Hello, looking for some feedback and help from the community.
My name is Kirill, me and the team are working on Darkstorey- a network of white label dark stores with a 15-60 minute delivery for e-commerce. Present in Lisboa, Berlin and Dubai, looking to bring the instant delivery experience to the Shopify community.
The main problem is that to make the delivery instant - we have to store your stock in mini-warehouses across the city = the city has to be chopped in different delivery zones in the radius of the warehouse. This leads us to different inventory balance in every warehouse which means we need to know your clients address beforehand.
Struggling with the flow where we first get the address and the show the stock available for express delivery.
Have something in mind but would love to hear your opinions on the case first. Will be happy to share our solution after gathering your feedbacks
Happy to discuss in the comments or set up a quick call to ask a couple questions in person:)
Make sure your also asking this in the partner slack, link found in the partners dashboard support page.
The common flow for new customers means an address is never collected until the shipping step, way after the product description page is passed and any frontend cares about inventory.
Even if you were only on stores that require accounts before checkout that are also setup to collect address info before checkout that means it’s still possibly only moments between an account being created and an address being added and a possible checkout/order being created.
For the online channel you probably have to behave like a shipping estimator most of the time before guest checkouts prompting for zipcode or full address information and all the contrivances that go around that. it’s been awhile but I think you can still pass address info to to the checkout to lessen a customers data entry in /checkout but there’s wonkiness with the country/province fields.
And even then that only applies specifically to the online-sales channel, other channels will have new customers directly in /checkout where most merchants are unable to make any code changes due to restrictions requiring a shopify plus plan.
Not a lot of lead time no matter what you do. And keeping in mind GDPR and shopifys increasing restrictions on accessing customer data.
Which means to have any consistent impact on that you’d need to possibly be acting through the carriers api to provide up to date shipping-rates&names in the checkout based on the cart contents and what you can fulfill. Which has the extremely narrow limitation of being a text only 2-line output to get any messaging across inside /checkout.
Hack for new customers of online-channel pre /checkout is making it all heuristics and geolocation guesswork with ambiguous messages based on historical data for a store, the areas covered by it’s shipping profiles, and your fulfillment rate for the store and it’s customers. And a remediation process for when the heuristic fails.
Beyond that look into the upcoming features like shopify-functions and checkout-extensions to see if those allow any new approaches.