Patent ID: 8266069

Claim:
An apparatus, comprising: an order fulfillment server device including an interactive hierarchical inbound shipment order configuration tool adapted to receive input from merchants to configure hierarchical inbound shipment orders corresponding with hierarchical inbound shipments respectively for a set of one or more warehouses, wherein each of the hierarchical inbound shipment orders has a plurality of levels including a product level and a plurality of container levels, and wherein the tool is adapted to configure hierarchical inbound shipment orders at least by: inclusion of, via receipt of merchant input, product type objects in the product level, wherein each product type object represents a physical product type, inclusion of, via receipt of merchant input, container objects in each of the plurality of container levels, wherein each container object represents a set of one or more physical containers, creation of, via receipt of merchant input, associations between the product type objects and the container objects, wherein each association between one of the product type objects and one of the container objects represents an amount of the physical product type per the set of physical containers represented by that product type object and that container object respectively, creation of, via receipt of merchant input, associations between the container objects of a lower level of the hierarchical inbound shipment order and container objects of a higher level of the hierarchical inbound shipment order, wherein each association between one of the container objects of the lower level and one of the container objects of the higher level represents an amount of the set of physical containers of the lower level of the hierarchical inbound shipment per the set of physical containers of the higher level of the hierarchical inbound shipment, and provision of, via receipt of merchant input an indication of different ones of the container objects as representing shippable container packages, wherein each shippable container package is a physical container that will potentially be shipped to a customer without a modification of the contents of that physical container; and the order fulfillment server device further including a packing list generation module adapted to generate at least one packing list from the configured hierarchical inbound shipment orders for each of the hierarchical inbound shipments, each of the at least one packing lists including a listing of one or more of the shippable container packages in its hierarchical inbound shipment.