Mirakl, Rithum, and DSCO are the three platforms that power dropship and marketplace programs for most major retailers. Mirakl runs retailer marketplaces like Macy’s Marketplace and Nordstrom Marketplace. Rithum (formerly CommerceHub) handles high-volume dropship for retailers like Kohl’s, Saks, and QVC. DSCO, a Rithum platform, is the API-first system behind Nordstrom’s dropship program.

One thing brands often get wrong: these aren’t competing options you choose between. The retailer picks the platform, and your job is to connect to whichever one your retailer uses — which is why growing brands often end up on two or all three at once. If a buyer at a major retailer wants to carry your brand without buying inventory upfront, one of these platforms is almost certainly involved. This guide breaks down how each one works, which retailers use which, how the order-to-cash workflow actually runs, and what returns look like in practice.

What Is Retailer Dropship?

Retailer dropship means your products appear on a retailer’s website — Macy’s, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, Saks, Carrefour, QVC — while you ship each order directly from your warehouse or 3PL. The retailer handles checkout, customer traffic, and payment. They collect payment from the customer, deduct their commission or marketplace fee, and pay you the net amount on their settlement schedule — which can run anywhere from weekly to net-60 depending on the retailer.

You get national exposure without the retailer taking inventory risk, and you keep control of stock, branding, and fulfillment. The tradeoff: every retailer enforces its own routing guides, label formats, EDI or API requirements, SLA targets, and compliance standards. That’s exactly what Mirakl, Rithum, and DSCO exist to manage. They handle:

• Order transmission from retailer to vendor
• Real-time inventory validation
• Shipment confirmations and tracking
• ASNs (Advance Ship Notices)
• Invoicing
• Returns
• Vendor scorecards and SLA enforcement

Mirakl, Rithum, and DSCO at a Glance

How Mirakl Works

Mirakl powers hundreds of retail marketplaces worldwide. When you sell through a Mirakl-powered retailer, the retailer publishes and approves your listings, pulls live inventory feeds from your system, sends approved orders to your order management system, validates tracking and ASNs, and processes invoices — all through Mirakl’s APIs.

Mirakl expects accurate, real-time data. Stale inventory feeds lead to oversells, and oversells lead to cancellations that hurt your seller score. Brands that connect Mirakl directly to their ERP inventory (see how the AIMS360 Mirakl integration works) avoid the most common failure mode: feeding Mirakl from a spreadsheet that’s already out of date.

How Rithum Works

Rithum — the company formed when CommerceHub and ChannelAdvisor merged — is the dropship backbone for many of the largest U.S. retailers: Kohl’s, Saks, QVC, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Meijer, Costco, Staples. It specializes in high-volume order routing, routing guide enforcement, strict packaging and ASN requirements, and financial validation of invoices.

Many Rithum retailers still run on traditional EDI — the 850 purchase order, 856 ASN, 810 invoice, and 846 inventory advice. That means EDI compliance is where brands win or lose on chargebacks. (New to these documents? The EDI software guide for apparel brands walks through the full bulk and dropship document flow.) A native EDI engine inside your ERP beats bolting a third-party EDI vendor onto a system that doesn’t understand apparel data. AIMS360 connects to Rithum retailers directly through its CommerceHub / Rithum integration, so required documents flow without SPS, DiCentral, or external mapping vendors in the middle.

How DSCO Works

DSCO is Rithum’s API-first platform, used heavily by premium fashion retailers — most notably Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack. DSCO focuses on real-time order ingestion, structured product catalogs, live inventory checks, automated tracking, and fast vendor onboarding.

Because DSCO is built around clean, structured data, apparel brands need their style, color, and size variants mapped correctly from day one. That’s the main reason fashion brands connect DSCO to an apparel-native system rather than a generic connector — the AIMS360 DSCO integration maps catalogs at the style/color/size level, which is how Nordstrom expects to see your data.

Which Retailers Use Which Platform?

Mirakl-powered retailers include Macy’s Marketplace, Nordstrom Marketplace, Bloomingdale’s, Kroger, Best Buy Canada, Hudson’s Bay, Anthropologie, ASOS, Carrefour, Decathlon, Galeries Lafayette, La Redoute, Maisons du Monde, Sarenza, Kiabi, B&Q, E.Leclerc, El Corte Inglés, Fnac Darty, home24, Vertbaudet, Worten, Secret Sales, Showroomprivé, Printemps, Rue du Commerce, and dozens more worldwide.

Rithum and DSCO retailers include Nordstrom and Nordstrom Rack (DSCO), Saks Fifth Avenue, Saks OFF 5TH, Kohl’s, QVC, Macy’s, The Home Depot, Lowe’s, Costco, Staples, Meijer, and Walgreens, with Amazon, Walmart, and Target supported through Rithum’s marketplace operations.

Notice the overlap: Macy’s and Nordstrom show up on both lists because their marketplace programs and their dropship programs run on different platforms. It’s common for a brand to end up connected to two or all three platforms as retailer relationships grow. AIMS360 maintains connections to individual retailers across all three — the full list is on the EDI retailers integration hub.

