A shipment consists of one or more packages and describes all packages that are sent together in one shipment to the recipient. The sender as well as the recipient can be a private person or a company. A postal or logistics service provider is usually responsible for the actual shipping of the shipment.

If an order is to be processed in the warehouse, the (individual) goods are picked and processed as a whole. In the process, several orders can be combined by the WMS into one shipment even before picking starts. A delivery note is usually enclosed in the shipment. Packed at the outgoing goods, the consignment is now handed over to the transport service provider. The arrival of the delivery can either be announced by data notification (advanced shipping note) or the recipient must do this manually (without advanced shipping note).