Help! - Local Pickup at Multiple Locations with One Central Warehouse Location for ALL Inventory

JRogers410
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Help!

We have 4 coffee shops and an online store primarily selling coffee beans. We handle all inventory and fulfillment in our central warehouse, and in order to defray prohibitive shipping costs for local customers, would like to enable them to pick up an online order at one of our 4 physical shops. We stock and distribute other products to our shops from the warehouse as well; it would be relatively easy to simply package online orders at the warehouse and  include them in our existing deliveries to each designated shop 2 or 3 times/ week for free customer pickup.

However, we cannot physically keep online store inventory at each of 4 stores and fulfill from each; this would be far more complex/costly. Our fulfillment resources are at the warehouse, and we’d need to hold and redistribute far more inventory (which has a short shelf life), and Shopify seems to require independent inventory at each location. We have considered simply setting each shop’s inventory to 0, and enabling ‘oversell’, for the warehouse; however, this would require manually decrementing inventory for each order. Furthermore, if we truly ‘oversell’, our supplier’s processing / packaging time far exceeds our existing 2-day turnaround.

We have been trying to approach this from multiple angles:

- Shopify pickup option for multiple locations (above issues).

- Only Shopify: enabling local pickup from our warehouse location, and finding a way to allow customers to select one of our 4 actual pickup locations from a drop-down somewhere (?) but we’ve been told that we can’t edit or add anything to the checkout form.

- Finding a way to back into what we need using Shopify’s ‘delivery’ option; no luck as of yet.

- Multiple third party apps, e.g. pickup, delivery, inventory… none of which seem to fit the bill.

In summary, we’re desperately seeking a way to maintain a central inventory while enabling customers to select any one of 4 pickup locations. We’re hitting the proverbial wall on this, and are surprised; it doesn’t feel like this would be unique/niche functionality. We’re relatively small, but many national online retailers allow customers to allow local in-store pickup? Have any of you successfully dealt with this issue, something similar, or happen to have any ideas? Are there any other third party app recommendations? We would welcome any and all ideas and are happy to provide additional clarification as useful. Much appreciated, and thanks in advance! 

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