The EDI 846 is the inventory feed — your sellable positions, transmitted to partners who sell what they can see. In dropship and distribution programs it's not a nice-to-have; it is the program. No current 846, no orderable items, no orders.
The business logic: selling against remote inventory
Three kinds of partners run on your 846:
Dropship retailers. Chewy, Wayfair, and every e-commerce dropship program list your products, take the customer's money, and send you the order to ship. They can only safely sell what your last 846 said you had. Stale data cuts both ways: report too little and listings get suppressed; report too much and you're canceling customer orders — which dropship SLAs penalize hard.
Distributors. KeHE and UNFI replenish based on your availability across their DC network. Their rule is blunt: stale 846 data suspends items. An item that isn't orderable in the distributor's system might as well not exist, and buyers don't chase suppliers for stock data.
Industrial channels. Grainger quotes your availability to its customers in real time. Your 846 feed is effectively their promise-date engine — oversells get charged back against you.
What's inside an 846
The document is structurally simple — that's the point. LIN identifies the item (UPC, GTIN, partner item number, all cross-referenced), QTY carries the positions. The subtleties are in the quantity types: on-hand versus available-to-sell, on-order with dates, discontinued flags. Programs differ on which they want. Available-to-sell is the one that prevents oversells: on-hand minus allocations, safety stock, and anything already promised. Reporting raw on-hand to a dropship partner is how you sell the same unit twice.
Multi-warehouse programs add a location dimension — positions per DC, so the partner routes orders to the warehouse that can actually fill them.
Cadence is the contract
Every 846 program specifies a rhythm: daily at minimum, hourly or better for serious dropship volume. Treat the cadence as a hard SLA with monitoring, because a silently broken inventory feed is invisible until the damage is done — a week of suppressed listings looks exactly like a week of soft demand unless something is watching the feed.
The operational failure pattern is always the same: the feed was built as a scheduled export, the export broke or went stale, nobody noticed. The fix is the same as for every other document in this series: generate the 846 from live system data, on schedule, with the platform alerting when a scheduled feed doesn't go out.
Where the 846 meets the rest of the chain
Inventory feeds and order flow are one loop. The partner sells against your 846, sends an 850 purchase order, and expects the 856 ship notice with tracking — for dropship, that tracking number drives the end-customer's shipping email, so speed and accuracy are customer experience, not back-office hygiene. Then the 810 invoice settles it. Break the 846 and the whole loop starves.
EDISQ generates 846s from your connected system — NetSuite, Shopify, your WMS — applies each program's quantity-type and cadence rules from the certified map, and monitors the schedule so a missed feed pages the platform, not your customer. Setup is self-serve, and the pricing ladder treats an 846 like any other document: first 25 each month free, then from $0.50, decreasing with volume.
If a partner just asked you for "an inventory feed," check their page in the trading partner directory — the cadence and quantity-type expectations that matter are listed per partner.
FAQ
Who needs to send 846s?
Anyone whose partner sells against remote inventory: dropship vendors for e-commerce programs, suppliers to distributors like KeHE and UNFI, and industrial suppliers whose availability is quoted to end customers, like Grainger's.
How often should the 846 be sent?
Whatever cadence the program specifies — daily is the floor, and dropship programs like Chewy's expect multiple feeds per day. The real rule: send it often enough that the partner never sells what you don't have.
What happens if my 846 goes stale?
Two failure modes: the partner suppresses your listings (lost sales), or the partner sells inventory you no longer have (oversells, cancellations, and SLA penalties charged to you).
What does sending 846s cost with EDISQ?
Per document only: first 25/month free, then from $0.50, decreasing with volume. One 846 feed transmission is one document, regardless of SKU count.