It’s totally crazy that Shopify doesn’t offer a native, simple, bin location management solution : No fields to store a bin location and have it appear on an invoice or packing slip !!!
We have tried 2 solutions
1 - Modify the SKUs to include the bin location causes a problem when the location needs to be changed : The synchronization of the product between several stores is lost and Sales history, statistics are lost
2 - Creating a metafield for the stock location is very easy but it is impossible to include this metafield in any template
Seriously Shopify, how do you pretend to make the work of merchants easier by forgetting such an essential function. The only solution seems to use an ERP but in this configuration platforms such as Magento are more efficient.
A simple solution?
PS : We started with 200 SKU with shopify but now need to manage 3 to 5.000 SKU for 2 online store and a 500sqm warehouse. We have no choice if we don’t want to see our employees walking as ghosts searching for a product in our warehouse.
Using the SKU as a bid location is a bad solution. The SKU is a SKU. If you use it in another way you get bad effects : false statistics, bad synchronisation…
Most of the time we don’t need a warehouse management software… A field we could use in a template is enough.
Thank you for this feedback about the metafields function and trying to add it to an invoice on your store.
I did some digging into this myself and I can confirm, it is not an easy thing to do at this time. The metafields do create a liquid object that can be referenced within the theme code, but not in our apps like Order Printer.
From what I can see it looks like an app developer could customize their own order printer app to reference metafields, if they don’t already, or you could hire a theme developer to assist in making your metafields into line item properties, which could then be referenced in apps like Order Printer.
I’ve shared your feedback on this process to our developers and I hope we can include this option in our own order printer app in the near future.
Hi @LuisaP , I’m sure it’s frustrating to try and solve this within the native Shopify platform. Truth is, Shopify is a phenomenal eCommerce platform, and does very little on the inventory management side since this opens up a full can of worms that I’m sure Shopify has thought long and hard about and ultimately relies on partners like us to build apps to solve these issues.
That said, we created a solution that I think would work well for you. SKUSavvy is a warehouse management system built for Shopify merchants. Think of it as Shopify inventory on steroids which will provide all the bin location storage, purchasing, order management, and pick-pack-ship across one or multiple warehouses. It uses a visual warehouse interface so your staff will know exactly where the item is on a map during put-away, inventory visibility, and picking operations. All the information will be relayed back to Shopify (customers, orders, inventory, locations, order status, tracking) so that all your inventory can be quickly tracked and managed within SKUSavvy.
The benefits of using SKUSavvy as a merchant include the full lifecycle management of product inventory, as well as the ability to fulfill orders directly including purchasing and printing shipping labels, and the pricing is directly correlated with your order count with your first 50 orders free monthly then just $0.10-$0.19 per order.
Thank you but for now we only need a simple solution which could be using a metafield in a template. t seems very simple but obviously it is not for Shopify staff.
We don’t need a warehouse management system… maybe later.
@oddzac curious if you’ve taken a look at SKUSavvy to solve this problem. It’s built around visual bin locations so you know where your product is and during picks, you will have a visualization of each bin to go to and how many units are needed for an order or batch of orders.
Allocation to bins upon PO receipt is done with this same visual bin location placement.
We allow sorting / grouping products and orders in your picklist. If you have product locations or bins in metafields you can order your picklist by any product / variant metafield to reduce your pick path.
For many, that is not an acceptable solution. They might end up with thousands of tags, and which tag is the bin location since many shops are using multiple tags for other stuff.
It will also not cover when using multiple Shopify locations, alternative bin locations, or sorting on bin location.
Has anyone tried Zoho Inventory, as I’m in the same boat, just a simple 2 person business starting, no need for a large warehouse solution, just some simple to assign a SKU to a certain bin.
