Contextual Inventory with Shopify Markets - problem with multiple location inventory

[MilaTatyanina]

Hi, I’m trying to set up the Shopify Markets feature to work properly with my inventory.  I need help with multi-location inventory set up.

I have 2 Markets: US and EU, and 2 corresponding fulfillment centers (US and EU) with separate inventory for the same products. The problem with Shopify Markets is that if I have product A available either in the US OR in the EU, then Shopify makes it available for purchase in BOTH Markets, regardless of where the user is shopping from.

I need to implement a feature that Shopify used to have but then discontinued. It’s called “Contextual Inventory with Markets”: 

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

The gist of it is that: if product A is sold out in the US location, then it should appear as “sold out” to customers shopping in the US, even if it is available in the EU fulfillment center. 

Here is an example.

Product A Inventory: US - 0; EU - 5;

Product B Inventory: US - 3; EU - 0;

Product C Inventory: US - 0; EU - 0;

Here is my requirement:

For a customer from the US, products A and C should appear as “SOLD OUT”

For a customer from the EU, products B and C should appear as “SOLD OUT”

The current Shopify implementation is that for ANY customers, only Product C appears as “SOLD OUT”. Both Products A and B are available for purchase, regardless of customer location.

[correctconnect]

Same problem here!  Did you figure out a solution? 

[Appifiny]

Unbelievable that markets has shipped without contextual inventory!

One solution is to create different products with their own inventory and make them available in each market. This could could potentially cause more issues itself with SEO and indexed product url's.

[agentfitz]

Truly wild that a product called "Markets" and based around selling in different markets in the world wouldn't have their inventory sorted out prior to releasing the product. That is literally the entire purpose of Markets. Have been struggling with this for months.

For what it's worth, there is a setting now that ALMOST gets this right.... this setting needs to be explicitly turned on by Shopify Support and is called "Fulfillable Inventory". Once this is enabled, you can explicitly select an option to make your inventory market specific.

That said, the current issue I am facing is that once "total inventory" for any product dips into negative (using for pre-orders, for example), ALL markets start relying on "total inventory", rather than their market specific inventory. Pretty wild this thing made it out the door.

[LaurensF]

Same problem here, did you find a solution?
I came across the app called geostock inventory which is supposed to solve this.
But be aware, the support is limited and slow and it does not work yet for me, im still in the process of getting it fixed.

[cwveysey]

Your desired UX can be accomplished via use of the unstable version of the API (which as you can imagine, as far as tradeoffs can carry with it some negative consequences as well). We have partner stores where we have facilitated the desired UX via this approach.

See https://github.com/Shopify/storefront-api-feedback/discussions/35 for more details - I hope this helps.