fulfillment based on country using locations

[fschaal]

Hi,

I'm trying to set up the following scenario but can't figure out what would be the best approach to set this up in Shopify.

• There is currently one online shop for US and EU.
• The US warehouse and the EU warehouse both have their own stock.
• The US warehouse only fulfills orders that are for the US and Canada but the EU warehouse fulfills all EU orders. 

I've been reading through the documentation regarding Shopify locations and that seems to be almost perfect. The only thing that seems to be missing is that you can not assign orders based on country to a specific location. As far as I can see this is only priority based. Working without location-based stock would mean that we have global stock and cannot show accurate if a product is available in the EU for example.

The quick-fix seems to be to create a US store and an EU store but I was wondering if there is anything possible to achieve this in one store?

Thanks!

[Paul78]

I hope there is a solution for this, as I am looking for the same thing.  I have stock in Canadian fulfillment centers and separate stock in US fulfillment centers, and would like each order sent to the respective fulfillment center based on the customers location.  There must be an easier way than setting up two separate stores.

[antoinelescun]

Did you find a solution?

[Paul78]

No, seems like it should be easy to do.

[horsti2010]

Hi everyone,

Has by any chance anyone an update on this issue?

We are a German-based merchant and stuck in a similar situation. We sell exactly one single product to Germany (DE) and Austria (AT) and we also have two warehouses run by external fulfilment providers, one per country. Both warehouses are connected from Shopify to the provider separately and successfully. But this setup obviously means we need to trigger the correct connection, meaning the correct warehouse (DE or AT), based on the customers shipping address/country.

But I have not come across any option to specify the warehouse depending on the country given by the customer. The locations function in Shopify does not help as it only allows prioritisation of warehouses and automatic selection based on the available quantity. What is absolutely missing is the option to link one (or multiple) warehouses to a country to which shipping is offered. And that is a scenario that is highly common, because a dedicated warehouse per country saves you money in terms of shipping costs, etc..

For me, the only options we have are these:

1. Only use one fulfilment provider that is used to sell to all countries we offer -> Costly as you must pay abroad shipping costs
2. Copy the existing shop to have two separate instances, one for DE and one for AT -> Costly (two shop subscriptions needed) AND additional administration workload to keep both instances updated regularly
3. Create two instances of the same product and restrict shipping per product to DE for the one, and AT for the other product. And then ask the customer “somehow” before s/he enters the product/checkout page in which country s/he wants the product to be shipped to (DE or AT) à Very inconvenient for customers and it will likely produce many dropouts.

So, as none of the options are really options, our question remains: How to solve this in Shopify by linking a warehouse based on the shipping address (country) given by the customer during checkout?

I also searched for an app that adds this functionality but could not find any. Does anyone know such an app or any other solution?

Thanks and regards

[jasperking]

Not adding any new information to the thread so I apologize.

But I just wanted to +1 on this requested functionality. Allowing Shopify Locations to prioritize fulfilling orders based on customer location instead of just inventory levels/static priority order would solve so many issues for stores that commonly sell in multiple countries/regions.

That being said, is setting up multiple stores on separate/sub domains for different countries still considered "best practice" within the Shopify framework? If so, that would require so much manual configuring, and be a lot of work to maintain. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[Paul78]

I can provide an update to what I have discovered while trying to find a solution to multi-country fulfillment, as it has opened up a huge can of worms and a lot of manual work to set up.

I have proceeded to set up a shop-ca and shop-us subsomain to create 2 separate Shopify stores. One is connected to US fullfillment, the other to Canada fullfillment. This was straight forward and not that difficult to duplicate stores using the Replay app. But all the connections to Shopify now become very difficult:

1) I use Drip for email marketing. Drip can only connect to a single Shopify store. I am supposed to create a second Drip account and manage 2 separate email lists, which I don’t want to do. So I am in the process of using Zapier to connect both Shopify sites to my single Drip account.

2) Google Merchant Center for Google Shopping Ads can only connect to one Shopify site. I am in the process of setting up a multi-channel account with Google, which creates two sub-accounts, one for each site.

3) FB Business Manager only connects to one Shopify store. I would have to create a second FB Business Manager account, which requires a separate FB Page. This is a show stopper, since it affects customer experience by having to use a Canada FB Page versus a US FB Page. I haven’t determined how to address this roadblock yet. I may not need to, except for point 4.

4) Shopify Ping only connects to one FB Business account. Although I have Apple Business Chat set up on both sites, I am only able to receive messages from one of the sites since Ping is only connected to one. I also cannot connect FB Messenger to both sites. If I sacrifice FB Messenger and Apple Business Chat, I can probably make 2 sites. But it is unfortunate I cannot use these capabilities with 2 sites.

5) I haven’t got this far yet, but I imagine setting up Google Tag Manager and Data Studio will be double the work for both sites.

In my mind, a simple IF statement in Shopify based on the customer’s shipping address to select the fulfillment Center would allow me to use a single site and eliminate the issues above.

If I have missed something or there is an easier way to get around these roadblocks, please let me know.

[jasperking]

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@Paul78 wrote:

In my mind, a simple IF statement in Shopify based on the customer’s shipping address to select the fulfillment Center would allow me to use a single site and eliminate the issues above.

If I have missed something or there is an easier way to get around these roadblocks, please let me know.

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Hey Paul78, thanks for the reply and sharing your experience in dealing with this issue. I am sort of confused about what you wrote here. If you are using 2 separate Shopify stores (one for US and one for Canada) - each store would have its own fulfillment centers list, and so, couldn't you just map the correct fulfillment center to the corresponding store?

I could be wrong, but I believe selecting/prioritizing a specific fulfillment store is more for when you have multiple fulfillment centers in a SINGLE shopify store. But to continue off your thought on selecting the proper fulfillment center -- according to Shopifys docs, it seems your Shopify store auto selects a fulfillment center based on your store's set "priority list" (which is static, btw) and inventory levels (I couldn't find an answer to selecting a fulfillment center based on customer location).

I don't know if you can directly select a fulfillment center by hard coding it in your checkout.liquid. If you do manage to do it, however, could you update me on your findings? Thanks so much.

Cheers.

[jasperking]

^ Edit: I'm sorry I can't read apparently.

I see now that you mean to use a proper fulfillment center list for the purposes of using a single site.

Still, I couldn't find an answer in the forums as to set the priority based on customer location. But if you do find an answer (or workaround), please do share. Thanks again.

[mccaly]

Hi @fschaal ,

1) If you don't need to offer EU and US customers different shipping options / prices AND you are using the same fulfillment company for the EU and the US you could simply use one store for both, send the order to the FC and let them sort out which location should fulfill the order based on shipping address. 

2) Two separate stores (as you stated) - a bunch of our clients use this method successfully. However, they use 2 separate fulfillment companies (one in the US, on in the EU) so couldn't use option 1.