Can I fulfill online orders from a third-party warehouse only?

[AmyGallagher]

Hi,

We are changing how our stock is fulfilled physically, we will now use a 3rd party courier who will keep 3 weeks sales of our stock in their warehouse, fulfilling and despatching all online orders from there.

We will also have a storage warehouse which will be managed by the company and will feed stock into the 3rd party warehouse weekly.

I know I can set up multiple locations so all stock is visible on our website but I only want to fulfil from the 3rd party warehouse as we will backfill the stock from our storage warehouse. Is this an option that can be done?

TIA

[kingstore]

Within Shopify you can use Transfers to move inventory between your two locations holding product. This can only be accomplished using actual locations and isn't meant to work with Shopify custom fulfillment locations. The workflow for transfers is also only done within Shopify admin without barcoding. 

For a good solution to this, you can utilize SKUSavvy which is a Shopify WMS that will include everything needed to host both your inventory values and can be connected to a 3PL via API. This will coordinate cross-docking workflows for you to move inventory over to your 3PL provider, and as they update orders and inventory into Shopify, this information will be synced back to SKUSavvy.