How the Dropship Workflow Runs, Step by Step

Here’s the end-to-end lifecycle of a single dropship order, whichever platform it comes through:

1. A customer buys on the retailer’s site. The shopper checks out on Macy’s, Nordstrom, Kohl’s, or any marketplace powered by Mirakl, Rithum, or DSCO.
2. The platform transmits the order to you. The validated order arrives via API or EDI 850 within minutes.
3. Your OMS imports it automatically. In an integrated setup, orders land in the order management system with no portal logins or CSV downloads.
4. Inventory is checked and reserved. Stock is validated by style, color, size, and prepack, then reserved against the shared pool that also serves wholesale and DTC.
5. A pick ticket goes to the warehouse or 3PL. The system routes fulfillment to your WMS or an integrated 3PL based on rules you set — channel, region, stock level, or margin.
6. The order ships to the retailer’s routing guide. Labels, packaging, and carrier requirements are applied per that retailer’s spec.
7. Tracking and the ASN go back instantly. The 856 or API confirmation hits Mirakl, Rithum, or DSCO within their SLA window — this is the step that prevents most chargebacks.
8. The invoice is generated and submitted. EDI 810, API, XML, or platform-native format, created automatically from the shipment.
9. Payouts, credits, and accounting reconcile. Marketplace payouts, commissions, and adjustments post to AR and sync to QuickBooks.

Run manually, that’s nine touchpoints per order across multiple portals. Run through an integrated ERP built for consumer brands, it’s zero-touch except for exceptions.

How Dropship Returns Actually Work

Returns in retailer dropship are stranger than DTC returns, and nobody warns you until the first pallet shows up:

1. The customer returns to the retailer, online or in-store, following the retailer’s policy — not yours.
2. The retailer consolidates returns into bulk shipments. You don’t get one package per return; you get cartons or pallets of mixed items.
3. Bulk returns arrive at your warehouse or 3PL, referenced against return authorizations.
4. Every item gets inspected individually. Your team flags customer damage, missing tags, wrong items returned, and clean resellable units.
5. Credits and disputes get sorted. Resellable items trigger credits; customer-fault or wrong-item returns become retailer disputes.
6. Inventory and AR update. Sellable units go back to available stock, damaged units to non-sellable buckets, and credit memos post to accounting.
7. You measure profitability after returns. Return rates by retailer and SKU tell you which dropship programs are actually worth the volume.

An ERP with built-in returns management keeps this from becoming a spreadsheet nightmare — inspection results, credits, and disputes all live against the original order.

Pros and Cons of Retailer Dropship

Why brands do it:

• Fast retailer onboarding. No inventory purchase means less risk for the buyer, so “yes” comes quicker.
• Massive exposure. Your products sit in front of millions of shoppers on retailer sites.
• DTC halo effect. Customers who discover you on Nordstrom often buy direct next time.
• One inventory pool. No pre-allocating stock to a retailer — the same units serve wholesale, DTC, and dropship until the moment they sell.

The honest downsides:

• Strict SLAs. Late ASNs and slow ship times mean chargebacks and scorecard damage.
• Bulk returns. Consolidated returns take real labor to inspect and reconcile.
• Thinner margins. Commissions and fees eat into each sale — the bet is that volume and exposure offset it.
• Multi-platform complexity. Each platform and each retailer has its own rules, and you’re expected to follow all of them.

The pattern across all four downsides: they’re operational problems, and operational problems are automatable.

Three Ways to Run Retailer Dropship

When brands set up dropship on Mirakl, Rithum, or DSCO, they generally pick one of three architectures:

A standalone portal is fine for a handful of test orders. Once a retailer program produces real volume, the daily download-print-rekey-upload cycle becomes the bottleneck, and the vendor-blame problem in the three-vendor setup gets expensive. That’s when brands consolidate onto an integrated system.

How AIMS360 Connects to All Three

AIMS360 is an ERP for apparel and consumer brands, and it maintains native connections to each platform — no middleware, no third-party EDI vendor, one support team. The same dropship setup runs for fashion, footwear, beauty, jewelry, outdoor, home, baby, and pet brands across the industries it serves:

• Mirakl integration — real-time inventory feeds, order import, ASN and invoice compliance for Mirakl-powered marketplaces
• Rithum / CommerceHub integration — full EDI document automation (850, 856, 810, 846) for Rithum retailers
• DSCO integration — apparel-native catalog mapping and real-time flows for Nordstrom and other DSCO retailers

Behind those connections sit the pieces this guide covered: omnichannel order management, warehouse management, 3PL integrations, AI-assisted automations for invoicing and allocation, and accounting with QuickBooks sync. The AIMS360 implementation team handles retailer testing, label setup, and mapping end to end — which is where most chargeback problems get prevented before they start — and dropship support is available around the clock, because a stuck order on a Saturday is still a chargeback on Monday.

One more thing that matters when dropship volume climbs: AIMS360 pricing is a flat monthly fee. No per-document charges, no per-transaction fees, no VAN fees, no kilocharacter fees — so a big sales month doesn’t come with a surprise bill from your EDI layer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Ready to Run Dropship Without the Manual Work?

If you’re selling — or about to sell — through Mirakl, Rithum, or DSCO retailers, the difference between a profitable channel and a chargeback machine is operational. Book a dropship demo and we’ll walk through your specific retailers, see how implementation works, or read customer stories from brands already running these programs.