Practical guide
What is van selling
Van selling is a sales model in which the goods travel in the vehicle together with the seller: the deal, the shipment and the payment all happen in the retail outlet in one call. The assortment is limited to what was loaded into the vehicle, and the vehicle itself is accounted for as a warehouse.
- SFA: field sales automation
- Warehouse Operations and Inventory Management
- Marked Goods & E-Invoicing
In detail
What separates the model from pre-selling is the order of events. Under pre-selling an employee collects the order and delivery goes on a separate run from the warehouse; under van selling the order, the shipment and the payment coincide in time and in place. Every other difference follows from that: the assortment, the documents, the employee’s role and the demands on accounting.
The model wins where a separate delivery run costs more than the deal itself: small retail, rare and distant outlets, a short shelf life, high visit frequency, a small average order. Where outlets are dense and orders are large, pre-selling is usually cheaper - the vehicle is not standing idle in the sales hall.
The price of the model is accounting. The vehicle becomes a warehouse with a balance of its own that changes at every outlet, and a discrepancy between that balance and the documents is only discovered on the return to base. So loading against a document, the write-off at the moment of sale, returns and cash collection are the critical parts of van selling.
The employee combines roles: selling, shipping, issuing the documents and taking the money, and each of those duties needs a control of its own. The vehicle’s limited assortment then becomes a limit on sales in its own right - an item that is not in it will not be in the order.
How it is applied
- The vehicle is loaded against a document from the warehouse, and its contents are kept as an accounting balance rather than as goods issued to an employee.
- The route is planned in advance, departures from the schedule are recorded by the system, and the arrival is confirmed by GPS location.
- In the outlet the order is taken against what is actually in the vehicle, with stock balances and that customer’s terms checked.
- Shipping, write-offs and internal warehouse transfers run through one perimeter, so a balance is assembled from source documents rather than reconciled between journals.
- For marked goods the codes reach the electronic invoice on shipment, and integration with required marking, fiscal and state systems is configured for the agreed country and project scope.
- At the end of the run the unsold balance returns to the warehouse on a movement document, and a discrepancy is worked through by item and by storage location.