[Shopify] Multi-warehouse management
If you plan to ship from several Bigblue warehouses and to manage multiple geographies from one Shopify store, the multi-warehouse management feature will help you.
đź“š To manage multiple geographies from one store, Shopify recommends setting up multiple locations and using Markets, which is why we built this feature.
What is a Shopify location? A Shopify location is any physical place or app where brands sell products, ship or fulfill orders, and/or stock inventory. It can be managed from Shopify admin > Settings > Locations.
For more details, here is the Shopify Help Center article about locations.
In this article, see:
- What is multi-warehouse management?
- How to set up multi-warehouse management
- Frequently asked questions
What is multi-warehouse management?
The multi-warehouse management feature enables you to smoothen inventory and order management when using several Bigblue warehouses to fulfill orders from one Shopify store.
As you set up the multi-warehouse management feature, you associate Bigblue warehouses, Shopify locations and geographical zones in order to:
- Manage stocks:
- Each Bigblue warehouse pushes its inventory levels to the selected Shopify location
- On Shopify product pages, there is one inventory quantity line for each Shopify location, so that stocks in Bigblue Warehouse A and in Bigblue Warehouse B appear separately.
- Manage orders:
- Each Shopify order is pushed to a Bigblue warehouse depending on its destination country
- On Shopify, orders fulfilled by Bigblue Warehouse A are marked as fulfilled with Shopify Location A (named Bigblue Warehouse A in our example)
How to set up multi-warehouse management
Let’s sync the proper Bigblue warehouses to the desired Shopify locations and rout Shopify orders to Bigblue warehouses according to geographical zones 🚀
On Shopify:
- Go to Shopify Admin > Settings > Locations. Create one Shopify location for each Bigblue warehouse. For clarity, name your location after the corresponding Bigblue warehouse - e.g. Bigblue UK or UK warehouse if the location should be mapped to Bigblue's UK warehouse.
- For each location, add shipping rates in Shipping and deliveries. Each location should have its own shipping rates.
🚨 Keep or add the app location Bigblue Fulfillment in the shipping rates of each new location until your finalize multi-warehouse setup.
- Go to Markets and, for each market, review the shipping settings and the activation status.
On Bigblue:
🏠Please ask your point of contact to activate the desired warehouse. Otherwise, the new warehouse will not appear.
- Go to Shop integrations, select your store, go to Settings > Fulfillment.
💡 In this page, by default, there is a fulfillment zone called “All countries/regions” that should be linked to your default warehouse. This zone’s name changes into “Rest of world” as soon as you’ll create new zones.
- Click on “Add Zone” to start creating a specific zone.
đź’ˇ If you're fulfilling orders from two Bigblue warehouses, you should probably create one specific fulfillment zone for your "non-default" warehouse. If you're fulfilling orders from three Bigblue warehouses, you should probably create two fulfillment zones. And so on...
- In the "Edit zone" modal, complete each field:
- Selected countries: select the destination countries of orders in this “zone”
- Shopify location: select the Shopify location for order fulfillment and inventory sync
- Fulfillment warehouse: select the warehouse that will fulfill the orders from the selected countries and that will push its inventory to the selected Shopify location
- Ensure that the fulfillment zone called “Rest of the world” is linked to the desired Shopify location or click on edit to adjust it.
đź’ˇ It will now take maximum 10 minutes for your Bigblue inventories to appear on the new Shopify locations.
On Shopify:
- Go back to Shopify Admin > Settings > Shipping and delivery, remove the app location Bigblue Fulfillment from the shipping rates of your new Shopify locations.
- Go to Inventory and remove all inventory from the app location Bigblue Fulfillment.
💡 Bigblue is now connected to your new locations, it’s not connected to Bigblue Fulfillment anymore, hence it won’t push 0 to Bigblue Fulfillment. You should do it manually to keep clean and accurate inventory levels in Shopify.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I fulfill an order from another warehouse than the initially associated one?
Yes. Go to the Bigblue order page. If there is already a fulfillment, cancel it. Create the fulfillment from the desired warehouse. You’re all set!
If a long-term change is needed, follow the steps above to adjust the fulfillment zones in Bigblue.
How can I manage my markets on Shopify?
To understand how to manage markets on Shopify, you can read this Shopify Help Center article.
I have two Shopify stores, one for B2B and one for B2C, should I follow the whole setup process for each shop?
It depends:
- If one of the store needs to use multiple warehouses but not the other, then you should setup multi-warehouse management for this store only. For the store that uses only one warehouse, you can simply adjust warehouse in the default “All countries/regions” fulfillment zone.
- If both stores need to ship from multiple warehouses, then you should setup multi-warehouse management for both stores.
What happens on Shopify if I have no more stock in one warehouse (and hence in the corresponding Shopify location)?
As it did before multi-warehouse management setup, it depends on the option “sell without stock” on the Shopify product.
- If the option is ticked, then buyers can still buy the product.
- If the option is not ticked, then buyers can only buy the product if they benefit from Shopify shipping rates from a Shopify location that has stock — otherwise, let’s say there is no more stock in the location that serves the UK and the buyer orders from the UK, then buyer can’t buy the product.