Run a sales-by-channel report in Linnworks and your marketplaces are beautifully separated — Amazon here, eBay there, your website in its own column. Then there is the other column: the undifferentiated lump where every manually entered order landed. Trade counter sales, phone orders, field rep orders, quotes-turned-orders — all mashed together, unattributable. The fix has been sitting in Linnworks all along: the source and sub-source fields. Here is how to use them properly.
Source and sub-source: what they are
Every Linnworks order carries two attribution fields. Source is the top-level channel — for channel orders it is set automatically (Amazon, eBay, your webstore's platform), which is why marketplace reporting works without you thinking about it. Sub-source is the level below — for channel orders, typically the specific account or site the order came from.
Manually entered orders get a generic direct-style source by default, and that is where attribution goes to die. The fields are not the problem — a manual order can carry whatever sub-source you like. The problem is that nothing forces you to set one, so nobody does, and every offline sale ends up wearing the same generic label.
Why the DIRECT lump costs you
It feels like a cosmetic annoyance until you try to answer real questions:
- Is the trade counter actually worth staffing? You cannot say, because counter revenue is fused with phone orders and everything else manual.
- Did the new field rep bring in business this quarter? Their orders are indistinguishable from the counter's.
- What is the margin profile of phone orders vs walk-ins? No idea. One lump.
- Which offline channel is growing? The lump is growing. Helpful.
For a trade-heavy business, offline can be a third or more of revenue — and it is precisely the part of the business where you are making active decisions (staffing a counter, hiring reps, taking phone lines) that deserve measurement. Marketplace channels measure themselves; your offline channels only get measured if you attribute them at entry.
Design a naming convention first
Sub-source values are free text, which means without a convention you will accumulate TRADE, Trade Counter, tradecounter and TC within a month, and your reports will split one channel four ways. Decide the scheme before anyone keys an order:
- Keep values short, uppercase and stable. TRADE-COUNTER, PHONE, REP-NORTH, REP-SOUTH, QUOTE. Uppercase-with-hyphens is easy to eyeball and hard to mistype.
- One value per real-world channel, not per person — unless the person IS the channel, as with field reps. If you need to know who took the order, record that in a dedicated field (more below), not by multiplying sub-sources.
- Write the list down where order-takers can see it, and review it quarterly. Adding a channel should be a decision, not an accident of spelling.
- Separate order-getting from order-type. A rep phoning in an order for their account is REP-NORTH, not PHONE — attribute to whoever owns the relationship, and keep the rule consistent.
Reporting by sub-source
Once orders carry clean sub-sources, the fused lump separates. Filter or group processed orders by sub-source and you get revenue, order counts and average order value per offline channel — trade counter vs phone vs each rep — over any period. Now the questions above have answers: the counter did X this month, rep orders have a higher average order value but lower frequency, phone volume is drifting down as regulars shift to the counter. These are the numbers that justify (or kill) staffing decisions. Remember when pulling recent numbers that newly processed orders take up to a day to appear in processed-order search, so run channel reports for periods ending yesterday, not today.
The real battle: capturing it at order entry
Here is the honest part: the convention is easy, the discipline is hard. Sub-source only works if it is set on every order at the moment of entry, and manual order entry in Linnworks — designed around ecommerce fulfilment, not fast counter sales — makes it one more field a busy person must remember while a customer waits. One skipped field and the order joins the lump forever; almost nobody goes back to re-attribute old orders.
The fix that actually sticks is structural: take orders through a flow where the sub-source is part of the setup, not a per-order chore. If counter staff use a dedicated counter tool, every order it submits can carry TRADE-COUNTER without anyone typing it. In Trade Order POS, sub-source is a first-class field on every order alongside the rest of the trade metadata — internal reference, customer PO number, delivery notes, and a "Placed by" field that records who took the order (which is how you track staff without polluting the sub-source list). Set it once as a default for the counter, override it when a rep order comes through, and attribution becomes automatic instead of aspirational. If auto-processing counter sales is part of your flow, the attribution rides along — see auto-processing counter sales in Linnworks.
Getting started this week
- List your real offline channels — counter, phone, each rep, anything else.
- Agree the sub-source value for each and pin the list up.
- Start stamping every new manual order. Do not bother back-filling history; clean data from today beats a re-attribution project.
- After a month, run your first sales-by-sub-source comparison and enjoy finally seeing your offline business in focus.
The honest summary
Linnworks gives you the fields; it just does not make you use them. A short, stable naming convention plus capture-at-entry turns the DIRECT lump into real channels you can report on and make decisions about. The discipline problem is best solved structurally — bake the sub-source into the order-taking tool rather than relying on busy humans to remember one more field.
Trade Order POS stamps sub-source, customer PO, internal reference and "Placed by" onto every counter and phone order it submits to Linnworks — attribution built in, not bolted on. Start your 14-day free trial at trade-pos.mcp-g.com.