
Significance of Consignee in an E-commerce Shipping and Delivery
As the receivers and verifiers of a product, a consignee is responsible for acknowledging the entire delivery cycle or an intermediate shipping cycle. They play a significant role in e-commerce shipping; some are listed below.
- End-to-end verification: At the end of an intermediate shipping cycle, a personnel or a company is involved to acknowledge the delivery of the unharmed products. These intermediate consignees usually verify cases such as product misplacement or product damage.
- Tracking and transparency: Intermediate consignees lay a decisive role, as they are the ones who track the product in between the intermediate shipping cycles while updating a report in a centralized system, enabling everyone to track products during transit.
Prerequisites of Consignee and How It Works
There are no such requirements for a consignee except for placing an agreement with a merchant. Apart from that, the steps below underline how a consignee works.
- Initial order: A customer or the future consignee gets products from a specific seller and requests its delivery to a particular location.
- Intermediate verification: Appointed personnel or companies take up the mantle of a consignee by verifying the delivery of the product before redirecting them to succeeding shipping cycles.
Use Case With Consignee
Some use cases of a consignee are as follows.
- A customer receives and accepts a pair of jeans they ordered previously with an international brand.
- A warehouse manager acknowledges the delivery of 150 self-tanning kits and schedules them for last-mile delivery.