A coffee roastery wants to offer local pickup at multiple physical locations (their main shipping facility and a separate café) while maintaining inventory at only one central location. The second location would serve purely as a pickup point, with orders delivered there from the main warehouse.
Core Problem:
Shopify’s local pickup feature requires inventory to be assigned to each location for it to appear as a pickup option at checkout. This creates unnecessary inventory management complexity when locations don’t actually hold stock.
Suggested Workarounds:
Assign arbitrary inventory numbers to pickup-only locations
Create duplicate products that don’t track inventory (risks overselling)
Use the notes section at checkout for customers to specify pickup location (manual and error-prone)
Use paid apps like “Stock Sync: Inventory Autosync” to link multiple location inventories to one central source
Enable store transfers in shipping settings to pull inventory from the main location when other locations show as “out of stock”
Status:
Multiple users express frustration that this isn’t a built-in Shopify feature after years of requests. The discussion remains open with no native solution, though the inventory sync app and store transfer settings offer potential fixes.
Summarized with AI on October 30.
AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
I’d love to set up multiple physical locations where customers could go and pick up their order. This location would not ship from that location and would hold inventory in stock and anytime a customer would chose this option we would deliver it there from our central location. It would be just a pick up spot.
We are a coffee roastery (primary shipping site) and a cafe (local pick up only).
This way we would have one central location that has all of the inventory and ships all orders, allows pick up and one more location in town that would only allow local pick up.
Is there a way to do this? Currently when I have no inventory in the second location, it doesn’t even show up as an option at checkout. One option might be to set up some arbitrary inventory at the other location, but this would create whole another level of needless complexity.
Ryder here from the Social Care Team at Shopify. Welcome to the Community and thanks for posting! Glad to hear you’ve decided on setting up a Local Pick-up experience for your customers. I’d be happy to discuss the options available to create a pick-up location that does not ship out orders.
It sounds like you might’ve already gone this far, and you’re correct - in order to show local pickup availability, you’ll need to have some level of stock available at those locations. You can begin with an arbitrary number - in my example, I’ve created a transfer to transfer two Small and two Medium of my ‘Example T-shirt’ products from my primary location to my Local Pickup location on the same day.
Then, I received the transfer. You can receive all items by clicking “Mark complete” or individually by clicking “Receive items”.
Once stocked, that Local Pickup option will display at checkout:
I understand that you also want to ensure that these locations don’t offer shipping. This shouldn’t be a problem as long as you’re mindful of where you’re shipping out your orders from. Once an order comes in, it should automatically display to ship from your primary location. You’ll have the ability to toggle between alternative locations, should you choose to do so:
After you’ve delivered the product to the local pickup location, you can mark the order as ‘Ready for pickup’ which will send your customer an automatic email to update them about the status of their order.
You can also do this on the Shopify POS app. If your local pickup locations are staffed with access to these 13 staff permissions, they’ll be able to ‘Mark as picked up’ on their end through the POS app as well.
Otherwise, you can do this after receiving confirmation from the local pickup location that the order has been picked up.
Alternatively, you can use a third-party app, or create a duplicate of this product that does not track inventory quantity. This won’t display in your products as the same product, and thus won’t be able to keep track of the inventory; however, you’ll still be able to view some product insights on the product page. For shops on the Shopify plan, you can also utilize the sales report to keep track. I would be cautious if taking this approach, as you’ll want to be mindful of overselling your products.
I hope this helps! Please let me know if there’s anything I can clarify.
Ryder A., your answer didn’t help the original poster, who like me wants to have multiple pick up locations, but only have to use one inventory. I have a drop-off service once a month, and it’s been a headache from day one to make it work using Shopify Pickup. I have to tell people over and over again to leave us a note in the note box before they check out, and inevitably a few people always forget, they don’t see the box, or something. Why is it that over two years later Shopify still has not fixed this issue? Let us turn or off the ability to have multiple inventories or not. Can you please address what has happened since you last answered this question?
We too would like have two pick up locations available while maintaining only one set of inventory! We’ve tried to figure out several workarounds, but so far we haven’t found one other than the “please let us know where you’re picking up in the notes section” conversation. It would be so much cleaner to have the two separate locations.
YES! I have been smashing my head against the desk trying to understand why this is so complicated.
I am a consignment store with only one of each item I have in stock, so I can’t even use this silly inventory work around to offer a second pickup location. It is truly mind blowing that this is such a difficult request to manage.
Has anyone found a solution for this? I too have this same exact issue. I know it can be resolved with expensive app addons but should be inbuilt into shopify as a setting for pickup locations rather than the locations only be connected to inventory.
Did you read what Patrik_Rami was asking? Your solution to his issue is not a solution. I HAVE THE SAME ISSUE! I ONLY HAVE ONE INVENTORY but I have multiple options for pick up. We fill orders and bring them to different locations for customers to pick up. we do not and will not have MULTIPLE inventory locations.
I found a good solution to this, in case anyone else comes across this thread. We use the paid app Stock Sync: Inventory Autosync. We have multiple pick-up locations listed, and their inventories are linked to the central location. When an item is purchased at any location, the inventory updates across the board. The inventory also updates if we manually adjust the numbers at one location. Works really well for us, seamless experience for customers, and worth the cost.
Not sure if anyone got an answer for this issue. I just set up my client’s store with 2 locations. On the second location, don’t add any inventory. In your settings, under shipping and delivery, find the section with Store transfers, and selectyour main store and have it pull inventory from that location. I believe if you don’t add any inventory to the other locations and have shopify transfer inventory when your other locations are “out of stock” it should just pull from the 1 location.
