How to Display Location-based Inventory in Shopify?

The Default Shopify Behavior

By default, Shopify displays and allows you to add to the cart the total sum of quantities available at all locations combined. This, in fact, creates a major problem.

Let’s say, for instance, you have two warehouses, one in the USA and the other one in Canada. The available product quantity for any specific product in both warehouses is 25 each, making a total of 50 considering both warehouses. Now, imagine a client from the USA is browsing your Shopify platform and coming across this product, that user will see 50 available quantities for the product even though 25 of that quantity lies somewhere in a different country.

This will result in the following disadvantages:

• Lack of transparency to the platform/app users about product location.
• Hectic/expensive for you to manage international shipments to fulfill orders.
• Chances of partial deliveries within the promised delivery time.
• High chances of delayed deliveries hampering customer experience.
• Risk of running Out of stock in a specific location to fulfill someone’s order.
• Difficult to manage inventory at a short notice.

Possible Welcome Cases for the Client

Depending on the business type or products you are selling, you might need some significant changes in the default behavior while developing a Shopify app solution.

• You are having your warehouses at different geo-locations which are far away from each other.
• You would want to display location-specific products quantities in the application frontend.
• You want to display the quantity based on some custom rules related to the customer’s geo-location.
• You want to reduce the Shipping cost while moving the products from one warehouse to another to fulfill any order.

Scenarios considered before displaying location-based product quantity

Suppose, we have a business of wooden furniture having warehouses in the USA, Canada, and Africa. On the storefront, we are displaying the total available quantities.

• The customer from Canada has placed the order of 40 chairs and 3 tables and we have 15 chairs available in the USA, 15 chairs available in Canada, and 15 chairs and 3 tables available in Africa. Now, none of the locations individually can fulfill the order and so we have to ship the products from every location which gets very costly and also delays the delivery.
• If the warehouse locations in the USA and Canada are much nearby and if the orders are placed from USA or Canada, we can fulfill the order from either of the USA and Canada locations. Suppose the order is placed for 25 chairs and we have 15 chairs available in the USA and 15 chairs available in Canada. In this case, it will be convenient to fulfill the order from the USA and Canada and not from Africa. So we can consider displaying the sum of available quantities of the USA and Canada only.
• When it comes to the bill of materials products, it gets costlier than the normal products. For example, You are selling tables as BOM products.1 table = 4 metal legs + 1 wooden top. Suppose any Canadian customer has placed an order of 10 tables and you have,
  • 12 legs and 6 tops available in Canada
  • 30 legs and 5 tops available in Africa,
  • No inventory available in the USA

A BOM product requires assembling efforts including the shipping charges. To fulfill this order you will have to ship the 28 legs and 4 tops from Africa to Canada which gets costlier.

The Initial Consultation: How the Things Got Started!

One of our clients came up with the above requirements to build a custom Shopify eCommerce application. The client was concerned about the cases mentioned above as he had multiple warehouses placed at distant locations and wanted to streamline the inventory/quantity issues in the eCommerce application front end.

The hired expert Shopify developers at Bytes Technolab closely collaborated with the client for a clear understanding of project objectives, business requirements, and laid out 360-degree consultation. A strategic roadmap was created and presented to the client to deliver a walk-through to the client to give him clear ideas of the project journey, milestones, deadlines, and deliverables.

This approach helped to build a sense of trust, transparency, amicability, and tech reliance between the Bytes Technolab dev team and the client.

Available Products Quantities w.r.t. Locations

To reduce the shipping costs, we can display the product quantities available in the nearest warehouse locations respectively. Suppose, if you have 15 chairs available in the USA warehouse location and 20 chairs in the Africa warehouse location, we are showing 15 chairs to the USA customer and 20 chairs to the African customer.

Conditional consideration while displaying location-based inventory

When we have warehouses in 2 different states and the order placed is from the city which is closer to the other state than its original state, then it is advisable to ship from the different state and not the native one.

For example, if we have warehouses in Toronto and Montreal and the order is placed from Ottawa, it is advisable to fulfill the order from Montreal than Toronto. Ottawa and Toronto are cities of Ontario state, while Montreal belongs to Quebec province that is not a part of Ontario. In spite of that Montreal is nearer to Ottawa geographically when compared to Toronto.

Hence, the quantity displayed will be depending on the quantity available at the warehouse in Montreal. Again, it depends on the other parameters just as distance, time, efforts, etc. to check the feasibility. The following example will clear your doubts.

Sum of desired locations

We added customization to display the sum of available quantities for specific locations. The cases when it is okay to ship from the nearby warehouse to fulfill the order can be summed up.

For example, the client’s warehouses are in Montreal (Canada) and Vermont (USA), and the order is placed from Vermont (USA). As Vermont is not too far from Montreal so we can ship from these two locations apparently and can fulfill the order.

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