Hello. I have ran into a roadblock with drop shipping and am wondering my options going forward.
We are a sporting goods retail store that has one local location and warehouse that offers local delivery, local pick up, and shipping. We are wanting to start offering a category of items as drop shipping that is linked to a suppliers inventory management system - these items are for shipping only as they will ship direct to the customer from the supplier warehouse.
Ideally if a customer wants to purchase an item from our local store warehouse plus an item that is a drop ship item, they would still be able to select for pickup/delivery for the local items and then ship the drop ship and this would all be done in one checkout/transaction for the ease of the customer.
I do know that Shopify does not allow for split shipping/pick up options in the same order and it will default to one but i’m wondering if there are any ways around this? Our local delivery and pickup is used heavily so we don’t want to lose this for eligible items.
I will add - we have items that are in stock in our local warehouse only, some items that are for drop ship only and some items that will have inventory in both and if a customer wants to purchase our full stock they can also add more from the drop ship warehouse at the same time.
Unfortunately, Shopify’s checkout currently doesn’t support allowing customers to choose both pickup/delivery and shipping within the same order. As you’ve already discovered, the checkout generally requires a single fulfillment method for the entire cart.
For merchants with a mix of local inventory and dropship products, the most common approaches are either separating the products into different orders or clearly indicating which items are shipping-only before customers reach checkout.
One area that may also be worth considering is inventory management for products that exist in both your local warehouse and supplier warehouse. Keeping stock synchronized across multiple inventory sources can become challenging as your catalog grows. Some merchants use inventory synchronization tools such as Easify Inventory Sync to help manage shared inventory and maintain more accurate stock levels across related products.
While that won’t solve the split pickup/shipping limitation directly, it can help simplify the inventory side of a setup like the one you’ve described.
I’m interested to hear if anyone in the community has found a workflow that handles mixed fulfillment types more elegantly.
@CHeddle ,
One option is to keep the dropship products in a separate Shopify location and use shipping profiles to clearly distinguish them from your local inventory. While this wont enable mixed pickup and shipping in a single checkout it does help avoid confusion about fulfillment.
Another approach some merchants take is encouraging customers to place separate orders when they mix local pickup items with dropship items. Its not ideal but with clear messaging on the product page and cart it can reduce customer frustration until Shopify adds native support for mixed fulfillment.
