Asda Integration – Feature & Process Guide
Asda is a drop-ship vendor (DSV) channel, not a Mirakl marketplace. Asda owns the product listing on its George.com storefront and the customer relationship end-to-end; the seller's role is limited to receiving purchase orders and fulfilling them, either by shipping to the customer's home or by delivering to an Asda store for Click & Collect. There is no product or offer catalogue to manage on this channel — it is purely an order lifecycle and stock-feed integration, with orders, acknowledgements, shipments and cancellations exchanged as files rather than through a live request/response API, and no confirmation is sent back by Asda once a file is uploaded successfully.
Carrier labelling and manifesting for most shipments runs through Metapack, a separate courier-management step outside Pentagon Connect. Click & Collect orders are the one exception: they are always routed through Asda's own "toyou" in-store collection service regardless of what carrier logic would otherwise apply.
Quick Reference
Product Management
| Capability | Supported | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Create new products / listings | No | Asda owns the product listing on George.com; sellers cannot create or manage listings through this channel |
| Update product content (title, description, images, attributes) | No | Not applicable — there is no catalogue flow |
| Deactivate / remove a listing | No | Listing lifecycle is entirely controlled by Asda |
Pricing & Stock
| Capability | Supported | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Price updates | No | Asda sets and owns pricing on George.com; there is no price feed from the seller |
| Stock / quantity updates | Yes, optional | A stock feed can be sent, but whether it's used is controlled by Asda per seller, not mandatory |
Orders & Fulfilment
| Capability | Supported | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic order import | Yes | Asda sends a purchase order the moment a customer buys on George.com; one order per file |
| Order acknowledgement | Yes, full acceptance only | Every received order must be acknowledged in full — no partial acceptance or rejection is possible at this step |
| Ship orders (tracking + mark shipped) | Yes | Includes courier and tracking reference |
| Partial shipment | Yes | An order can be shipped across multiple dispatch messages, as long as every unit is eventually shipped or cancelled |
| Home delivery | Yes | |
| Click & Collect | Yes | Customer collects from a named Asda store; always shipped via the "toyou" service |
Refunds, Returns, Cancellations & Claims
| Capability | Supported | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-shipment cancellation | Yes | Full order or full individual lines only |
| Post-shipment cancellation | No | Not permitted once an order has shipped |
| Partial-quantity cancellation on a line | No | A line can only be cancelled in full, not partially |
| Shipping-cost refund | No | Cannot be communicated to Asda; treated as complete on our side only |
| Returns | No | No return flow exists for this channel |
| Claims / incidents | No | No claims mechanism is documented for this channel |
Product Management
Creating products
Not applicable. Asda owns and manages the product listing on George.com; sellers do not create products or listings through this integration.
Updating products
Not applicable, for the same reason — there is no product content, pricing or offer flow to update on this channel.
Deactivating / removing products
Not applicable. Listing lifecycle (adding, changing or removing an item from sale on George.com) sits entirely with Asda.
Pricing & Stock Sync
Pricing is not exchanged on this channel — Asda sets and controls the price customers see on George.com. A stock (inventory) feed can be sent from the seller showing quantity available, but it is optional and Asda decides per seller whether it's used. The feed always reports available stock net of anything already allocated to open orders; it does not separately report quantity currently on order.
Order Management
Getting orders
Orders arrive automatically: Asda sends a purchase order as soon as a customer buys the item on George.com. One order is expected per file, and Asda does not amend an order after it's issued — any change to the ordered quantity is handled later through a cancellation, not an edit to the original order.
Every order carries a fulfilment type of either Home Delivery (ship to the customer's address) or Click & Collect (customer collects from a named Asda store).
Order information we store
For every order, Pentagon Connect stores:
- Marketplace order ID and Asda's customer-facing order number
- Order created date, requested ship-by date, and promised delivery date
- Order (fulfilment) type — Home Delivery or Click & Collect
- Delivery address (or collection store, for Click & Collect) and customer phone number
- Per line item: quantity, line number, item price, shipping cost, SKU, and EAN/barcode where available
SKU is frequently missing on the order as received from Asda. When that happens, Pentagon Connect falls back to matching by EAN, then by Asda's own item ID against an existing listing; if neither resolves, the order is still stored but flagged as incomplete rather than lost.
Shipping orders
Once an order is ready, Pentagon Connect sends a dispatch notice with the courier and tracking reference. Multiple dispatch notices can be sent against a single order to cover partial shipments, and between shipments and cancellations every ordered unit needs to end up accounted for — nothing should be left neither shipped nor cancelled.
Day-to-day carrier labelling and manifesting for shipments is done through Metapack, a separate courier-management portal outside Pentagon Connect: orders are imported and allocated to a carrier service, labels are printed, and the batch is manifested to the courier for collection.
Click & Collect orders are handled differently — they always report the courier as "toyou" (Asda's in-store collection service) with a toyou tracking link, regardless of normal carrier logic.
Cancellations
Cancellations can only be made before an order has shipped — once shipped, an order can no longer be cancelled through this channel. A cancellation can cover a whole order or specific lines within it, but only in full: there's no way to cancel part of a line's quantity, only the whole line.
No specific cancellation reason codes are documented for this channel.
Refunds & returns
There is no returns flow for this channel — Asda's source material is explicit that returns aren't managed through this integration. A refund of the product itself is only possible pre-shipment, via the cancellation mechanism above. Refunding shipping charges specifically cannot be communicated to Asda at all; any such refund is recorded as complete on our side only, with no message sent to Asda.
Claims / incidents
Not documented in the current source material — no claims or incident mechanism is described for this channel.
Carriers Supported
No fixed, named carrier list is documented for this channel. Home Delivery shipments are typically labelled and manifested through Metapack, which routes to whichever carrier service is allocated to the order in the Metapack portal, so the effective carrier list depends on what's configured there rather than a set Pentagon Connect maintains. Click & Collect orders are the one fixed case: they always go through Asda's own "toyou" service.
Known Limitations
- No product or pricing flow — Asda owns the George.com listing and price; this channel is orders and stock only.
- Orders can't be amended by Asda after being sent — any change comes later as a cancellation, not an update to the original order.
- Order acknowledgement must be full acceptance — partial acceptance or rejection at the acknowledgement stage isn't supported.
- No post-shipment cancellation.
- No partial-quantity cancellation on a line — only whole lines or whole orders.
- Shipping-cost refunds can't be communicated to Asda.
- No returns flow for this channel.
- No claims/incidents mechanism documented for this channel.
- Stock feed is optional and controlled by Asda, not guaranteed to be in use for every seller.
- SKU is often missing on incoming orders and is resolved via fallback matching, which can occasionally leave an order incomplete if no match is found.
- No live confirmation from Asda on acknowledgements, shipments, cancellations or stock updates — each is treated as successful once sent, so problems only surface if something fails on our side or is queried by Asda later.
- Orders left neither shipped nor cancelled are not currently auto-resolved after any time threshold — this has been flagged as a possible future improvement but isn't built.
Source Materials
This guide was built from Asda's DSV integration and onboarding documentation, Pentagon Connect's internal implementation scope for the Asda channel, and the Metapack carrier-management guide.