Changing the fulfillment location to a fulfillment service

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

Main issue: Being able to change an order’s fulfillment from an in-house location to a third‑party fulfillment service after the order is placed.

Current capabilities:

  • You can enable multiple locations and reassign fulfillment between locations at fulfill time, if the product has inventory in those locations.
  • “Custom fulfillment” services only send email requests tied to products and can’t be switched to after an order is created. FBA-type services also can’t be mixed with stocked inventory for the same product.

Limitations and impacts:

  • You cannot change a placed order’s fulfillment to a custom fulfillment service. To switch dynamically, the supplier must be added as a Location.
  • Locations don’t notify suppliers automatically and staff permissions can’t restrict them to only their own orders; they would see all orders.
  • Automatic nearest-location routing isn’t built in; fulfillment follows set location priority and inventory availability.

Workarounds/tools:

  • Manually coordinate with suppliers or use third‑party apps (e.g., Order Fulfillment Guru for routing; Product Inventory Information for geolocation/stock display).

Status/outcome:

  • Feature requests logged for location-based notifications and nearest-location auto‑selection. No update on availability; discussion remains open. A final question about AliExpress/AutoDS setup is unanswered.
Summarized with AI on December 31. AI used: gpt-5.
2

Hello, @CraigAB .

Elias here with Shopify Support. That is a great question.

This feature is available to all merchants now, simply upgrade your shipping to the shipping profiles and add your third-party fulfillment service. Third-party fulfillment can be a custom fulfilment service or fulfillment by Amazon.

After that, you can enable multiple locations and begin assigning inventory to locations. Once that’s done, go back to the shipping profiles and set up your shipping rates for each location. If you have vastly different rates between products, you can consider using the combined rates at checkout.

Is this the feature you were looking for?