How to manage book returns from temporary locations with Shopify POS?

Retail & Point of Sale

Topic summary

A user is exploring Shopify POS for managing book sales at temporary seminar locations. Their proposed workflow involves:

Current Setup:

  • Creating a temporary Location for each seminar
  • Using Transfers to move inventory to that location
  • Processing sales via POS device

Key Challenge:

  • Returning unsold books to the main distribution center proves problematic
  • Since the inventory movement uses Transfers (not Orders), there’s no way to create a return against that transfer
  • The user would need to create a second transfer and manually itemize all unsold books for return
  • This process becomes tedious, especially without an apparent way to print transfer labels

Status: The discussion remains open with no solution provided yet. The user is seeking advice on streamlining the return process for inventory moved via transfers to temporary locations.

Summarized with AI on November 10. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I’m interested in using Shopify POS to manage seminar book table sales. It seems that the way to do this is to 1) create a Location for my seminar and 2) create a Transfer to move books to that Location. Then I can run sales using my POS device.

The problem, for me, comes when I want to return all my unsold books to my main distribution center. Since my inventory management process here is a Transfer and not an Order, I have no way to create a return against that transfer. Do I have to create a second transfer here and itemize all the books to be returned? This becomes tedious–not to mention that there’s no way (that I can see) to print a label for my Transfer.