Inventory location

[Sjtw46]

So we have an inventory of around 2000 products (inc variants)

We hold a small stock on the office but most is in racked out storage with picking bins all labeled. 500 location codes.

I have spent weeks if not months trying to figure out how to allocate each product to a bin location. Which is displayed on invoice or picking list, don't care which but need it on one.

This feature I feel should be standard on shopify and let's be honest, most stores sell physical products that need storage structure.

But the bin location feature seems to be an extra with only the big wms apps, ranging from £99 month to hundreds if not thousands every month. Which is ridiculous just for a basic feature.

We were going down the metafield route with code added to packing slip template, but have hit a wall with the 128 Metafield limit.. And yes I did sit down for hours adding 127 metafields only to be met with this notification 🤬.

So any suggestions? As I'm seriously considering changing website provider over this.

[Realest_Maven]

Hi Stjw46

Totally get how painful it is to map 2,000 items to 500 bins—and custom WMS systems can cost a fortune. You can keep it simple with one custom “Bin Location” field per variant. That way, each version of your product points back to its exact shelf, and you’ll never hit Shopify’s field limits again.

Just bulk-upload all your bin codes in one go—either through a CSV import or Shopify’s bulk editor—and you’re set. Then tweak your packing slip template to pull in that single field next to each item.

No pricey apps needed, and your pickers get the exact location every time. 

[Ablestar_Daniel]

Really sorry you had enter those manually until you hit the limit, that sucks. One option might be to use metaobjects to store the bin location. First you could create a metaobject that looks something like this:

And then create a single metafield to reference the metaobject (or use 'List of entries' if there's multiple per product):

Would something like that work for you? It should get you around the limit for metafields and the limits for metaobject entries are way higher, 64,000 for Basic and 128,000 for Shopify Plus.

Best,

Daniel