How do we geographically lock customers to specific warehouse locations?

[SpookedKooks]

We sell stock to different regions from geo-specific warehouse locations... eg Australian warehouse sells/dispatches to Australian customers, and USA warehouse services USA orders.

But it appears that our USA customers are able to purchase stock from Australian warehouse and vice versa with Australian warehouse selling to USA. This is not workable for us as our items (surfboards) are extremely costly to ship internationally, so they must be sold and dispatched from domestic warehouse locations. 

How do we geo-lock customers from USA to only be able to buy from USA warehouse, and the same for all locations? 

Any help would be much appreciated 🙂

[JoesIdeas]

I've seen this problem solved by changing the location of the fulfillment order. So you can do something like this:

1) If order shipping address is from USA but the fulfillment order / location is assigned the Australian warehouse, click the 3 dots in the fulfillment order box to change the location to the USA warehouse

2) If you have an automated fulfillment service managing shipments that pulls from your order data instead of waiting for a Request Fulfillment button to get clicked on the order page, ask them to either implement the request fulfillment system or ask them to delay reading orders until you have time to edit the order.

You can use Order Automator app to automate the process of changing warehouse assignment in Shopify orders based on location, and also requesting fulfillment.

If you're referring instead to an action you want taken on the website (before the order is created), you could add some theme code to detect where the user is visiting from, and then show relevant information to them.

[SpookedKooks]

Hi Joel, 

Thanks for taking the time to reply, 

It seems that changing the location of the fulfilment post purchase might result in a customer ordering something out of stock which would still be an issue for us. 

Currently we have all of our locations set to local warehouse/fulfilment options. The issue is, if the local warehouse runs out of stock Shopify will allow a customer to buy a product from another warehouse showing stock, even if this warehouse is on the other side of the planet ... there does not seem to be an option to stop the purchase from happening through shopify. 

We did find this app, which may help us... we are looking into it now: https://inventory-info-demo.myshopify.com/

[Kalen_Jordan]

What order routing rules do you have set  up?

[SpookedKooks]

Hi Kalen,

Thanks for taking the time to reply, 

Currently we have all of our locations set to local warehouse/fulfilment options (see picture).
I see that the rule "Stay within the Destination Market" begins with "When available"... indicating that it's not a locked rule, just best practice guide. 

The issue is, if the local warehouse runs out of stock Shopify will allow a customer to buy a product from another warehouse showing stock, even if this warehouse is on the other side of the planet ... there does not seem to be an option to stop the purchase from happening through shopify. 

 

[Kalen_Jordan]

Looks like this might be a solution:
https://community.shopify.com/c/payments-shipping-and/prevent-shipping-from-locations-without-stock/...

[YOD_Solutions]

You can use our app JsRates to configure the shipping rate based on the warehouse locations and inventory - for example, no shipping rate for USA customers if the item is out of stock in USA warehouse, etc. If you keen, install the app and reach out to our support via "contact support" in the app. The app has a free demo plan - we will setup the rates for you.