Limit inventory (and stock display) to the location (warehouse) assigned to country (shipping zone)

[polygonwindow]

Hi community,

I have following problem that I cannot solve. We have the following setup:

–––

Markets

I have 3 Markets setup:

1. CH Market: That covers Switzerland and Liechtenstein
2. EU Market: That covers the European Union, e.g. Germany, France, Spain, Italy and so on...
3. International Market: That covers United States, UK, Latin America, Asia and so on... (not sure which countries finally).

Here the setup:

Locations

We have two locations that act as warehouses for deliveries for online orders. They each have individual stock of the products we sell online. Both warehouses stock the same product items.

1. Zurich: Only ships to Switzerland and Liechtenstein
2. Berlin: Ships to all the other countries in the EU and in Internationl market

Shipping Profile and Zones

I set up the general shipping profile with 2 locations and 3 zones

And the zones look like:

 

 

Just as a note: The configuration is not final, yet. I'm still setting things up.

Geolocation

I have the Geolocation App installed where the user chooses his "country" when accessing the shop.

–––

Now, to the problems. Lets take following "Product B" for example with following inventory:

#1 Stock Display

When a user selected France – where only the Berlin Location ships to – I want to display the user the stock available in the Berlin warehouse.

I added a custom liquid block that displays the stock available

{% assign current_variant = product.selected_or_first_available_variant %}
<div class="inventoryNote form__label">
{% if current_variant.available %}
{% if current_variant.inventory_quantity > 0 %}We have {{ current_variant.inventory_quantity }} in stock
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
</div>

This works but displays the combined inventory from Berlin and Zurich, in the case of "Product B" its the amount of 3 (but it should be 9 at this point).

#2 Ordering Products

If a user selects Switzerland as his current country and also ships to switzerland, he can now do this for "Product B" even though there is no Stock in Zurich for this product – e.g. the inventory goes to minus in Zurich. But we do not want to fulfill the order from two locations...

Notes:

• When there is not enough stock in Berlin and Zurich the order is not possible right now, which is correct
• When the stock goes to 0 for Berlin and Zurich combined, the product is displayed as out-of-stock, which is correct

#3 Shipping country

If a user selects France as his country, we want that the user to only be able to select France as his shipping country in the checkout.

So, I'm stuck with these Problems, Problem #1 and #2 are importan, #3 not so much. I really tried a lot and researched but cannot figure it out. Do I need an app for this or did I configure things wrong?

Thanks so much for any help.

[matiasricci]

I've experienced that exact same problem for years now. The Shopify Team told us we needed to upgrade to Plus, which we did last week. Now we are still experiencing the same issues, we're getting no support at all, and we're stuck into a $24k/year contract.

Quick example of muy problem:
Location A fulfills US & Canada (Market A) only > product X is in stock in that location
Location B fulfills European countries (Market B) only > product X is out of stock in that location
A customer from a European country will see the product X in stock, and will even be allowed to complete checkout, ignoring that there's no stock in that location.

This is leading us to oversell. Shopify seems to be aware of this problem because they've launched this feature > https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/markets/inventory_and_fulfillment. But it's only for selected merchants and we're not one of them.

There's another thread about this topic: https://community.shopify.com/c/international-commerce/inventory-and-fulfillment-with-markets/m-p/19...

[polygonwindow]

Hi Matiasricci, thanks so much. Sorry to hear that you went for Shopify Plus due to this issue without solving the issue for you, that s.cks. Ok, it really seems that is a "bigger issue" with shopify. I also posted this to support but I did not get any answers (yet). This is really a bit dissapointing altogether, for us, this is a pretty crucial feature. On Reddit somebody recommended looking into an orfder management system like https://orderbot.com/ but I did not do that yet.

Regarding this Link

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/markets/inventory_and_fulfillment

When researching about if Shopify is the right solution for our store I actually read this link and this made me check the box in regards to inventory mgmt with two warehouses, I just overlooked that this is only available to selected merchants... I will go on investigating and findind a solution, I will post back If i find out sth.

[matiasricci]

That's too bad - I'm sorry. If you want, shoot me an email at matias@unit1gear.com. I'm putting together a list of merchants that are experiencing the same issue to see if we put a group claim/feature request with Shopify.

[polygonwindow]

Hi matias, great, I will shoot you a mail!

