How to exclude/include from Shopify MARKETS depends on Inventory location

[Darius90]

Hi Everyone,

We are facing an issue with markets. We have products in different locations. For example in US and EU. But it has different shipping price. We don't want to ship from the US when out of stock in the EU. It should be a way how automatically exclude/include MARKETS. 

I tried FLOW. But it has a strange behavior. It returns TRUE, but in the end, it returns FALSE.

I changed this part to at least one of product variant and nicely works for VARIANT. but CAN'T EXCLUDE VARIANT. 

[HulkyZo]

Hiii Darius,


Different Shipping Prices for Different Locations:

• In your Shopify admin, go to Settings > Shipping and delivery.
• Next to the shipping profile where you want to add a shipping rate, click Manage rates.
• In the Zones and rates section, click Add rate.
• Enter the details for the shipping rate, then click Done.
• Make sure you set different rates for the US and EU.
1. Avoid Shipping from the US when Out of Stock in the EU:
• You can use inventory management to set inventory quantities for each location. When a product is out of stock in the EU, it won't allow customers to order unless you have the 'Continue selling when out of stock' option enabled. Ensure this option is disabled for the EU location.
2. Automatically Exclude/Include Markets:
• This can be a bit tricky. You might need to use a combination of inventory settings and shipping zones. Ensure that the EU location only ships to EU countries and the US location only ships to US addresses. This way, even if a product is available in the US, it won't be an option for EU customers if it's out of stock in the EU.
3. Using Shopify Flow:
• Shopify Flow can sometimes behave unexpectedly due to conditions not being met or other underlying workflows interfering.
• Ensure that your conditions in Flow are set up correctly. If you're checking for inventory in the EU and it returns TRUE but then FALSE, there might be another condition or trigger affecting this result.
• Consider breaking down your workflow into smaller parts to identify where the issue is.
4. Excluding Variants:
• If you want to exclude certain variants from being available in specific markets, you can adjust the availability settings for those variants.
• Go to Products and click on the product you want to adjust.
• Under Variants, click on the variant you want to adjust.
• In the Sales channels and apps section, adjust the availability as needed.
  
  
  I hope this wil solve your Issue. 🙂 
  HulkyZo

[stevenhealy]

Hi HulkyZo. It is not possible to adjust Sales channel by variant. Any other suggestions or tips?

We have variants that are unavailable in certain countries, but since we cannot exclude these variants from visibility based on shipping location/market, the variants are available to purchase.

We can alternatively create a new shipping profile and only include certain variants, but this still lets users add item to cart, and only tells them upon reaching shipping step during checkout that there is an error.

[Darius90]

Simple. Create metafield and add value for products you would like to
exclude. Create collection and filter by created metafield. Filter products
by collection, select all and exclude from market. Hope it helps. If need
more help, find me on linkedin: Darius Slubelis ##- Please type your reply
above this line -##

[stevenhealy]

A bit confused by this. I don't have the ability to develop a meta-field. Collections that are filled based on a condition do not give the ability to 'select all" the products to exclude, and there also isn't a way to exclude products from a market within a collection page.

[BobbyMacCheese]

---

@HulkyZo wrote:

Hiii Darius,

1. Avoid Shipping from the US when Out of Stock in the EU:
• You can use inventory management to set inventory quantities for each location. When a product is out of stock in the EU, it won't allow customers to order unless you have the 'Continue selling when out of stock' option enabled. Ensure this option is disabled for the EU location.
•  

---

Was thing a thing just 4 months ago and now not? Our shopify forces us to ship from the US when EU is out of stock. Even shopify plus support say we ought to open a separate website for Europe to fix this. How can we set it up?

[stevenhealy]

No, this wasn’t a thing. HulkyZo gave you inaccurate information. It’s not possible to truly separate inventory by market unless you are using Shopify in Canada. The feature is not available anywhere else. Instead, they make you think you’re separating inventory when in reality you are not.

Our web development team fixed the issue for us by using geolocation and  implementing something along the lines of:

If inventory at US location is 0, show OOS in US

If inventory at Canada location is 0, show OOS in Canada

There are a few more rules than this, but this is the basic idea. It only took our dev team a month to implement, and I’m honestly a little disturbed that Shopify won’t spend the time to fix this so we don’t have to pay an outside developer.

[BobbyMacCheese]

Well that's a shame. With flow we could probably set "if inventory in warehouse X is 0, exclude from X market", but it just removes the page completely instead of showing out of stock. 

[rohithprem]

Hey @BobbyMacCheese ,

Sorry I don't have an answer to your issue. But in trying to figure out my own issue I stumbled upon your statement and would like to know how you're achieving it.

You mentioned you're able to "exclude from X market" using flow? I don't see a direct way to do this. How are you achieving this?

[BobbyMacCheese]

Hi, no we never managed to achieve excluding from a market, but in March 2024 Shopify released "fulfillable inventory" settings, which allow you to block shipping if the product is out of stock in a particular warehouse.

[Snow_Wolf]

One year later, still not possible. Shopify has so many small and obvious features like this that are lacking and which takes them years to fix. So frustrating.

[BobbyMacCheese]

actually last March this feature was added (maybe just to Plus, not sure). Fulfillable inventory

[Snow_Wolf]

Hi @BobbyMacCheese , thank you for the suggestion but this isn't at all the feature that's needed for this issue. With Fulfillable inventory, you can restrict shipping, but the variant still shows up in the wrong markets, making it seem like it is sold there. Until the customer reaches checkout and realizes "We don't ship there"

[Guespi]

Absolutely mind blowing that such a feature is not implemented yet. I feel it is such a basic and important thing to allow people to scale. 
It would literally only take a filter in the markets section (as it is already present in the shipping profile section) to be able to achieve this. 
Do you have a solution I can implement instead of having to hire a team ad hoc? Thanks! @Snow_Wolf 

[Snow_Wolf]

Hi @Guespi , yeah the Shopify team is US-based and it shows, they are so many design blind spots when it comes to international selling...

We had to rely on duplicating products for a given market, pretty much duplicating our inventory

[Guespi]

Hi! I actually managed to solve this without having to do that. With the
broadcast theme, on the product page it automatically crosses out as
unavailable (crosses out the variants bullets) the variants that don't have
a shipping profile for the market they are visualised. For example, let's
say I'm viewing the Italian version of a product (so part of the italian
market on the backhand) and that product has the black variant included in
a shipping profile shipping to italy, while the white variant is not
included in any shipping profile shipping to italy, it will cross out the
white variant. This means that to solve my issue, I had to organise my
shipping profiles as follows, not as "EuropeE, "USA", etc but instead a
general one that includes all variants that are shipped in ALL countries I
intend to sell, then another shipping profile for variants that are shipped
to the USA only. The general profile contains shipping zones are rates for
Europe as well as USA, the USA profile contains only the USA shipping zone.
Only problem is that going back to the example before, the black is
available in general profile (available in Europe and USA), while the black
is available in the USA profile (available only in the USA), it will be
considered as separate shippings. I solved this by adding a conditional to
the pricing. A bit of a workaround and not bulletproof, but it works
perfectly for me. Thought of writing it down quickly as I was struggling so
much and couldn't find any solution online. Hope this helps someone. Cheers