Shopify Feature Spotlight: Ship-to-Customer Order Fulfillment

[Ranksy]

Sebastien here, and I want to help you get the most out of Shopify POS by showing you its features and how to see great results using them. 

Today, let’s talk about ship-to-customer order fulfillment, a feature that’s available with a Shopify POS Pro subscription. 

With ship-to-customer, you’re no longer limited to selling what you have in stock. You can close sales in-store and ship them to customers from your warehouse or another store location that has inventory. 

Using ship-to-customer is a great way to transform your store into a showroom, dedicate more space to displaying products rather than storing them, and prevent stockouts from blocking sales once and for all.  

Want to learn more? Click the link below to learn how it works, and how to set it up in Shopify. 👇

How to Lift Store Conversions with Ship-to-Customer Order Fulfillment

Happy selling! 🚀

[Rayan_Bahabri]

Dear Sebastien,

Thank you for your post. However, it seems to me that Shopify POS did not take into consideration the true retail operation when they build this feature. As a retailer with more than 8 locations and an online store, it will be really hard to monitor the stocks across my locations with Shopify's logic structure for order fulfillment decisions. I will elaborate more and put all the limitations down

1- If the cart has only 1 line product, regardless of the QTY, the stock available at the default location, and fulfillment priority, Shopify will oversell the entire order from the default location and turn the stock available into negative at that location. 

The solution: 

Regardless of the number of product lines inside the cart, the stock intake should follow the fulfillment priority rules based on stock availability. If the customer orders 4 pieces and the first location has only 2 then a split order fulfillment should be made automatically by Shopify to fulfill this order from 2 different locations. Furthermore, if one of the locations is a physical store, this should trigger the POS smart grid to notify the sales person about the fulfillment that he/she needs to prepare and ship to the customer. 

2- Locations that fulfill online orders. If this option is checked that means the inventory of this location is available to be sold online and there is no problem with it. However, Shopify has 2 limitations here. 

A) Again, if the order has 1 product line inside the cart Shopify will oversell the product from the default location instead of splitting the order between 2 locations based on stock availability and fulfillment priority rules.

B) Let's say, the order has been split into 2 fulfillments. Shopify POS will not notify the sales rep. through the smart grid about a new order that he/she needs to fulfill and ship to the customer.

I believe this needs more attention to have a true retail omnichannel features without operational issues.