How can I manage inventory and fulfillment with Markets?

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Topic summary

Merchants using Shopify Markets with multiple warehouse locations face a critical inventory management issue: products show as available even when out of stock at the location serving a specific market. This leads to overselling when customers can complete checkout for items that cannot be fulfilled from their designated warehouse.

Core Problem:

  • Inventory aggregates across all locations regardless of market-specific availability
  • Customers in Market A can purchase items only stocked in Market B’s warehouse
  • Merchants cannot ship cross-border due to customs, taxes, and duty restrictions

Shopify’s Response:

  • A beta feature addressing this existed but was discontinued in December 2022
  • A new “fulfillable inventory” solution launched in Winter 2024, but it’s exclusive to Shopify Plus subscribers
  • Standard plan merchants are directed to use shipping profiles as a workaround, which only removes unavailable items at checkout (poor customer experience)

Community Reaction:

  • Multiple merchants from different regions (Singapore, Malaysia, Germany, Switzerland, US, Canada) report identical issues
  • Strong frustration that this basic functionality requires a $27k/year Plus plan versus $1,200 for standard plans
  • One developer created a third-party app as an alternative solution

Status: Unresolved for non-Plus merchants. Shopify acknowledges the limitation and claims ongoing development, but no timeline provided for standard plan availability.

Summarized with AI on October 27. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
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Thank you for following up with me on this. I did some additional digging to ensure that I fully understand the current flow available to merchants, and the changes you are asking for.

In the example you linked to, that is referring specifically to merchants who had the option to enable this functionality (Inventory and Fulfillment in MARKETS) as a beta when it first rolled out. If you did enable this feature when it was available then you can continue using it for now. It is not available to re-enable, or enable on stores that aren’t using it currently.

This means that the standard experience is that the storefront shows inventory based on availability across all warehouses, which could lead to customers being able to checkout with inventory not available to them at this time. Our team is aware of this limitation and how it can affect some merchants and their customer experience. We are continuing to work on this and improve the tooling we have available.

Ensuring that you have the correct shipping profiles setup though will help stop customers from being able to checkout with inventory not available to them at this time, which is where setting up shipping profiles comes into play.

If I am missing anything, or off the mark, please let me know! Shipping and fulfillment for international orders can be a tricky subject and I am happy to continue looking into this if I can.