[UKPreppingShop]

Hi

Were settuing up an EU warehouse with selected products and have hit the same wall....come on shopify spend some of them billions!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[MilkyTee]

This is a major issue for me too, and I’m sure will be for many merchants. Shopify markets seems great but if they cannot split the inventory for each of the markets that will cause huge issues as you’ll end up overselling stock which isn’t available. I hope shopify find a solution to this soon.

[CreatureCaster]

Any updates or official response or other threads regarding this issue. Seems like something that is very obvious... different warehouses ship to different locations, otherwise I'm sure we would all just have one warehouse.

[polygonwindow]

Hi! We solved it by using the https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/markets/inventory_and_fulfillment feature that works really well. Issue is that in the checkout the user can switch the delivery country and then there is no more stock check for the configured location/wherehouse.. We had to have this feature enabled on request to the support. Hope that helps!

[MilkyTee]

Oh that’s great to hear. Did you just contact shopify and ask for this feature to be added? I wonder why this is t automatically offered to all stores as surely this is an issue which will affect many stores which sell globally?

[polygonwindow]

yeah, we just asked 🙂 Not sure why its not a standard feature, I think it is marked as a Shopify Plus feature... There are also other Features that are officially marked as Shopify Plus but you can use them with normal plans.

[JWBC]

 Same boat over here! - However, Shopify support is telling me they won't install that feature. Can you kindly let us know if you asked for that feature before December 2022?

[matiasricci]

Yes, we did it before Dec 22. Unbelievable that they won't install it for
you.

[americansocks]

It's insane that Shopify markets / locations won't have this feature on default. It's a 101 of multiple warehouse fulfillment. The storefront can't be showing products which are not available in the market you're located in. 

We asked too! We'll let you know if this worked.

[JWBC]

A trusted developer we work with investigated a solution, and confirmed what other developers have said. In order to augment the front end, a custom app needs to be created - You can't do it via the API and Javascript alone. We have been provided several quotes all coming in under $2,000 USD to create a custom app and implement the front and changes.

I'm sure some of us are aware of how this goes - You pay for a custom solution to a seemingly simple task and two weeks later Shopify rolls out the feature 😞

Happy to share our developers information to any one interested. 

[polygonwindow]

yeah, one would be tempted to actually release a custom app for this in the app store.

[MilkyTee]

That’s a great idea. It would of course be better if shopify allowed this
very necessary option but it seems they have no intention of doing so. So
if anyone develops an app please let me know!

[americansocks]

Here's the latest reply I got from Shopify:

There are two main ways in which you can achieve this

Go to Settings > Markets > Click on the United Kingdom market > Products and pricing > Click on the checkbox for the products you want to remove from the Market > Click on Exclude from market.

2. You can go to Products > Click on the first checkbox that appears there > Click on Select all products in this store > Click in Bulk edit > Once the Bulk editor is open click in Columns > Go to the Markets section > Select UK > You can then proceed to deselect every product that you don't want to show in the UK market > Save.

I mean,it works, but it should be automatic, right?

[polygonwindow]

Sorry for the late reply – yes, this was somewhen beginning of last year. That's bad that they will not activate the feature for you since its obviously "basic".

[iska31]

Hi Shopify Addict here,
-In response to the whole thread-
The solution is available for Shopify plus : https://shopify.dev/docs/api/functions/reference/fulfillment-constraints/graphql/common-objects/must...

Using checkout ui extension allows to create a back in stock flow from there.

Nevertheless you are able to create a custom shipping method and link them to specific "Shipping origins" which are locations. Thus when locations become OOS you won't have any shipping method available in the checkout.

If you want something more robust, you should probably use a server side integration on your PDP to query the desired location's stock availability using Shopify ADMIN API and display the desired UI.

Best regards.

[Ggoodman]

Found this article that walks through adding fulfillable inventory specified to the market origin zones. This works, as I tested it on a development store. The only issue is it doesn't handle the scenario of when someone adds more inventory than the market has, it only triggers an error if there is 0 inventory or when the customer adds a shipping address, at which point the only option is to remove the whole quantity if it is over the available amount vs just the amount over the available quantity. But at least it works, it could just have a better UX. https://www.biscuitsbundles.com/blog/how-to-limit-inventory-and-stock-to-each-market-in-shopify-mark...

[polygonwindow]

Thanks for posting – I will need to study this!